Bellefontaine Cemetery

Based on Wikipedia: Bellefontaine Cemetery

A City of the Dead Where America's Frontier Story Sleeps

Somewhere in St. Louis, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, lie the remains of the man who walked to the Pacific Ocean and back. Not far from him rests the inventor whose calculating machines would eventually become computers. A few paths over, the author of Naked Lunch shares eternal ground with the woman who brought kindergarten to America.

This is Bellefontaine Cemetery, and it is one of the strangest, most beautiful places you've never heard of.

Three hundred fourteen acres of rolling hills, winding roads, and monuments ranging from modest headstones to Egyptian-revival mausoleums that wouldn't look out of place along the Nile. More than eighty-seven thousand souls have been laid to rest here since 1850, and walking among them is like taking a master class in American history—if your professor happened to be a landscape architect with a flair for the dramatic.

Born from Panic and Death

The story of Bellefontaine begins, appropriately enough, with a plague.

In 1849, cholera swept through St. Louis with terrifying efficiency. The disease killed more than four thousand people in a city that was already struggling with explosive population growth. Bodies piled up faster than the old graveyards along Jefferson Avenue could receive them. Worse, people had started to believe—incorrectly, but understandably—that the very air rising from overcrowded cemeteries was making them sick.

This was the age of miasma theory, the idea that diseases spread through bad smells and foul vapors. We now know this is nonsense; cholera spreads through contaminated water, not cemetery air. But in 1849, the theory seemed to explain why neighborhoods near graveyards were often unhealthy. Nobody realized the real culprit was that these same neighborhoods typically had poor sanitation and shared wells.

Still, the belief had consequences. If cemeteries were disease factories, they needed to be moved far from the living.

On March 7, 1849, a banker named William McPherson and a lawyer named John Fletcher Darby gathered the city's most prominent citizens. They formed the Rural Cemetery Association of St. Louis, and they had a vision: a new kind of cemetery, miles from the city, designed not as a grim repository for corpses but as a beautiful landscape where the living could commune with the dead.

The Rural Cemetery Movement

To understand what McPherson and Darby were attempting, you need to understand a cultural revolution that had begun in Paris and spread to Boston.

Père Lachaise Cemetery opened in Paris in 1804, and it scandalized traditional sensibilities by being, well, beautiful. Instead of cramped churchyards with headstones jammed together like bad teeth, Père Lachaise offered winding paths through manicured gardens, grand monuments, and mature trees. It became fashionable to visit—to picnic, to stroll, to contemplate mortality in pleasant surroundings.

Americans took notice. In 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery opened outside Boston, and the rural cemetery movement was born. These weren't just places to bury the dead. They were America's first public parks, spaces where city-dwellers could escape crowded streets and breathe fresh air. Central Park in New York wouldn't be designed until 1858. Before that, if you wanted green space, you visited the dead.

The Rural Cemetery Association purchased the Hempstead family farm, 138 acres about five miles northwest of downtown St. Louis. They chose the location for its natural beauty—rolling terrain, old-growth trees, views of the river—and for a practical reason: the road to Fort Belle Fontaine passed directly by. They named their new cemetery after the fort.

"Belle fontaine" is French for "beautiful fountain," which tells you something about who settled this part of Missouri.

The Architect of the Dead

To design their cemetery, the Association hired Almerin Hotchkiss, a landscape architect who had helped create Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Hotchkiss would spend the next forty-six years shaping Bellefontaine, eventually becoming its superintendent and the man responsible for virtually every road, vista, and planting decision.

Hotchkiss understood something profound about landscape design: the dead don't complain about their views, but the living care deeply. He laid out the cemetery so that the wealthiest families could build their mausoleums on the highest ground, with sweeping views of the Mississippi. The monuments cascade down the hillsides in an informal hierarchy, the grandest tombs claiming the best real estate.

The first burial took place on April 27, 1850, and the cemetery immediately began absorbing the dead from St. Louis's overcrowded urban graveyards. Bodies were exhumed and transported, including some from the cemetery beside the Old Cathedral near the riverfront. The oldest graves at Bellefontaine actually predate the cemetery itself—they're from the Hempstead family plot, going back to 1816, when the land was still a working farm.

