St. Roch Cemetery and Chapel
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
An 1875 chapel and campo santo built in thanksgiving after yellow fever, whose courtyard walls accumulated ex-voto offerings of thanks that scholars still document as living devotion.
St. Roch Cemetery No. 1 grew around a chapel built in 1875 by Fr. Peter Leonard Thevis, vowed in the yellow-fever years in thanksgiving for his parish's survival, and its campo santo courtyard became one of the great American sites of votive offering: plaques, prosthetics, crutches, and marble thank-you tablets mounted on the walls by people who believed they had been healed. The MAVCOR project at Yale documented the ex-voto corpus as an object lesson in lived Catholic devotion.
The chapel and cemetery remain an active parish site; the ex-votos, some removed and preserved, some still accumulating, are the point: an unbroken practice of asking and thanking at a specific grave-chapel for nearly a century and a half.
Visiting
1725 Roman St, New Orleans; the chapel courtyard is typically open on weekday mornings; see the New Orleans Catholic Cemeteries site for hours.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Orleans_St_Roch_Cemetery_1955.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
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Traditions historically rooted in this region — offered as background context, not as a claim about this particular place.
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