St. Augustine Cemetery sits behind the church on Highway 484 on Isle Brevelle, in the Melrose country of Cane River. Tradition on the river says Nicolas Augustin Metoyer raised a chapel here in 1803. On 19 July 1829 Father Jean Baptiste Blanc consecrated a chapel “erected on Isle Brevelle on the plantation of Sieur Augustin Metoyer,” built by Augustin and his brother Louis, and dedicated to St. Augustine. In 1856 the mission became a parish of its own. Augustin died that December, at eighty-eight, having seen the church take that step.
The cemetery came with the church, not ahead of the clerks. Augustin’s 1839 will still spoke of “a cemetery,” as if the yard were not yet finished. The earliest stones that can be read belong to his people in the 1830s. Marie Agnes, his wife, died 7 July 1839 and is thought to be among the first laid here. Their brick tomb, stuccoed white with a marble tablet, stands near the front and center of the yard. It also holds their son François Gassion Metoyer and Perine Metoyer Dupre. The St. Augustine Historical Society rebuilt the tomb in 2013 after it had begun to fail, and set the marker that now faces the rows.
This is the churchyard of the Isle Brevelle Creole community, not a town plot open to every line. The stones carry Metoyer, Roque, Balthazar, LaCour, Chevalier, Rachal, Sarpy. Louis Metoyer built Melrose Plantation across the river. Marie Thérèse Coincoin, Augustin’s mother, is not here. She is believed to lie at American Cemetery in Natchitoches. A later mausoleum stands beside the older graves. Clementine Hunter, who painted Melrose from the inside for half a century and died in 1988 at one hundred and one, is in that house of vaults. So is François Mignon, who lived at Melrose and pushed her work into the world.
The church and cemetery were listed together on the National Register in 2014. The present church is not the 1829 chapel. Union troops burned the first building in 1864. A second burned in the early 1900s. The yard kept the families through both fires. It is still in use. Come in daylight. This is an active parish cemetery. Treat the tombs and the mausoleums with respect.