The Dead Governors Society

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
—Thomas Gray, “Elegy in a Country Church-yard”

Martin Gauthier is looking for a few good men. Five, to be exact.

Gauthier’s mission is to track down the burial places of all the Louisiana governors since 1803. In the past three years, he has found forty-three of forty-eight. Just five to go and he will have “visited” all of Louisiana’s dead governors.

But those five are stumpers. Where, for example, is Joshua Baker, who served for only six months in 1868? Is he buried in Franklin Parish, in St. Mary Parish, or in Lyme, Connecticut, where he died in 1885 while visiting his daughter? Gauthier has searched in Lyme and come up empty. He thinks Baker’s body was sent to Louisiana for burial—but where?

Benjamin Franklin Flanders (1867-68) was buried in the Girod Street Cemetery in New Orleans in 1896. But the cemetery was destroyed in 1957, after a decade in decline. (Nowadays, it’s the site of the Superdome.) “They gradually moved all the remains from Girod to Hope Mausoleum, but they didn’t keep any records of the people buried there,” says Gauthier. “More than three thousand people were buried at Girod, but all they have at Hope is a plaque with the names of about fifty of the most prominent.”

Gauthier was excited to discover that, in 1911, a man named Benjamin Franklin Flanders had bought a plot at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans. Possibly, he thought, the man was a descendant who had had the governor reinterred there. But when he checked out the plot he found “nothing but grass—no tombs.”
Also on his short list are Thomas Bolling Robertson (1820-24), possibly buried in Copeland Hill Cemetery in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Gauthier spent half a day trying in vain to locate the cemetery.

And what about Isaac Johnson (1846-50), who might be in the J. P. Smith Cemetery in West Feliciana Parish? The cemetery was part of Clover Hill Plantation, which was subdivided years ago; part of it is now the Girl Scouts’ Camp Marydale. Gauthier found a tombstone—for somebody else. No sign of Isaac Johnson.

Who is not to be confused with Henry Johnson (1824-28), Gauthier’s current obsession. According to contemporary newspaper accounts, when Henry died in 1864, he was buried at Woodley Plantation in Pointe Coupée Parish. But Gauthier can’t find him. Johnson’s siblings lived in Woodville, Mississippi, so Gauthier and a friend recently motored over and trekked through Evergreen Cemetery. They didn’t find the governor, but they did find a younger Henry Johnson, possibly a son or nephew. Later they spent a day at Hill Memorial Library at LSU, poking through records and perusing a 1935 thesis on Johnson, but turned up no leads.

Gauthier, a semi-retired electrical engineer who lives in White Castle, has driven all over Louisiana—and beyond—in his dogged determination to find out where the bodies are buried. In July 2007, he traveled 3,400 miles by car in search of five governors buried out of state. He found William P. Kellogg in Arlington Cemetery in Virginia; George F. Shepley in Portland, Maine; and Robert C. Wickliffe in Bardstown, Kentucky. Baker and Robertson remain on the short list.

Gauthier was already passionate about cemeteries when in 2007 he attended a lecture on Henry Clay Warmoth, the first Reconstruction governor, who at the tender age of twenty-one tangled with no less a personage than General Ulysses S. Grant.

In 1863, Warmoth was wounded at Vicksburg and hospitalized. When he returned to camp, Grant gave him a dishonorable discharge for having been absent without leave. Warmoth sped to Washington and waited in line for hours to talk to President Abraham Lincoln, who opened the White House to all citizens once a week. Lincoln reinstated him. Warmoth returned to camp and reported for duty. From then on, Grant was his implacable enemy; he even tried to have Warmoth impeached toward the end of his term as governor (1868-72).

At the lecture, Gauthier learned that Warmoth was buried in Metairie Cemetery. The following weekend, he drove over to photograph Warmoth’s tomb. “It was an incredible feeling,” says Gauthier, who lost no time adding this information to his Web site.

In 2004, Gauthier had launched www.la-cemeteries.com. It lists each cemetery he has found in all sixty-four parishes. (He has found around 6,300 and estimates he will find an additional thousand.) “My dad was from Avoyelles Parish,” he says. “I started doing research on the cemeteries there and came up with 150. Then I did Iberville Parish. I finally did all sixty-four parishes in about two years.”

Gauthier added a section on governors to his Web site, posted his Warmoth information, and launched an all-out effort to find and visit the resting places of the other forty-seven governors, from William C. C. Claiborne (1803–1816) to John McKeithen (1964–72). The site now contains all available information on each governor’s grave, with a photograph and biography of each leader. It also has updates on the search for the “lost” governors. For now, the French and Spanish governors are on the “maybe later” list.