The American Resting Place by Marilyn Yalom

Author:Marilyn Yalom [Yalom, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Bellefontaine Cemetery Bellefontaine Cemetery lies directly across the road from Calvary. While Bellefontaine contains less acreage and fewer graves than its neighbor, it became the model garden cemetery for the entire Mississippi region.

Bellefontaine owes its origins to a group of eleven prominent businessmen who purchased 138 acres north of the city limits in 1849 in order to create a nonsectarian burial ground. The cemetery was barely operative when calamity struck. St. Louis's worst cholera epidemic, sent upstream from New Orleans, filled the other metropolitan cemeteries, forcing three to close and four new ones to open. In the course of the summer, one tenth of the population died of cholera.

A month before the epidemic, on May 17, a raging fire had spread from a docked steamboat through a sizable section of wooden houses, killing or destroying whatever lay in its path. The ninety-bed St. Louis City Hospital had been struggling to handle the victims of the fire when the cholera epidemic erupted. Approximately one hundred burials arrived each day at Bellefontaine, sent from various St. Louis churches. During one sweltering July week, more than seven hundred people died, most of whom were small children and recent immigrants. Coffin makers and gravediggers struggled to keep up with the deaths. A lone child's walnut coffin made during the 1849 epidemic has been placed in the St. Louis Historical Museum as a reminder of that fateful year.

With this disaster weighing heavily on their minds, the Bellefontaine directors sought out a competent superintendent to manage and develop the cemetery, which was soon expanded to 332.5 acres. They found the right person for the job: Almerin Hotchkiss, a young civil engineer who had helped design the beautiful Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn a decade earlier. Hotchkiss was responsible for laying out the winding roads and landscaping the tree-filled grounds of what would become one of America's most famous garden cemeteries.

Bellefontaine was officially dedicated on May 15, 1850, and Almerin Hotchkiss remained superintendent for a record forty-six years. When he retired, in 1895, his son Frank took over for the next two decades. The senior Hotchkiss died in 1903 at the age of eighty-seven, and his funeral service was held at his home on the cemetery grounds. A large block of hewn granite inscribed with his name marks his burial site.

Bellefontaine's most prominent inhabitant is probably William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, who is buried on a hilltop under an obelisk bearing the Masons' emblem. His epitaph honors him as a "soldier, explorer, statesman and patriot." In front of his monument lie the smaller stones of his second wife and descendants, including his oldest son, General Meriwether Lewis Clark, named for his father's partner on the famous expedition.

Unfortunately, William Clark's co-explorer Meriwether Lewis came to a less glorious end than Clark. In a fit of depression, he killed himself on October 11, 1809, in a poor wayside inn along the Natchez Trace, about seventy miles from Nashville, Tennessee. Two years after his death, an associate visiting

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