SHREVEPORT – Walk around Shreveport’s historic Oakland Cemetery, the city’s oldest cemetery established in 1847 as City Cemetery, and many things likely catch the eye.
A memorial on top of a mass grave names many of the roughly 800 people who were buried quickly in the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1873, which killed a quarter of Shreveport’s population in three months.
Updated walkways and gazebos adorn the expansive cemetery, fitting for one of Shreveport’s most historic sites, landing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.
But one may also notice a large plot of land that appears sparsely populated bordering Milam Street, with few visible grave markers.
This happens to be the land in which the original City Cemetery first started and where Shreveport’s oldest inhabitants would have been buried.
The LSUS History Department is launching a project to examine this plot, approximately one acre in size, to determine how many graves may exist.
Armed with historic records and ground penetrating radar, LSUS history faculty, staff, and students will attempt to map the plot.
“LSUS historians have always taken a great interest in Oakland Cemetery because it’s the city’s oldest cemetery and probably our most endangered historic landmark,” said Dr. Cheryl White, LSUS history professor. “It contains the graves of many early Shreveport pioneers, mayors, and significant early citizens that help tell the story of how our city came to be.
“The main reason that we now wish to involve students in a project to map the location of unmarked graves is because we do have surviving maps of the early cemetery and the families who purchased plots. This combination of scientific investigation and historical record is a great interdisciplinary approach to learning on several levels. It will provide us with missing information that will also allow us to mark, in some small way, the gray features we identify.”
The project’s first phase is to reset any visible grave markers that may have fallen and remove other obstructions that could hinder mapping and data collection.
The second phase will use ground penetration radar, a high-energy shallow scan with the goal of locating grave markers just below the ground’s surface.
Recovered markers will be cleaned and reset if the original location can be determined in the third phase.
The third phase consists of overlaying an early 20th-century map that details who is buried where onto a modern aerial photograph.
The project is underway and could extend for much of this year.
Marty Loschen, field technician for the Spring Street Museum (an LSUS property), and three LSUS students have begun examining the ground.
Further historic documents support the extensive use of this land for burials, with an 1869 record stating that space was becoming limited, emphasizing the need for a new cemetery.
That’s four years before the 1873 Yellow Fever Epidemic, which was the third-worst outbreak of its kind in U.S. history, and consumed more space in the cemetery with its mass grave.
So how do grave markers, and possibly even graves, disappear -- even if they are nearing two centuries in age?
“It’s believed that through the decades, the topography of this portion of the cemetery contributed to some erosion, as well as the placement of the mass grave that certainly caused a great deal of earth to be moved,” White said. “One of the outcomes we hope to achieve through the investigation is the answer to that very question.”
