Perpetual

Saint Louis, Missouri

Academic Research Project

Research in the Landscape with Gavin Kroeber

The history of Saint Louis’s cemeteries is one of trauma and movement involving both the living and the dead. Many of the city’s oldest remaining public burial grounds form a loose constellation along the political border of Saint Louis City and County. Their geographical arrangement resulting from successive cholera epidemics, disproportionate investment, predacious development, and the city’s tortured history of racial suppression, segregation and disenfranchisement from the period of slavery through the present. The resting dead were not immune to a changing city’s impositions. Ann Morris’ 2000 survey of cemeteries in St. Louis County recounts the city’s repeated history of relocating bodies that occupied older urban burial grounds. Entire cemeteries, exhumed and relocated to the perimeter of the growing city, only to be encroached upon and surrounded anew. Contemporary Saint Louis continued the practice of exhumation into the 1990s when between 11,000 to 13,000 graves were relocated from Washington Park, a historic African American cemetery in Berkeley near Lambert International Airport. 

This research project investigates discernible traditions of incorporating living plants into grave-markings among the city’s historic cemeteries, and questions how themes of commemoration embodied in the growth and development of plantings might be identified and categorized? Five burial sites were selected as representatives for a future comprehensive project. The sites strove to include a diversity of demographics, religions, locations and geographic areas. Greenwood in the Wells Goodfellow neighborhood was the first public non-sectarian African American burial ground in the city and remains a cherished cultural landmark despite ongoing challenges to maintaining the grounds. Saint Peter and Paul is a historically Catholic cemetery located just North of the River Des Peres in the South city Boulevard Heights neighborhood. The largest site included is Bellefontaine which occupies 314 acres in North Central Saint Louis. Bellefontaine, founded at the dawn of the cholera epidemic of 1849, continues to be a popular choice for some of the city’s most affluent. Ohave Sholom in University City is the smallest plot represented at only .184 acres. The Jewish burial site, screened from view by a thick Holly tree hedge, is the resting place for a community of German Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors. Lastly Saint George, an African American cemetery on a forested hill overlooking the American Bottom near Centreville, Illinois has no signs or walking paths and would be swiftly overtaken by the surrounding growth of oak, hickory and bush honeysuckle if not for an annual ritual of maintenance performed by a family of descendants.

Despite being landscapes that “exist to be read,” Katrina Simon writes about the fallibility in ascribing fixed meanings to a cemetery’s living plants. Connotations that are recognizable to one sub-culture may be unknown to others, this language may be as exclusive as pertaining only to an immediate family’s traditions or a departed’s fondness for a specific plant species. In her analysis of Baltimore’s historic black cemetery, Mount Auburn, Diane Jones describes observations of unsanctioned plantings and maintenance practices which may appear subtle, disorganized or improvised but carry deep cultural messages that can be easily overlooked by the uninitiated. Designed in the style of the rural cemetery, Mount Auburn was founded in 1872. Jones draws a direct connection between these informal planting practices and the African American community’s inseparable notions of working land and subjugation. Coded messages inscribed upon landscape were critical methods of communication and resistance for enslaved people and commonly contrasted the slavers imposed dominance over the natural world. This ‘cultural overlay’ reveals specificity and intention in Mount Auburn’s “undetectable sense of place.” Simon writes of the reciprocal relationship between personal experiences and impressions of death and how we ‘read’ or interpret a funerary landscape.

The Landscape may reflect as well as shape human experience, in all of its diversity and ambiguity, and what we know or believe about death will shape the landscape of death, as well as how we read or experience it.

The diagrams included here are graphic investigations into intention within observed spatial situations of placement and growth. Commonalities in spatial gestures and planted species are evident across demographic and religious distinctions. A more comprehensive study could be performed to investigate the breadth of these commonalities and speculate on intentions. Regular site visits and a period of investigation that extends across seasonal change would likely reveal more subtle patterns of visitation, maintenance, and commemoration.