According to Highland Cemetery’s website, this graveyard is named for the highland bluff along the Mississippi River flood plain. The cemetery’s earliest documented burials date to 1813. Occupants are mainly French and German settlers who lived during or after the Revolutionary War who grew cotton or sugar on plantations by using slave labor.
Highland Cemetery was restored in the 1970’s; rubble from the old cemetery’s ruins was used to reconstruct it. The graveyard was surrounded by houses on two sides, jutting up closely against people’s lawns.
A few plots were fenced off with metal or brick, one a Duplantier plot, while another belonged to the Favrot family.
Numerous plaques informed of the Favrot plot’s occupants. One family member, Josephine Favrot, was commemorated as a poet. A plaque on the exterior of the fence shares one of Favrot’s poems.
Favrot’s Spanish fiancé was killed in the capture of Fort San Carlos by soldiers from the Republic of West Florida, a short-lived republic annexed by the United States the following year.
Favrot also wrote a tribute about the battle of 1812, found online translated from the French. In the tribute, Favrot addresses the defeated English from the perspective of Louisiana’s women, whom she uplifts by mentioning, “we would have won our enemy’s admiration by telling them we knew how to combine advantages people concede that we have: high spirits and courage which usually do not belong to such naturally weak and timid creatures.”
Favrot experienced life as a Spanish, then American, citizen, and wrote material concerning the nation which replaced the one her fiancé had died defending. Many of the families in this cemetery would have lived in New Spain, founded in 1535, and like Favrot, lived to see their surroundings transferred to the ownership of the United States.
Links
Historic Highland Cemetery: official website of the cemetery.
Highland Cemetery, East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana: history of the cemetery and listing of burials, provided by the Louisiana Genealogical Register.
A Tribute to Defenders of New Orleans: translation of tribute by Josephine Favrot, January 15, 1815.
Sunlight-Colored Roses 