Qualla: Bellefontaine Cemetery

Bellefontaine Cemetery: Introduction

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Lawton, CC BY-SA 2.5. William Massie, a riverboat captain buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery, lived for decades with the bullet that killed Wild Bill Hickok lodged in his wrist. The slug had passed through Hickok's skull, hit the captain at the poker table, and stayed there for the rest of Massie's life. It is exactly the kind of improbable detail that defines this place. Bellefontaine is not just a cemetery -- it is a 314-acre outdoor museum of St. Louis ambition, a place where the explorer who mapped the West, the brewer who made the city's most famous beer, the inventor of the mechanical calculator, and the author of Naked Lunch all rest within walking distance of each other, surrounded by architecture that rivals any gallery in the region.

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Image: Robert Lawton | CC BY-SA 2.5

Bellefontaine Cemetery: Born from Cholera

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Velo City STL, CC0. Bellefontaine Cemetery exists because of a catastrophe. In 1849, a cholera pandemic killed more than 4,000 people in St. Louis, overwhelming the city's graveyards, which were clustered along Jefferson Avenue near the city center. Residents feared that fumes from the crowded cemet...

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Image: Velo City STL | CC0

Bellefontaine Cemetery: A Roll Call of American History

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carptrash at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 87,000 graves at Bellefontaine read like an encyclopedia of American ambition. William Clark, who explored the Louisiana Purchase territory with Meriwether Lewis, was reinterred here in the 1850s from his original burial site at the farm of his nephew John O'Fallon. Adolphus ...

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Image: Carptrash at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bellefontaine Cemetery: Sullivan's Tomb

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Viking55, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bellefontaine holds the largest collection of private mausoleums and sarcophagi in Missouri, and its architectural crown jewel is the Wainwright Tomb, designed by Louis Sullivan in 1892 for Charlotte Dickson Wainwright. Sullivan, the father of the Chicago School of architecture a...

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Image: Viking55 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bellefontaine Cemetery: A Living Landscape

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Viking55, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bellefontaine is also an accredited arboretum with more than 180 species of trees and shrubs across its 314 acres of rolling terrain. Hotchkiss designed the roadways and plantings to create the picturesque landscapes that Victorian Americans prized -- winding paths, wooded hillsi...

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Image: Viking55 | CC BY-SA 3.0