Cemetery Committee Restored Neglected Burial Grounds into Places of Beauty / And Helped People Find Them

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By Pauline Masson

Before the city fathers disband the cemetery committee and turn care of the cemeteries over to the city administrator, I want to share with readers what a group of community volunteers – the City Cemetery Committee – did for the city over the past twenty years.

The recent cemetery committee was started in 2000, in the administration of former mayor Jill Pigg.

The city owns two cemeteries – City Cemetery on North Orr Street and Resurrection Hill Cemetery on Hwy OO. Pacific established the City Cemetery in 1910 but many of the graves date in the 1800s. The city purchased land and established Resurrection Hill Cemetery for colored people in 1909. The earliest dated burial there also predates formation of the cemetery.

 By 2000 both were in a state of neglect. The antique wrought iron fence at City Cemetery was listing in places and damaged. Stones in both cemeteries were toppled over and some broken into pieces sprayed over the ground in disarray. Cemetery Sexton Alan Bruns said he had patched them some over the years but but the total repair job was huge.

Mayor Pigg asked the late alderman Barbara Bruns to organize a cemetery committee and create a plan to restore both cemeteries. There was just one glitch, the city had no money to make the needed repairs. The city budgeted a perpetual care fund but there wasn’t enough money in it for all the needed work.

Barbara’s committee included Neil Brennan, Roger Jarvis, Orton Lynch, Norma Keolling, Jim Coleman and Randy Malin. Over the years many other citizens would serve on this committee, including Ruth Mueller, Edna Myers, Nellie Mueller, Emma Moore, Harlan Bruns, Laura Noonan, Jeanne Groth, Kay LeClaire, Bob Myers, and Edith McLaren.

The committee quickly concluded that the folks with the greatest desire to restore the cemeteries was the living descendants of those buried there, but how to locate them. They enlisted the Meramec Valley Genealogical and Historical Society to help identify the descendants and find mailing addresses for them. The genealogy committee found 20 of the 49 identified families and publicized the names encouraging any living relatives to help.

The cemetery committee mailed its solicitation letter to lot owners and friends of the cemeteries and within months had received $4,000 in donations toward repairs. That amount was soon doubled. The committee established a Cemetery Restoration Trust Fund separate from the city budgeted perpetual care fund

After they oversaw months of repairing and resetting all the damaged and toppled stones, the antique wrought iron fence was straightened and repaired. And they had money left over.

Cemetery Maps

Saying they wanted to make it easy to find the city cemeteries and easy to locate graves of individuals buried there, members of the cemetery committee walked the cemetery and listed the names on every stone. 

Two members Roger Jarvis and Orton Lynch created a map of the cemetery showing where each grave was located. Two copies of the map were made. One was housed at city hall and the other was kept at the Pacific library.

The map was not intended to clear up any discrepancies in the cemetery records but was created as a guide to the location of individual graves.

Identification and direction signs

The sexton noted that neither cemetery had an identification sign. There were cemeteries on both sides of North Orr Street but no sign to identify the City Cemetery. On Hwy OO, motorists could see a small, sloping hillside cemetery but no sign identified what it was.

The committee asked Alan to carve monument stones to identify each cemetery. But how about persons from other areas who come to Pacific to visit gravesites of their ancestors. How do they find the cemeteries? The committee appealed to the City of Pacific to put up street directional signs on major roads pointing toward the cemeteries.

Then a terrible thing happened. One September morning the city awoke to learn that vandals had removed eight sections of the century-old City Cemetery wrought iron fence. Complete sections were missing and bars near some of the missing sections were twisted, indicated that they had been ripped out, not dismantled for repair. 

Estimated cost to replace the missing sections $2,000 but Police Chief Ron Reed said due to the age of the fence and the unique capitals, it might  not be possible to recreate exactly what is there. Chief Reed wanted to find the missing fence. He circulated pictures of the fence to area flea markets, antique dealers and firms that deal in old building materials and the missing fence was found, restored and put back in place.

Gazebos

When a friend and frequent visitor of the cemetery said it was a shame there was no place for visitors to sit and enjoy the cemetery, the cemetery committee ordered large bandstand style gazebos with benches to be built in both cemeteries. When they dedicated the gazebos in May 2005, a large crowd gathered for the ceremony.

In April 2013 when vandals rampaged through the city cemetery knocked over some 49 headstones leaving them damaged broken and lying in pieces, or completely unreadable due their weathered sandstone content the late Marc Houseman and the Franklin County Cemetery Committee came to the rescue the cemetery. In one day, with a large volunteer crew, they reset the toppled stones and for months worked with the cemetery committee to repair the broken stones.

The result of all this loving care is the city enjoys two burial grounds that are a source of solace for local families and pride for the community.

The beautiful state of the city’s two cemeteries disappeared from friendly conversation when Jeff Palmore, owner/operator of Bell Funeral Home was elected mayor and launched a campaign to correct the city cemetery records.

No one denied that the cemetery records were imperfect, but no agreement could be reached on how to address the errors.

This disagreement ended up in public spats  that resulted in the aldermen giving the old hand-written cemetery records to the sexton and one of the original cemetery committee members, the late Neil Brennan, launching a law suit that resulted in the records being returned to City Hall. There is still talk of reviewing and updating the records.

None of that altered the value of our two cemeteries. 

Whether you sympathize with Jeff, or with the Bruns family that oversaw the city cemeteries for over 100 years, it can not be denied that our burial grounds are jewels and we owe a debt of gratitude to the individuals who served in the city cemetery committee that turned them from neglected graveyards to places of beauty.

ADDITION: Third Cemetery

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Former city administrator Harold Selby reminded us that there was once another cemetery in Pacific. A gravestone with the name William Fausel was uncovered on the Grimm property at the south end of First Street after the 2010 flood buyout.

Some older residents recalled walked past a cemetery there as youngsters to play in the nearby creek nearby. The old road, which is still visible, ran very close to the little burial ground and people walking to the creek at the south end of the property would have been quite close.

In some local memories there were more than twenty gravestones standing in the early decades of the last century. That was before the big 1950s and 1980s Meramec River floods swept over the property, washing the stones over on their backs and carrying river silt to cover them.

The cemetery committee turned to the late Marc Houseman and the Franklin County Cemetery Committee (FCCC) for any records of the burial site. Marc found evidence that Fausel had married Mary Siefert, whose father operated the Siefert Hotel on St. Louis Street. After Fausel’s death in 1862, Mary married William Wolf Sr. The couple’s great-great grandson Tom Wolf, who operates Wolf Hardware, unearthed and cleaned the Fausel stone in July 2010.

Marc and four members of the FCCC probed the area for other grave stone. Three partial but unmarked stones were uncovered.

The origin of the cemetery where Fausel was buried has not surfaced but the 1878 Franklin County Atlas shows the cemetery on the property of Edwin James.

Marc noted that since the site does contain burials it should be maintained as a cemetery, which, at that time, the city fathers indicated they were willing to do.

A marker has been placed near the stones to alert the grass cutters, who meticulously trim around them.