How Sailor’s Tombstones Got to New Orleans

The question of how a 2nd-century Roman sailor’s tombstone ended up in the backyard of a New Orleans shotgun house has been answered. The news only reached former homeowner Erin Scott O’Brien, who sold the house to the current owners in 2018. She was the one who placed the plaque in her yard, but she didn’t know it was a 1900-year-old Roman tombstone or even that it was an antique.

She got the tablet from her mother. It belonged to her maternal grandfather, Charles Paddock Jr., Sergeant Major Charles E. Paddock, who was stationed in Italy during World War II. He was a musician who met his future wife, Adele Vincenza Paoli, herself an accomplished violinist and artist, in the USO’s Special Services Division. They were married 79 years ago today in Italy (October 14, 1946). Paddock returned to the United States with his bride, where they lived Charles teaches voice in the music department at Loyola University New Orleans and works with local artists, including legendary entertainer Chris Owens, known as the Queen of the Latin Quarter.

The tablet is one of several antiques in a display cabinet in Paddock’s home in the Gentilly neighborhood. He died in 1986, and neither O’Brien nor her older relatives knew about the tombstone. For that matter, they had no idea it was a tombstone. They just think it’s a piece of art.

When O’Brien bought the Shotgun House in 2003, her mother gave her the inscribed stone she inherited from her father. O’Brien and her husband planted a tree in the backyard and placed the board there as a marker to celebrate the beginning of a new chapter in their lives.

No one in her family knew its history. When she sold the house in 2018, she forgot she had put it there.

“I just thought it was a piece of art,” she said, recalling that it didn’t seem unusual for items she and other relatives to inherit from their grandparents. “I had no idea this was a 2,000-year-old relic.”

How Master Sergeant Charles E. Paddock came into possession of the artifact remains unknown. It is likely that he (or his wife) bought it as a souvenir in Italy during or shortly after the war, but to the best of anyone’s recollection they never mentioned it, so the full saga may never be told.