By 1865, the cemetery had reached its permanent size: 314 acres, crisscrossed by more than fourteen miles of paved roads. Today it holds more than 180 species of trees and is an accredited arboretum, meaning it's officially recognized as a living museum of plants.

The Architecture of Immortality

If you want to understand how wealthy Americans thought about death in the Gilded Age, Bellefontaine is an open textbook.

The families who could afford it built mausoleums in every conceivable style. Classical temples with Corinthian columns. Gothic chapels with pointed arches. Romanesque structures with heavy rounded doorways. Egyptian revival tombs that wouldn't look out of place in the Valley of the Kings—complete with lotus-bud columns and sloping walls meant to evoke the Pharaohs.

Why Egyptian? The ancient Egyptians were obsessed with preserving the body for eternity, and nineteenth-century Americans found this appealing. An Egyptian-style tomb suggested permanence, mystery, and a connection to one of history's greatest civilizations.

The most architecturally significant structure at Bellefontaine is the Wainwright Tomb, and if you know anything about American architecture, that name should ring a bell. Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect who invented the modern skyscraper, designed this tomb in 1892 for Charlotte Dickson Wainwright, who had died the previous year at age thirty-seven.

Sullivan's skyscrapers—the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, the Wainwright Building right there in St. Louis—pioneered the idea that tall buildings shouldn't pretend to be overgrown Greek temples. They should express their steel frames honestly, soaring upward without apology. For Charlotte Wainwright's tomb, Sullivan took a different approach: a low, spreading structure covered with ornate carved ornament, organic patterns that seem to grow from the limestone like living things.

The tomb is now on the National Register of Historic Places. So is the entire cemetery, as of 2014.

Then there's the Busch Mausoleum, built in 1915 for the family that made Budweiser. Adolphus Busch, who co-founded Anheuser-Busch with his father-in-law Eberhard Anheuser, lies here with his wife Lilly. The mausoleum was designed by Barnett, Haynes and Barnett, a St. Louis firm that specialized in grand institutional architecture. It's exactly as ostentatious as you'd expect from a family whose wealth came from selling beer to an entire nation.

Who Rests Here

The roster of Bellefontaine's permanent residents reads like a who's who of American history—but not the obvious names. These aren't the presidents and generals who dominate national memorials. These are the people who actually built things, discovered things, and pushed the country westward.

William Clark arrived in 1838. Yes, that William Clark—the one who traveled with Meriwether Lewis from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back between 1804 and 1806. After the expedition, Clark became the leading figure in St. Louis: governor of Missouri Territory, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, a man whose word carried weight for decades. He died at sixty-eight and was originally buried in a family plot, then moved to Bellefontaine when the cemetery opened.

Near Clark lies Thomas Hart Benton, one of the most powerful senators in American history. Benton served Missouri in the Senate for thirty years, from 1821 to 1851, and championed the expansion of the United States to the Pacific. He believed in manifest destiny before the phrase existed, pushing for the annexation of Texas, Oregon, and California. His grandson, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, would become famous in his own right, though he's buried in Kansas City.

William S. Burroughs rests at Bellefontaine too—though which Burroughs might surprise you. The author of Naked Lunch, the godfather of the Beat Generation, the man who accidentally shot his wife in a drunken game of William Tell in Mexico City? Yes, he's here, having died in 1997. But so is his grandfather, William Seward Burroughs, who invented the first practical mechanical adding machine in 1886 and founded the Burroughs Corporation. That company eventually became Unisys, one of the world's largest computer companies.

Two William Burroughses, one who helped invent computing and one who helped invent literary chaos, resting a short walk from each other.

The Woman Who Invented Kindergarten

In America, at least.

Susan Blow was born in St. Louis in 1843 to a wealthy family. She grew up privileged, educated, and restless. In her twenties, she traveled to Germany and discovered Friedrich Fröbel's kindergarten movement—the idea that young children learn best through play, not rote memorization, and that education should begin years before traditional schooling.

Blow came home determined to bring kindergarten to America. In 1873, she opened the first public kindergarten in the United States, in the Des Peres School in St. Louis. She trained teachers, wrote books, and spent decades evangelizing for early childhood education. By the time she died in 1916, kindergarten was spreading across the country.

