The Girod Street Cemetery (also known as the Protestant Cemetery), was a large above-ground cemetery that resided in central New Orleans, Louisiana, established in 1822 for Protestant residents of the Faubourg St. Mary and was closed down in the 1940s. The cemetery then remained unused, until it was officially torn down on January 4, 1957. History It consisted of 2,319 wall vaults and approximately 1,100 tombs. As the cemetery was above ground with mostly wall vaults, and was located in what was considered a very “convenient” central area of the city, it had become used as a public burying ground to stack bodies, especially during epidemics. Notables interred there included Congressman Henry Adams Bullard, Zulu Social Club King Joseph J. Smith, Lieutenant Colonel William Wallace Smith Bliss, and California governor John B. Weller. There were multiple cases (usually during a major epidemic in the nineteenth century) of people getting in fights because people were over stacking the tombs and wall vaults, and they even had to stack bodies near the entrance because there were not enough people to bury the bodies. As it was described during the 1833 cholera epidemic “...the shrouded dead dumped at the gateway of the Girod Street Cemetery accumulated in such numbers that the entrance to its precincts was so obstructed that arriving bodies had to be deposited on the outside; no graves at this time could be dug; no coffins procurable, for there were neither grave diggers to be had nor undertakers to be found.” Because most of the bodies in the vaults were from epidemics, the site came to be known as the “yellow fever mound”. Girod Street Cemetery was laid out along a central artery with side aisles, and was noted for its so-called "society tombs," which could rise seven or eight tiers above ground. Societies of (former) slaves owned their own tombs: the First African Baptist Association, the Home Missionary Benevolent Society, and the Male and Female Lutheran Benevolent Society. The New Lusitanos Benevolent Association owned the largest society tomb in Girod Street Cemetery, which was designed by J.N.B. de Pouilly in 1859. In 1880, a commissioner of Louisiana inspected all the cemeteries of New Orleans. All of them were found to be in good condition except for the Girod Street Cemetery. Since the cemetery vaults had been built hastily with only a single layer of bricks, unpleasant odors of decay were