Throughout the 1700s, this cemetery was adjacent to the Washington Catholic Church and used as a Catholic burial ground. It was the first cemetery in Washington. After the church was moved in 1798, the cemetery was used by all creeds and races in the immediate vicinity.
During the yellow fever epidemics of the 1850s, one-third of the town’s population was lost. As a popular steamboat town, Washington was especially vulnerable to the spread of the disease. The large number of deaths from this time filled the cemetery and necessitated mass graves, which are still unmarked to this day. These mass graves give the Old Church Landing Cemetery its other popular name, the Yellow Fever Cemetery.
