Jefferson Barracks Cholera Monument

Cholera repeatedly struck the St. Louis region during the nineteenth century, thriving where contaminated water and crowded conditions allowed it to spread. Military posts were especially vulnerable because large numbers of people lived together under conditions that predated modern sanitation.

At Jefferson Barracks, the memory of epidemic death became part of the burial landscape. The cholera monument gives physical form to a kind of mass mortality that can otherwise disappear into statistics.

The monument in Section 57, Site 15009, marks one of the cemetery's most powerful Civil War stories. In August 1866, members of the 56th U.S. Colored Troops contracted cholera while returning to Missouri after their service. One hundred seventy-five officers and soldiers were buried near the former Koch Quarantine Hospital in St. Louis. In 1939, the War Department removed their remains to Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery and moved the original stone obelisk with them, where it was re-erected and dedicated that May.