Qualla: Metairie Cemetery

Metairie Cemetery: Introduction

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Charles T. Howard made his fortune running the first Louisiana State Lottery, but money could not buy him membership in the Metairie Jockey Club. The track's elite gatekeepers considered his wealth too new, too coarse for their society. Rejected and furious, Howard made a vow: he would see the Metairie Race Course turned into a cemetery. It was the kind of threat that sounds like bluster until it comes true. After the Civil War and Reconstruction bankrupted the track, Howard helped purchase the property in 1872 and converted it into Metairie Cemetery -- burying the institution that had snubbed him, quite literally, under six feet of New Orleans soil. Today Howard rests in his own tomb on Central Avenue, interred on the grounds of his triumphant revenge. He died in 1885 in Dobbs Ferry, New York, when he fell from a newly purchased horse.

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Image: Public domain

Metairie Cemetery: From Thundering Hooves to Eternal Silence

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clark Mills, Public domain. Before the headstones, there were thoroughbreds. Colonel James Garrison and Richard Adams founded the Metairie Race Course in 1838, establishing it on a high-and-dry ridge along Bayou Metairie. The track became one of the premier horse racing venues in the antebellum South, drawi...

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Image: Clark Mills | Public domain

Metairie Cemetery: An Oval of the Dead

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Wilson, CC BY 2.0. The cemetery's most striking feature is visible only from above: its roads follow the original oval layout of the race track. What was once a course for horses is now a circuit for mourners, and the irony is baked into the geography. Within those curving lanes lies the largest co...

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Image: Steve Wilson | CC BY 2.0

Metairie Cemetery: Governors, Generals, and Gangsters

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The roster of Metairie Cemetery's permanent residents reads like a compressed history of Louisiana itself. P.G.T. Beauregard, the Confederate general who ordered the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, lies here alongside William C.C. Claiborne, the first U.S. governor o...

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Image: Public domain

Metairie Cemetery: The Stories Between the Stones

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit S. T. Blessing, Public domain. Some of the most compelling tales at Metairie Cemetery belong to its lesser-known residents. Isaac Cline, chief meteorologist in Galveston from 1889 to 1901, was an integral figure in the devastating Galveston Hurricane of 1900 -- the deadliest natural disaster in American histor...

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Image: S. T. Blessing | Public domain

Metairie Cemetery: Where the Track Bends

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Geological Survey, Public domain. Despite its name, Metairie Cemetery sits within the New Orleans city limits, not in the suburb of Metairie -- a confusion that traces back to its location on Metairie Road, formerly the banks of the since-filled Bayou Metairie. From the air, the oval footprint of the old race tra...

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Image: U.S. Geological Survey | Public domain