In 1873, Shreveport experienced the third worst yellow fever epidemic in U.S. history. While the virus was spreading, and many people were dying, five Roman Catholic priests from Shreveport and other nearby towns made a choice to enter the worst of the epidemic and provide the care they could. Inevitably, they all succumbed to the disease within three weeks of each other.
Yellow fever claimed over twelve hundred lives in just twelve weeks. Due to the number of deaths within a short period of time, most people were not given their own burial site, and many burials were never properly recorded, including for two of the priests’. Dr. Cheryl White tells the story of how she and Marty Loschen from the Spring Street Museum began to search for. Father Quemerais’s and Father Gergaud’s original burial sites.
Cheryl White Father Quemerais was the first to die on September 15. And then Father Gergaud was actually the fourth to die on October 1. We know from the records that they were originally buried in Oakland Cemetery. They were both later exhumed in early 1874. So, I was curious as to where the original burial sites were. Because there's plenty of records that tell us they were moved but no records that said where they were buried. So that’s kind of why I got interested in looking at the registers from Holy Trinity Church and identifying the prominent Catholic families that owned plots in Oakland, because that made sense to me. That some Catholic family donated a space.
Dr. White identified four of the major Catholic families from 1873: O’Niel, Moore, Kennedy and Kelly. When examining the burial plots of the families, the Kelly plot turned up with some missing markers. The researchers then decided to use Ground Penetrating Radar technology to examine the plot. Abigail Boykin, a history student at LSUS, used the radars to identify any anomalies. The results uncovered the answers the team had been searching for.
Abigail Boykin It looks like a lawn mower, kind of. And you push it across the ground, and it sends out a signal into the ground, and then it receives it back. And when it receives that signal back, it tells you basically, you know, here’s where the soil is and here’s strange things that are not matching the soil. And those would be, like, objects. So, you can use it for artifacts. Very useful. But one of the things that also shows up is disturbances in the soil. So, things that were removed. And so, that is of extreme importance to locating those two burials because obviously, we’re not expecting to find bodies there. But when we surveyed the Kelly plot with the GPR. You’re just pushing this thing back and forth over the ground. Eventually, it creates a picture for you. Kind of, if you imagine plaid and how that goes one way across and the other, it creates a picture in that manner. And so, you are looking at where objects are and where voids are. And so, we are looking at this and we knew from the headstones that were within the plot that there should be 11 people buried there. And we found, you know, and we found the occurrences of 11 items there, which are the bodies that were interred. And then we found two voids. And those two voids are, of course, where the two priests would have been laid to rest.
The search concluded in March of this year.
Cheryl White It answered an unanswered question. It filled in a blank in the narrative. We had as much of the broader picture and the border story, we have a lot of it in very specific detail. But what we didn’t know was this. We didn’t know where they were buried originally. And so, again, for the historian who was interested in the integrity of the record, and getting all of the facts, that was an important question to answer.
In the summer of 2023, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to continue the canonization process for the five priests. This means these priests are the first North Louisiana residents to be on the path to sainthood.
This is Alaina Atnip with Red River Radio News.