Photograph by Byron Kerman
Spend enough time in a graveyard, and your reverence for the dead starts slipping. Certainly, you’re respectful of the dead—you’re probably not one to sit on headstones or anything—but that special silenced humility conferred by the cemetery begins to give way to other emotions.
At Bellefontaine Cemetery, the first major rural cemetery west of the Mississippi, those other emotions can overwhelm, too.
The first thing that hits you is the randomness of it all. The headstones range from the thoroughly lowly and time-eroded to the most ostentatious temple to Thanatos that riches can buy. Often the former squat unassumingly around the latter, monuments, it may seem, to the way folks viewed themselves in life.
William S. Burroughs’ headstone is very much the former. His small plaque bears the inscription “American Writer,” and to this writer, perhaps no phrase could be simultaneously more humble and more honorable. Bellefontaine Cemetery superintendent Kevin Hunter says the site gets its share of pilgrims who want to commune with the cantankerous, substance-fueled legend. The other category would include Col. John O’Fallon, a man sufficiently revered in death that they named cities after him on both sides of the river. The 19th-century businessman and philanthropist lies under a 50-foot granite monument topped with a 13-foot statue that seems to command the obedient tombs of his descendants as they cluster meekly at its base.
This necropolis, a mishmash of the subdued and the outsized, is a very easy place in which to literally become lost. None of the winding “streets” that cut through the vast, 314-acre tract are straight, and there are 14 miles of them, overlapping in such a way they almost seemed designed to disorient the visitor, as in a maze. (Hunter says that people get lost here constantly, and the confused should either head for a perimeter fence or follow the white-painted paths that mark off the self-guided tour of famous graves. Best option: On the way in, pick up a free map at the cemetery office.)
The statues atop monuments’ pedestals are frequently so high off the ground that they can’t be seen well enough to be scrutinized. Grace, faith, mercy—all the things these angels stand for become ciphers at which mortals can only guess.
Wander long enough through Bellefontaine, and you’ll be flummoxed, too, by the class distinctions that persist long after the diamond days. The comically titled Prospect Roadway (why not Park Avenue?) is lined with absurdly huge monuments and stately mausoleums for those who excelled at the game of life. Rubbing elbows at a preternatural cocktail party, the Maritzes, the McDonnells, the Spinks (not the boxers, the Sporting News founders), the Anheusers, the Cuppleses, and their ilk chose to mingle for eternity. It’s strange that these society figures aren’t contained in a gated cemetery-within-the-cemetery, so exclusive is their little “neighborhood.” Some may find the relative anonymity of, say, the Jefferson Barracks cemetery, with its identical headstones, a palliative to Prospect’s whiff of patrician grandeur.
A different kind of grandeur awaits visitors to what is arguably the most important tomb at Bellefontaine, the resting place of Gen. William Clark. The explorer of the western half of the continent (with Meriwether Lewis & Co.) is honored not simply by a giant obelisk, but by a bust and a surfeit of quotes about his achievements etched into a surfeit of monuments and submonuments. There are, in essence, monuments to monuments here—stones erected in 1904 and 2004 to commemorate the major anniversaries of the Louisiana Purchase.
These are the kinds of memorials that ramp up our emotions—whether a tribute to a brave man or a simple stone that says MOTHER, implying that the person beneath was perhaps most herself as a nurturer to others. The monument for Eva Whipple is a sculpture of a precious little baby inside a seashell (commissioned by the mother of the pearl, so to speak). Some 19th-century headstones have faded photographs of the deceased mounted under glass. They’re arresting.
On a different note, death-metal bands that want to shoot their album covers at the single creepiest spot in the joint should head for the grave of former Missouri Gov. David Francis. His life-sized, shrouded mourning angel monument looks like one of Tolkien’s Ringwraiths and is so realistic she looks like she could turn her head and say hello.
Halloween interests aside, Bellefontaine is an awe-inspiring place that may color your natural inclination to reverence with questions about the way we choose to go. To wit, does the cemetery, of all places, have to offer a lesson in class distinctions? Why does death always have to be fêted with such pomp and gravitas when life at its richest can seem so light? And does every human body really need to occupy a permanent piece of real estate, when life, real life, has so little to do with our remains?
In Steve Martin’s novelty hit “King Tut,” he joked that the monarch “gave his life for tourism.”
Like life itself, Bellefontaine is one hell of a tour.
Bellefontaine Cemetery, 4947 W. Florissant, 314-381-0750, bellefontainecemetery.org. Visit St. Louis Magazine’s Flickr photostream to see the author’s photos of Clark’s tomb and more: flickr.com/photos/stlmag.
