HOLT CEMETERY

NEW ORLEANS

Many of the graves have grown over with weeds.

HOLT CEMETERY

NEW ORLEANS

In 1973, four victims of the UpStairs Lounge arson attack, Ferris LeBlanc and three unidentified males, were buried in a mass grave at the cemetery.

HOLT CEMETERY

NEW ORLEANS

It contains 99% in-ground burials. 

HOLT CEMETERY, NEW ORLEANS

The cemetery contains the remains of known and unknown early blues and jazz musicians, including Charles “Buddy” Bolden.

HOLT CEMETERY

FINAL RESTING PLACE OF BUDDY BOLDEN

Holt Cemetery is a potter's field next to Delgado Community College in New Orleans.

It is behind the right field fence of the school's baseball facility, Kirsch-Rooney Stadium.

The Cemetery is named after Dr. Joseph Holt, an official of the City Board of Health (famously involved with city health issues concerning Storyville, the Red Light District of New Orleans) who officially established the cemetery in the 19th century.

The cemetery was established in 1879 to inter the bodies of poorer residents, and was frequently used due to allowing funerals to proceed around, rather than through, the city; it was expanded in 1909.

 It contains 99% in-ground burials.

The cemetery contains the remains of known and unknown early blues and jazz musicians, including Jessie Hill and Charles "Buddy" Bolden.

Bolden was an African-American cornetist regarded by contemporaries as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of rag-time music, or Jass, which later came to be known as jazz.