Bellefontaine Cemetery: Where St. Louis Buried Its History

Along the northern edge of St. Louis lies a three-hundred-fourteen-acre park of wooded hills, winding lanes, and Gothic mausoleums that reads less like a cemetery and more like a catalogue of American ambition. Bellefontaine, established in eighteen forty-nine, is where the city buried the architects of its golden age, and where their stories have been quietly composting into history ever since.

The timing of the cemetery's founding was grim and practical. St. Louis was hit by a catastrophic cholera epidemic in the summer of eighteen forty-nine, and the old burial grounds along Jefferson Avenue were already full. A group of prominent citizens, led by banker William McPherson and former mayor John F. Darby, purchased a hundred and thirty-eight acres on Bellefontaine Road and opened a rural cemetery in the European tradition, a landscaped arboretum as much as a graveyard. By eighteen sixty-five it had expanded to its permanent size.

The roster of the buried tells the story of St. Louis in miniature. General William Clark, of Lewis and Clark, rests on a bluff with a view of the Missouri River he once paddled into the unknown. His remains were moved here from a family farm after the cemetery opened, a final homecoming for the explorer who spent his last decades as Superintendent of Indian Affairs in this city.

Adolphus Busch and Eberhard Anheuser, the men who built the beer empire that bears their names, are here. So is William Burroughs, the inventor of the adding machine, and his grandson and namesake, the Beat writer. Captain Isaiah Sellers, a Mississippi steamboat pilot, lies in Bellefontaine as well. Samuel Clemens once mocked Sellers's overblown newspaper prose and then, perhaps feeling guilty, borrowed Sellers's old piloting call sign for his pen name: Mark Twain.

Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri's first U.S. Senator. Engineer James Eads, who built the great bridge that bears his name. Poet Sara Teasdale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Civil War generals from both sides lie within a few hundred yards of each other. Bellefontaine is now a National Register of Historic Places site and an accredited arboretum, still receiving the dead, still tended by the living.