Bellefontaine and Calvary Cemeteries

Bellefontaine And Calvary Cemeteries

Bellefontaine Cemetery (established in 1849) and the Roman Catholic Calvary Cemetery (established in 1857) in St. Louis, Missouri are adjacent burial grounds, which have numerous historic and extravagant tombstones and mausoleums. They are the necropolis for a number of prominent local and state politicians, as well as soldiers of the American Civil War.

Founders planned Bellefontaine Cemetery to make room for development in the business area before the cholera epidemic of 1849. That event made it more critical for the city to have room for burials. It was not until later that doctors understood the relation between the epidemics and water supplies, but the residents benefited by moving burials away from the river, which might have become infected by water leaching past the remains of infected people. The original St. Louis cemetery was by the Old Cathedral in Downtown St. Louis near the Mississippi River. Bodies from that cemetery (including that of city co-founder Auguste Chouteau) were moved to Bellefontaine.

Burials from an historic African-American cemetery, discovered in the 1990s during construction at Lambert-Saint Louis International Airport, were reinterred here.