The 1900s photo is an image of an antique postcard of the Chalmette National Cemetery GAR Memorial found on eBay. The 2014 photograph was taken by Mama Blaster the day we visited the cemetery .
One of the few Grand Army of the Republic monuments in the South, this fine memorial stands at the Mississippi River end of the Chalmette National Cemetery commemorating the sacrifice of Union troops during the Civil War.
When the National Cemetery was first laid out, the entrance to it was via the River Road next to the Missisippi River. This memorial faced the entrance and its inscription was visible from the river side.
In ensuing decades, flooding, development, and the need to increase navigability on the Mississippi River required that hundreds of graves be removed, their occupants reinterred in a mass grave. At that time this memorial was rotated 180 degrees and replaced so that its inscription faced into the cemetery.
The original position of the memorial can be seen in the postcard. Although the memorial setting looks significantly different, in fact the memorial has not been moved, only rotated. What used to be the center of the cemetery is now the southerly end.
From a PDF of the history of this cemetery found on the the National Park Service website: (
visit link)
"The first great change in the layout of Chalmette National Cemetery occurred in 1910 when the New Orleans Terminal Company planned to develop the land along the Mississippi River. By then a railroad and a
highway ran along the back of the national cemetery so access was insured when the national cemetery’s gates were moved from the levee end to where the entrance now stands. Land was added to the current
entrance’s end and a road was built from the gates to the highway through the railroad right of way.
The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 redrew the national cemetery’s design once again. In 1929, Congress approved the moving of 572 graves and the caretaker’s home from the national cemetery’s
river end to accommodate wider levees requested by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Lake Borgne Basin Levee Board, and the Mississippi River Commission.
More than 400 Union dead were relocated to a single mass grave. The superintendent’s house on the river end was demolished and the two-story house and smaller carriage house near the current entrance gate were built. The two buildings are now used for park offices, storage, and a maintenance workshop."