Holt Cemetery

Holt Cemetery is a Potter's field cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana. It is located next to Delgado Community College, 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.^[1]

The cemetery contains the remains of known and unknown early blues and jazz musicians, including Jessie Hill^[2] and Charles "Buddy" Bolden. The battered remains of Robert Charles, at the center of the 1900 New Orleans race riot were briefly interred there, then dug up, and incinerated. Later, 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.^[3]

The word "Holt" means "Dead" in Hungarian. The name "Holt" is of Proto-Germanic origin meaning a small wood or grove of trees.

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