Greenwood Cemetery

Greenwood was the cemetery the firemen built. The Firemen's Charitable & Benevolent Association — New Orleans's volunteer companies, businessmen who fought fires for free — opened the 150-acre ground in 1852 as yellow fever filled Cypress Grove across the street, the city burying 8,000 dead in a single epidemic year. It was New Orleans's first above-ground cemetery built without walls — the tombs standing in open acreage like a city that forgot to fence itself.

The monuments map the city's loyalties — the 1887 Firemen's Monument at the entrance honoring the volunteers who died at their posts, the Elks' tumulus, and New Orleans's first Civil War memorial: the 1874 Confederate tomb where the Ladies Benevolent Association reinterred 600 soldiers moved out of the Union cemetery at Chalmette — a low mound topped by the infantryman resting on his rifle over busts of Lee, Jackson, Johnston, and Polk.

Greenwood holds the whole range of the city's dead — William Bruce Mumford, hanged in 1862 for tearing down the Union flag, among them. The 20,000-plus tombs along Canal Street carry the whole social register of the nineteenth century — society vaults, fire companies, fraternal mounds — the firemen's ground grown into one of the great cemetery cities of the dead.

Greenwood Cemetery is the archive's firemen file — the 1852 above-ground city the volunteer companies built during yellow fever, holding New Orleans's first Confederate memorial and 600 soldiers moved out of the Union ground.