St. Joseph Church & Cemetery

St. Joseph Church went up in 1856, five years before the Civil War reached Louisiana, making it the oldest Catholic parish on Jefferson's West Bank. It has held services ever since. The congregation that built it included both German immigrants and Creole families, and the burial ground behind the church still shows how those two traditions handled death — some families built above-ground tombs, others dug graves in the earth. The cemetery holds Gretna's founding families. Walk the rows and you're reading the tax rolls and merchant directories of a river town that needed both the German shipwrights and the Creole traders to function. The church itself anchors the Gretna Historic District's walking tour, which means you can see it as part of a longer afternoon that includes the ferry landing and the blocks where those founding families kept their houses and shops. This is a working parish. Mass is still said. The doors open for weddings and funerals. If you visit on a weekday morning you may find someone kneeling in a pew or tending graves out back, carrying forward what began here before the war came.