THE HISTORY

Chloe Cemetery, sometimes referred to as Saint Mary Cemetery, is a historic African American, Creole and Native American burial ground along English Bayou near the rural community of Chloe in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana.

On February 24, 1904, Eulalie St. Mary sold about one acre of land to “the inhabitants of Chloe neighborhood” for use as a public cemetery for the neighborhood. The deed, recorded in the Calcasieu Parish Conveyance Records, Book 59, page 137, records that the $25 purchase price was paid by the inhabitants of the neighborhood. According to community accounts passed down through families, the money was collected from members of the community. The deed also reserved a lot in the southwest corner for Eulalie St. Mary’s own family burial ground.

Burials appear to predate the 1904 sale. One of the earliest currently identified tombstones belongs to Joseph St. Mary, who died in 1888. Eulalie St. Mary, born Eulalie Pujo, was married to Joseph D. St. Mary, whose family name became associated with the cemetery over the years. Over time, the burial ground came to be called both Chloe Cemetery and Saint Mary Cemetery.

The cemetery became the resting place for generations of African American, Creole and Native American families connected to the farms and settlements around English Bayou. Among those buried there is James Alphonse, described in a July 26, 1943 Lake Charles American Press article as the last slave of Major J. C. LeBleu. The article records that he was buried in the cemetery at Chloe, one of the clearest surviving references tying the cemetery to the Black Chloe community. In the segregated South, the burial ground was referred to in the language of its time as the “negro cemetery.”

James Alphonse and his wife Josephine LeBleu (Roberts) Alphonse raised a large family on the LeBleu Settlement after emancipation. Many of their children and descendants are buried at Chloe, including their sons Walter and Ferrin Alphonse, their daughters Cornelia Hunt and Lucy Alphonse Taylor, and multiple generations of the Alphonse, Hunt, Taylor and Tillman families, whose lives stayed connected to the community along English Bayou. Louise May LeBleu Tillman, a granddaughter of James and Josephine Alphonse and the daughter of Cornelia, died on April 3, 1920. Her death certificate records her burial at Chloe.

Other families are part of Chloe’s story too. John Jackson Miller (July 4, 1885 – December 23, 1974), a native of Garland who lived most of his life in the Iowa community and was a minister among Jehovah’s Witnesses, was laid to rest here. The American Press recorded in December 1974 that his burial was “in St. Mary Cemetery at Chloe.” His story is the first in our FACES of Chloe series.

The families named here are the ones whose stories have been documented so far. Many other families are buried at Chloe, including those whose graves have not yet been identified. CAACPA was founded by descendants, and we are working to gather and record the histories of every family connected to this cemetery. Visit FACES of Chloe to meet those we have documented, and if your ancestors are buried at Chloe, please visit Share Your Story.

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The Chloe community developed within the region historically associated with the LeBleu Settlement near present-day Lake Charles. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Southwest Louisiana had become part of the state’s growing rice belt, and the families around English Bayou lived and worked in that farming community as laborers and farmers, according to descendants.

After emancipation, African American families who had lived and worked in the area continued building lives there, raising children, cultivating land and burying loved ones near the bayou. For many years, according to family accounts, the cemetery was cared for by the families who lived nearby.

As descendants moved away over generations, the burial ground gradually became overgrown, and many grave markers were damaged or lost. Hurricanes Rita (2005) and Laura (2020) caused additional damage, toppling trees and covering parts of the cemetery with debris and heavy vegetation.

In 2026, descendant-led restoration and documentation efforts began to clear the grounds carefully, identify burial locations, preserve historical records and restore dignity to the cemetery. Volunteers continue to uncover visible grave sites and document burial locations hidden beneath decades of overgrowth.

Among the latest known burials identified at the cemetery is Debbie L. Randle, who died in January 1990, showing the cemetery’s continued connection to Chloe families well into the late twentieth century.

Today, Chloe Cemetery remains one of the few surviving physical links to the families who lived and worked along English Bayou and were laid to rest there, a lasting record of the Chloe community itself.