Carville Patients' Cemetery, National Leprosarium.

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The Carville cemetery is the only stop on the tour where you may exit your vehicle and take photographs. Just beyond the cemetery is a hospital incinerator with a driving ramp and tower built in the 1920s to dispose of all waste. Remember that nothing was allowed to leave the grounds.

This is the second patient cemetery and was established in 1922 by the federal government. About 750 patients are buried here. These stones were provided by the federal government and resemble markers you might see in a military cemetery. Each stone is engraved with a patient's hospital ID number and either their real or false name. Some patients purchased their own ornamental markers.

In many cases, a patient chose to be buried using his “Carville name” to hide identity even in death. Several times a month, families come to Carville in search of a “long lost” relative. In cases like this, the Medical Records Department can make a positive identification by using old medical charts. The museum offers a schematic of the cemetery to help searching families locate a stone.

Carville’s first patient cemetery is located in the front quad of the patients' dorms. Because the first cemetery isn’t accessible to the public, the 40 & 8, a veterans’ organization and patients' benefactors since the 1940s, produced a memorial stone with the names of the first 137 patients to die and be buried here. It is the large grey marble marker to your right, at about 4 o’clock. When you examine the names, you will notice that some of these earlier patients were buried using a first name or initials only. One obvious pseudonym is “George Washington.”

32 veterans are buried here--from the Spanish American War to the Vietnam war— and each of these graves is marked with an American Legion star.