Cypress Grove Cemeteries and Charity Hospital Cemeteries served an indigent population of New Orleans and consequently had few aboveground markers compared to the cemeteries that were quickly developing alongside them. Additionally, the boundaries between these cemeteries and adjacent and parcels were liminal, at best, and the two parcels were barely physically divided. Godzinski et al. 2008 quotes from the History of Yellow Fever in New Orleans (1854):

"The gate of “Potter’s Field” bears a sign marked “Cypress Grove, No. 2”, but it is more generally known by the striking title above given. …As a general thing…the Potter’s Field and the Charity Hospital Grounds are the last homes of the ‘nameless dead.’ Very rarely are the bodies buried here, followed to the grave by mourning friends. The solitary hearse, the corporation carts, or the hospital wagons, come out with their load of dead, often half a dozen coffins or boxes at a time, during the epidemic; they are unloaded in a pile and hurried promiscuously into the earth with the least trouble or ceremony possible…Hundreds go to their long home, and…Their grave is unmarked by stick or stone; the very coffin is a nameless one! Not so much as a piece of chalk is employed to write their names upon the rough, unplanned and unpainted boxes in which they lie...".