Oakland Cemetery (A Brief History)

Shreveport's oldest public burial ground began in 1847, when Mayor Lawrence Pike Crain decreed that every burial take place in a new city cemetery. It was laid out on ten acres bought from Mary Cane, with a potter's field, a section for mayors and trustees and one for private individuals. Oral tradition holds that enslaved people were buried here before Star Cemetery existed, and one history records that in 1907 Mayor E. R. Bernstein ordered African American remains moved for a road, to Star. About 1,500 of the 5,000 to 6,000 buried here lie in unmarked graves.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — steps away
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Spring Street Museum — 0.4 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 0.7 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 2.7 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.

More markers nearby

• Oakland Cemetery — steps away
• James Burton — steps away
• First Jewish Cemetery — steps away
• Bishop Leonidas Polk — steps away