Church Street Graveyard is more than just Mardi Gras and haunted oaks. If you never think of this special place outside of Joe Cain Day, consider taking a stroll through this autumn as the weather turns cool. Here you will find much more than the usual yellow fever victims, cotton-fatted merchants and lace-strewn belles of Southern lore. Here you will find natives of Haiti, Mexico and Sweden; band leaders and murder victims; entrepreneurial women and Spanish bureaucrats; free people of color, Bonapartist refugees and wild young men fleeing their troubles back east. Come along, and we’ll meet a few.
Don Miguel Eslava (circa 1740 – 1823)
Church Street’s most senior resident is possibly Don Miguel Eslava. Born around 1740, Eslava’s life in the Port City spanned the Spanish, British and early American periods of Mobile’s history.
By the time he arrived in Mobile in the 1780s, Eslava had already surpassed the average lifespan of those buried in Church Street — about 29 for men. While his death announcement called him a native of Mexico, he was likely born in Spain and emigrated as a young man to Mexico City, where he managed the royal mint. In Mexico, he seems to have married Ysabel de Zuniga in about 1760. Together they had at least two children, Maria Josefa (born 1761) and Josef Augustin Amato (born circa 1775).
In 1779, Spain took control of several British possessions along the Mississippi River, and around 1782, Eslava was assigned the post of royal commissary for the settlement at Natchez. He seems to have been a widower at this time, and neither of his children accompanied him to his new posting. (Maria Josefa would marry Narciso Ortiz in Mexico a few years later).
Eslava’s time in Natchez was short. In 1783, the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War, officially granted Spain control of Fort Charlotte on Mobile Bay. By 1784, Eslava had relocated to Mobile, where he continued his role as royal commissary.
Eslava began his second family in Mobile, marrying 19-year-old Hypolite Francoise Alexandre in 1794. The couple soon had two children: Miguel, born in 1797, and Gertrude, born in 1798. By 1803, the marriage had become strained. That year, Alexandre sued for separation. While divorce was usually not an option, Spanish law did allow a wife to sue for maintenance in a separate household from her husband if she could prove abandonment or cruel treatment. An ecclesiastical tribunal ruled in Alexandre’s favor, and the King’s commandant ordered Eslava to pay $20 a month toward her maintenance.
Eventually, the couple realized some sort of reconciliation. In 1812, Alexandre gave birth to another son named Joachim. An infant son, combined with his own advanced age, likely influenced his decision to remain in Mobile following its cession to the American government in 1813. After five decades in the employ of the Spanish Royal House, Don Miguel Eslava renounced his Spanish citizenship and swore allegiance to the United States.
Eslava lived another decade, dying in 1823 at the age of 83.
Regis Bernoudy (circa 1760 – 1830)
Visitors to Church Street are sometimes surprised to find that, while it was originally divided along religious lines, the graveyard was never racially segregated. In this, we see that racial divides in 19th century Mobile, especially in the earlier decades, were less rigid than what we often assume. The Bernoudy family is a particularly striking example of this. Little is known of Regis Bernoudy’s life before he settled in Mobile. The only clues to his birth and origins come from his gravestone in Church Street. The epitaph, written in French, indicates he was born in New Orleans in about 1760. In his will, he self-identifies as a free man of color. Otherwise, he is almost indisting-uishable in the historical record from his well-to-do white contemporaries. He owned slaves as well as land, and he won legal disputes at the highest levels of the United States government.
Beginning in the 1780s, Bernoudy acquired considerable lands throughout Mobile, most notably a 500-acre tract along the Mobile River where he began manufacturing bricks for sale in about 1809. When a United States artillery captain named A. L. Sands arrived in Mobile in 1813, he was tasked with overseeing repairs to the crumbling Fort Charlotte. He asked outgoing British officers for their brick supplier and was given the name of Mr. Regis Bernoudy. Bernoudy, however, would not be able to satisfy the captain’s order. Joseph McCandless, a recently arrived American settler, had forcibly occupied his brickyards, beating his workers and driving them away. In the ensuing property dispute, Captain Sands’ testimony — signed in pencil as he boarded a ship departing Mobile because he had no pen or ink — proved crucial to proving Bernoudy’s case. A report delivered to the United States Senate in 1820 ultimately found in Bernoudy’s favor.
Bernoudy died 10 years later in 1830 and was buried in Church Street Graveyard, leaving his descendants to face an increasingly hostile world.
In 1832, Bernoudy’s daughter Hortense married Maximillian Colin, a free man of color, just as legal conditions for free and enslaved people of color entered a rapid decline. Beginning in 1833, Mobile’s free people of color were required to register with the mayor’s office or face a fine of $50, or about $1,800 in today’s money. The following year, all newly freed slaves would have to leave the state within 12 months or face re-enslavement. By 1852, this period had been shortened to six months, and in 1860, the state enacted a blanket ban on all manumissions.