Today, virtually every American child attends kindergarten. The word itself is German—"children's garden"—and the concept is so embedded in our culture that we forget it was once a radical experiment. Susan Blow lies at Bellefontaine, the woman who planted that garden.

Beer Barons and Brewing Dynasties

St. Louis was one of the great brewing centers of America, and Bellefontaine is where the brewing families came to rest.

The Anheusers and Buschs are here, of course. Eberhard Anheuser was a German immigrant who bought a struggling St. Louis brewery in 1860. His daughter Lilly married Adolphus Busch, another German immigrant with a gift for marketing. Together, they transformed a small local brewery into Anheuser-Busch, eventually the largest beer company in the world.

Adolphus Busch was a genius of promotion. He was among the first to use refrigerated railcars to ship beer nationwide, freeing the company from regional markets. He pioneered the use of pasteurization to extend shelf life. He created Budweiser as a nationally consistent brand at a time when most beer was local and variable. When he died in 1913, he was one of the richest men in America.

The Lemps are here too, though their story is darker. The Lemp Brewing Company was once a powerhouse, the first American brewery to sell beer coast to coast. But the family was cursed with tragedy. William Lemp Sr. shot himself in 1904. His son William Jr. shot himself in 1922. Another son, Charles, shot himself in 1949. A daughter died under mysterious circumstances. The family mansion in St. Louis is now famous as one of the most haunted houses in America.

The Griesediecks, another brewing dynasty, also rest at Bellefontaine. Their company survived Prohibition by making near-beer and soda, then resumed full production when the law changed. The St. Louis brewing industry has consolidated dramatically—Anheuser-Busch was bought by the Belgian company InBev in 2008—but the families who built it remain here, on the bluffs above the river.

Warriors, Diplomats, and Rogues

Bellefontaine contains soldiers from both sides of the Civil War, resting surprisingly close to each other. The cemetery predates the war by a decade, so families had already established plots before the nation tore itself apart. When sons died in blue or gray, they came home to the family ground.

Sterling Price is here, a Confederate major general who had been governor of Missouri before the war. Price led Southern forces in the brutal fighting in Missouri and Arkansas, including an audacious raid into Missouri in 1864 that nearly captured St. Louis. After the Confederacy fell, he fled to Mexico rather than surrender, only returning after a general amnesty.

John Pope is here too—a Union general famous for losing the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862, one of the worst Union defeats of the war. Pope had been brought east after successful campaigns in the Mississippi Valley, but he proved overmatched against Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He spent the rest of the war in Minnesota, fighting the Dakota War, far from the main action. History has not been kind to him.

Given Campbell is here, a Confederate officer with a more peculiar claim to fame: he led the final escape party protecting Jefferson Davis in the closing days of the war. After Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the Confederate president fled south, hoping to reach Texas and continue the fight. Campbell was among the last to stay with him before Davis was captured by Union cavalry.

Stephen Kearny rests at Bellefontaine, though he died before the Civil War. Kearny was the general who conquered New Mexico and California during the Mexican-American War, leading the famous Army of the West across the desert to seize Santa Fe without firing a shot. He also nearly got himself killed in a confused battle at San Pasqual, California, saved only by reinforcements under Kit Carson.

Writers, Inventors, and Visionaries

Sara Teasdale, who won the first Columbia Poetry Prize (later renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) in 1918, is buried here. Her poems are delicate, musical, concerned with love and death and the natural world. She drowned herself in 1933, at forty-eight, after years of declining health and a painful divorce.

James Eads built the first bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis, a triple-arch steel structure that opened in 1874 and still carries traffic today. Before that, he built ironclad gunboats for the Union Navy during the Civil War—the first armored warships to see combat in the Western Hemisphere. After the bridge, he designed jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi that deepened the channel for oceangoing ships. He was among the most important engineers of the nineteenth century, and his tomb at Bellefontaine reflects his stature.

William Beaumont, known as the "Father of Gastric Physiology," rests here. Beaumont was an Army surgeon who made his reputation through a bizarre accident. In 1822, a fur trader named Alexis St. Martin was shot in the stomach at close range. Beaumont saved his life, but the wound never fully closed, leaving a permanent hole—a fistula—directly into St. Martin's stomach.

