Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum

Bellefontaine Cemetery was incorporated in 1849 as St. Louis grew rapidly and crowded urban burial grounds became increasingly inadequate. The catastrophic cholera epidemic that year accelerated the need for a large rural cemetery outside the city.

Landscape architect Almerin Hotchkiss helped shape the grounds according to the rural cemetery movement, combining burial space with winding roads, trees and picturesque scenery. Over time Bellefontaine accumulated extraordinary funerary architecture, including the Wainwright Tomb and the Busch Mausoleum, alongside the graves of people central to the city's political, commercial and cultural history.

Today Bellefontaine's identity extends beyond burial. Its accredited arboretum and walking trails make the cemetery a living landscape as well as an archive in stone.

Bellefontaine was incorporated in 1849 during a crisis in St. Louis burial space, but the grounds were formally dedicated on May 15, 1850. That 1850 dedication is the point the cemetery's own chronicler identifies as the beginning of the cemetery visitors came to know: a deliberately rural, park-like burial ground established beyond the crowded city.