It is no wonder if Regis Bernoudy’s descendants found it expedient to leave the city in favor of their own community Down the Bay. Prior to the Civil War, Colin acquired considerable lands south of Mobile. Here, the couple and their seven children, along with other prominent Creole families, would establish the tight knit Mon Luis Island community. Among them were three of Colin’s sisters, Marie, who married Zeno Chastang, and half-sisters Annette and Bretaigne, who both married into the DuBroca family.
Catherine Victoire Legrand de Boislandry George (circa 1760 – 1836)
In her 1836 will, Victoire George charged her heirs to create a family burial ground on her property in Spring Hill, further instructing that “all persons there inhumed shall never be removed therefrom.” And yet, today you will find Catherine Victoire Legrand de Boislandry George at rest alongside most of her family along the east wall of Church Street Graveyard. Madame George’s final resting place follows the common thread of her life — that of never ending up quite where she had planned to be.
A refugee of both the French and Haitian Revolutions, George settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with her husband Pierre Edouard George (Edouard for short) and an infant daughter in 1792. In Philadelphia, Edouard found work as a supercargo for Stephen Girard, a French immigrant and self-made shipping magnate who would be America’s first millionaire. Edouard was often abroad or at sea. Victoire meanwhile operated an academy for young women out of the family home, where she also raised three children: a daughter, also called Victoire and two sons, named Edward and Achille.
Both Edouard and Victoire became involved with the local Society of French Emigrants. Victoire seemed to take a particularly strong interest, becoming one of only 10 women admitted as members. With her husband (and later their eldest son) abroad serving Girard’s interests, Victoire may well have been the driving force behind the family’s decision to join the Society’s venture to settle the Vine and Olive Colony in the wilderness of Marengo County, Alabama.
“This ancient little city,” wrote Victoire upon her arrival in Mobile Bay on Christmas Eve 1819, “would be a most desirable place to establish oneself.” Were it not for the yellow fever, that is. Regardless of the charms or dangers of Mobile, Victoire’s final destination was Demopolis. The 59-year-old made much of the two-week journey into the Alabama wilderness on foot. In Demopolis, she joined Achille, her daughter Victoire and Victoire’s husband, who had arrived some time before to prepare the land for the vines Girard would send them. Here in this new French Republic on America’s southern frontier, they were going to make wine.
Unfortunately for the Georges and the other Vine and Olive colonists, the grape harvest never met their expectations, either due to the humid Alabama climate or the inexperience of the colonists themselves. After five years in Marengo County, Victoire informed Girard that her son Achille would “establish himself in Mobile.” Victoire soon followed. She built a frame house in the Spring Hill community, where she once again operated a school for young women with the help of Achille’s wife Caroline.
Victoire’s dedication to female education and financial independence is further demonstrated in her will. The Spring Hill house and lot would go to her daughter-in-law Caroline, without any interference from Achille. In return, Caroline would continue operating the school, which she did for another quarter century after Victoire’s death. Caroline eventually retired to New Orleans, where she lived with her daughter and son-in-law. Upon her death in 1881, she was laid to rest here in Church Street Graveyard, steps away from Victoire.
The Seignette Brothers
The Seignette brothers — Severain (born 1822) and Arzac (born 1825) — belong to one of Church Street’s largest demographics: the young man from “Back East,” down on his luck and hunting his fortune on America’s southwest frontier.
Their father had been Pierre Seignette of the Seignettes of La Rochelle, France, a family of prosperous distillers. As a young man, Pierre emigrated to New York City where he established himself in business importing and selling Seignette brandies. In 1817, he married Catharine Hazard of Paterson, New Jersey.
Pierre died suddenly in 1826, leaving his young widow with four young children and the family finances in shambles. On the advice of Pierre’s associates, Catharine opened a gentleman’s social club, the Alcibiades Club, in her home. Newspaper articles and gossip columns hinted obliquely at the nature of Catharine’s “notorious” establishment. Trade publications lampooned the house’s exclusive reputation and “aristocratic” clientele. Especially scandalous were reports that then President Tyler’s son frequented the establishment, frequently accompanying accusations of presidential favors for the Seignette family.
The Seignette brothers were precocious when it came to making their own headlines. At only 15, Severain joined a civilian expedition to the Republic of Texas. The New York Daily Herald detailed how the boy was “enticed away” and “inveigled aboard” a schooner bound for Texas. Catharine quickly intervened, commandeering a Whitehall ferry, boarding the ship and bringing her boy home. In 1842, a 17-year-old Arzac took the witness stand in the murder trial of John C. Colt, a younger brother of Samuel Colt of the Colt revolver empire.
In 1845, the brothers advertised they would raffle off their own failed boarding house, the aptly named Hotel des Deux Freres, earning as much as $3,300 to fund their next venture. They decided to try their luck here in Mobile, where they settled in 1846.
Arzac succumbed to yellow fever in 1848 at the age of 23. You will find his name, albeit unfortunately misspelled, on a communal stone in the Odd Fellows section of Church Street Graveyard. Severain, who had found work as a telegraph operator, followed in 1850, aged only 28. His fellow telegraph operators purchased his headstone, suggesting his brief time in Mobile left a positive impression on those who knew him.