Beaumont realized he had an unprecedented opportunity. For years, he conducted experiments on the living stomach, lowering food on strings to observe digestion, collecting gastric juices for analysis. His research established that digestion was primarily chemical, not mechanical, revolutionizing our understanding of how the body processes food. The ethics were questionable—St. Martin was essentially Beaumont's experimental subject for decades—but the science was groundbreaking.

The Modern Dead

Bellefontaine continues to accept new residents. About a hundred burials happen each year, and the cemetery has enough land for another two hundred years at current rates.

Rush Limbaugh was buried here in 2021. The conservative radio host grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and became the most listened-to radio personality in American history. His three-hour daily show reached an estimated fifteen million listeners at its peak. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Trump in 2020, shortly after announcing he had advanced lung cancer. His grave at Bellefontaine has become a pilgrimage site for conservative admirers and, occasionally, a target for those who disagreed with him.

James McDonnell, founder of McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, is here. His company built the F-4 Phantom, the workhorse jet fighter of Vietnam, and the Mercury and Gemini space capsules that carried the first American astronauts into orbit. McDonnell Aircraft later merged with Douglas Aircraft, then with Boeing. The aerospace industry that employs tens of thousands in St. Louis traces its origins to McDonnell's company, founded in 1939.

A Walk Among the Dead

Bellefontaine offers guided tours, and you can pick up self-guided tour brochures at the cemetery office. The roads wind through the property in serpentine paths, designed by Hotchkiss to reveal new vistas at every turn. Spring brings flowering trees. Fall brings spectacular color. Winter, when the leaves are down, offers the clearest views of the river.

The cemetery added a chapel in 1909, designed by the St. Louis firm Eames and Young. They named it the Hotchkiss Chapel, after the landscape architect who had shaped the grounds for nearly half a century. The chapel was renovated in 2009, with an indoor columbarium added for cremated remains. A lakeside garden and outdoor columbarium opened in 2010.

There's even a section planned for "green burial"—natural interment without embalming, vaults, or hardwood caskets. The body returns directly to the earth, as humans were buried for most of history. Some of the cemetery's unused acreage has been converted to prairie and woodland, managed for ecological health rather than manicured lawn.

Bellefontaine is a nonprofit, non-sectarian institution. That second word matters. Unlike many historic cemeteries, Bellefontaine has never restricted burials by religion. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and nonbelievers have shared the ground from the beginning. Mary Odilia Berger, who founded the Sisters of St. Mary and established hospitals across the Midwest, is buried here. So is William Greenleaf Eliot, the Unitarian minister who founded Washington University and was the grandfather of the poet T.S. Eliot.

What Cemeteries Tell Us

A cemetery is a document. It records who a society considered important enough to memorialize, and how much they were willing to spend on the gesture. At Bellefontaine, the largest monuments belong to industrialists and merchants—the Buschs, the Campbells, the Lemps. Politicians are remembered with dignified but modest markers. Artists and writers, with few exceptions, have simple stones.

The cemetery also records absences. African Americans are present at Bellefontaine, including John Berry Meachum and Mary Meachum, who were prominent abolitionists, and John R. Anderson, a minister who fought against slavery. But the record is thinner than it should be, reflecting the segregation of nineteenth-century society. Black St. Louisans more often ended up at other cemeteries, their graves frequently lost to development and neglect.

Women's history is similarly spotty. Susan Blow, the kindergarten pioneer, has a prominent marker. So do suffragists like Virginia Minor and Rebecca Hazard. But for every woman memorialized for her own accomplishments, dozens are identified only as wives and daughters, their own lives subsumed into their husbands' monuments.

This is what cemeteries do: they preserve the biases of their era in stone. Bellefontaine is no exception. But it's also a place where you can stand at William Clark's grave and think about what it meant to walk across a continent nobody from your culture had ever seen. You can read the names of soldiers who killed each other and now lie a few hundred yards apart. You can trace the rise and fall of brewing dynasties, the arc of industrial fortunes, the long slow work of reformers who changed how we educate children.

The dead can't tell their stories. But their stones can start the conversation.