Resurrection Hill Cemetery Tells the Story of Interracial History in Pacific

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By Pauline Masson –

My first story on Black history in Pacific, published in the Missourian newspaper in February 1999, was an eye opener for me and for Missourian publisher Bill Miller Sr. The story on Ella Miller, 97-year old granddaughter of a slave and then a resident of Pacific Care Company, was influenced by the late Barbara Bruns and the late Neil Brennan. Both suggested that since I liked history I should get to know some of the local Black families.

After Ella’s story ran, Mr. Miller telephoned me complimented the story and said they (Missourian editors and publishers) had not been aware of the vast Black history here and encouraged me to keep researching.

As I became acquainted with Black families, I viewed what I discovered as unique. Nothing I had seen in other communities where I worked as a reporter compared. I fashioned a romantic ideal of an enclave of mutual respect between the races from the earliest arrival of Black families freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. 

But when I interviewed local Black celebrity George Hinkle, Jr, about his early life here, he politely suggested that I might be bit overboard, depicting life in a segregated community. He offered his traditional modest smile and said, “Don’t be writing any fairy tales.”

George Hinkle is a shining example of a Black boy growing up here. As he stood in line to enter Pacific High School as a freshman – already a tall boy – he was recruited go out for the PHS football team. As the story went, he had never even held a football in his hand before that. He tried out and and made the PHS team. He went on to play college football for Arizona State University and was recruited to the NFL where he played for six seasons for the San Diego Chargers and later for the Minnesota Vikings and Cincinnati Bengals. When I met him he was back home coaching the football team at his alma mater Pacific High.

For this successful man to caution me to not over-glorify a history that was segregated like every other community in the country, was a matter to take seriously. I have tried since then to put Black history here in true perspective.

But, here’s the thing, when the national news media celebrated Black History 2024 during the past few weeks, dozens – maybe hundreds – of stories on the condition of abandoned Black cemeteries cropped upon on every Internet search engine I touched. In Florida, Texas, California, New York, Georgia, Mississippi and Arkansas, officials are grappling with how to restore their Black cemeteries, abandoned and allowed to crumble for 160 years.

These printed histories, lamenting the condition of abandoned African American burial grounds across the county, brought to my mind, another example of life among the races in Pacific – the small, always manicured Resurrection Hill Cemetery for Blacks, which graces a gently sloping plateau on Hwy OO, a stone’s throw from North First Street and in clear view of motorists on I-44.

Even how the cemetery came to occupy that spot sets Pacific apart.

Black families who came to Pacific after being freed by the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation were allowed to move into a cluster of hastily constructed and later abandoned army barracks north of the original town. On a plot of land near the homes they buried their dead and informally referred to their burial ground as Resurrection Hill.

The community of former barracks was a vestige of a Union Army Civil War encampment. Following its abandonment by the Army, no record shows when or how the camp was ceded to the Black families who arrived here. 

The camp and its transfer to the former slaves was heralded in the September 1897 Pacific Transcript when Union Civil War veterans met in Pacific for a reunion. 

The Pacific Transcript devoted a full page to the visit and listed the names of 50 veterans of the former camp who attended the reunion, including seven local men.

Here’s how the camp came to be. In the fall of 1861 fragments of several companies met here in Pacific and reorganized into the 22nd Missouri volunteer infantry, the 17th Missouri and the 10th Missouri Cavalry. They went into winter quarters here, the Transcript noted, building “shanties” up the valley to the north.

“Several of these shanties were afterward remodeled and some are standing today, the old campground being transformed into a modern Africa,” The 1897 story in the Transcript said.

The Black families developed a burial ground on a gently sloping plot at the edge of the repurposed campground. 

In 1909 the City of Pacific acquired the plot of land that held several (mostly unmarked) graves and established the Resurrection Hill Cemetery for colored people in. The oldest recorded burial was Jasper Wagner, buried in October 1895.

One incident in recorded history illustrates Pacific’s role as a bastion of interracial neutrality – the 1973 search for consensus on the name Resurrection Hill Cemetery. A city-wide canvass lasted six months – April through September – and engaged white city officials, the cemetery committee and Black citizens. It involved city board meetings, two petitions, and public debates between best friends.

Donald Cummings asked the city to rename the colored cemetery, known locally as Resurrection Hill, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Cemetery. It turned out that Donald’s friend Herbert Adams thought local tradition should take precedence over honoring the great civil rights hero. The two men, best friends since childhood, and not quite twenty at the time, debated the issue in public board meeting(s). It turned out that Herbert’s parents Udell and Marie Adams agreed with their son, which really rankled Donald. He accused city leaders of bowing to Udell Adams out of fear.

The white city fathers scratched their heads, saying they absolutely had no fear of Mr. Adams and would give the cemetery any name the majority of Black citizens wanted. Marie Adams suggest petitioning the Black community. Two petitions were circulated, one for the traditional – but never officially enacted by ordinance – name Resurrection Hill and one naming the cemetery for Martin Luther King.

At the September 18 meeting, Mayor McKinney said he wanted it known that the board acted out of a sincere desire to favor the majority. “This was not a hurried decision,” he said. Bill 1143 was read and unanimously approved to officially name the graveyard Resurrection Hill Cemetery.

Thirty years later the little cemetery, along with the big City Cemetery on Orr Street, once again engaged the community.  In 2002, both cemeteries were in dire need of repair. Then Mayor Jill Pigg asked the late Barbara Bruns to form a committee to restore the two crumbling graveyards. The Improvement Committee was joined by the Meramec Valley Genealogical and Historical Society.

The combined committee researched living descendants of those interred in the two cemeteries, contacted them, asking for help to restore the cemeteries. They raised $9,700 to repair fallen and damaged stones, erect signs at the entrance to each cemetery – the first in the 100+ year history of the cemeteries –  and, with some help from the city fathers, built handsome gazebos lined with concrete benches so visitors could rest. They also created cemetery directories and a tax-deductible cemetery trust fund.

Ten years later, in October, 2012 when the Meramec Valley Genealogical Society discussed the legacy that King William Adams and his children had made on the city, someone asked, “Where is he buried?”  Only one person knew.

Cemetery Sexton Alan Bruns escorted committee members to the gravesites, very near the entrance to the cemetery. Seeing there was no gravestone for this legendary man, committee members determined to install one. With their own funds and contributions from residents, they asked Mr. Bruns to carve on the stone, the names of King and Mary Adams and the names of six of their children that could be identified through local archives.

When local newspapers announced that a marker was to be installed and dedicated at the graves of King William and Mary Adams in Resurrection Hill Cemetery, approximately 100 cemetery supporters and history buffs – Black and white – arrived to honor the historic couple

Today, as a monument to 160 years of interracial culture here, the City maintains Resurrection Hill Cemetery with the same care lavished on the companion City Cemetery, giving motorists on I-44 a glimpse of a picturesque historic graveyard.

It may sound a bit like a fairy tale, but to this reporter view it’s a fair representation of a town that often got it right. Pacific area schools were segregated until 1954 and Black kids couldn’t attend the Royal Theater until that same decade when Udell Adams persuaded Kenneth Hirth that it was time to segregate the picture show. But even though all that, as early as the 1880s a white realtor named Charles Clay Close began helping the former slaves move out of the old Army shanties and buy homes on the south side of Pacific. And the City looked at that most sacred of family rites and created a burial ground that many communities in our country would envy.