by Jean Feld Rissover
The Ste. Genevieve Herald, Ste. Genevieve
March 12, 2003
page 8

    Memorial Cemetery is one of the most historic sites in Ste. Genevieve - the resting place of many of the town's most prominent citizens, although not the earliest.
    The settlement's original founders were interred on the very banks of the Mississippi in the Old Town.  The graves in that first cemetery were washed away by the great flood of 1785.
    Some burials took place at the site of Ste. Genevieve Church after that date, but by the 1780's, the two-square-block site that comprises Memorial Cemetery had become the primary graveyard for the community.
    According to records examined by the late, local historian Lucille Basler, one of the first burials at the cemetery was that of Antonio D'Oro, a captain in the Reiment of Louisiana and Military Commandant of Ste. Genevieve, however his stone has not been found.
    The oldest legible stone at present dates from 1796, when one Louis LeClere was buried there.
    The exact number of burials in the cemetery is unknown and estimates vary widely (ranging from 3,000 and 5,000000 interments in the years between the 1780's and 1881).  In that latter year, the cemetery was closed.  It had become seriously overcrowded and records from the period register complaints that new burials often disturbed earlier graves. 
    The cemetery was declared a public nuisance by city officials and further burials were prohibited after April 1881.
    However, the final interment occurred 15 years after the closing, with the death of Odile Pratte Valle, widow of the prominent and wealthy Felix Valle.  Felix had died in 1877 and was buried in the cemetery in a family plot.
    When the decision was made to close the cemetery, Madame Valle approached the city fathers with an attractive proposal.  She would give a large tract of land to the city in exchange for permission to be buried beside her husband... whenever her time came.  The authorities accepted her offer and used the donated land to establish Valle Spring Cemetery on Highway M.  Odile Valle was laid to rest at the old cemetery at age 90, in 1894.
    Basler's research, which she began in the 1960's, identified more than 150 graves, mostly using old records, since many of the markers had been lost.  (Rumor has it that some wound up as paving stones in local yards - apparently an act of vandalism as callous as that carried out earlier this month.) 
    According to Basler, the cemetery was divided into three distinct sections: one for Catholics (the south half of the site, containing, she said, more that 3,800 graves), one for Protestants (the northeast quarter), and a third for other burials, probably including pauper burials carried out by the city (the northwest corner).
    Basler determined that some 50 Native Americans were buried in the cemetery while it was operating, including Chief de la Peorease and the daughter of a Grand Chief of the Pi tribe.  (Virtually all of the Indian burials are unmarked; most are believed to lie in a swale at the north central end of the cemetery.)
    There are also graves of slaves - 600 or so, according to Basler's research - some buried alongside their masters, but others in unmarked graves.
    About a dozen victims who died in a tragic explosion on the steamboat Doctor Franklin II in 1852 were buried in a mass grave at the site.
    Memorial Cemetery is the final resting place of Louis Bolduc, Jacques Guibourd, members of the Valle family, the Rozier family, the Janis family, Vital St. Gemme Beauvais, Joseph Bogey and Senator Lewis F. Linn.
    The inscriptions on the stones that remain standing at Memorial Cemetery provide a glimpse of life and death in Missouri's oldest town.  They are testimony to the high infant mortality rate in the little settlement, and the fate of the many young women who died in childbirth. They recall the men and boys who soldiered in the Revolution and the Civil War, and the year cholera swept the city.
    The tombstones stand in mute testimony to those who helped establish the little French town, and to the later German immigrants who made it grow, and made it their own.
    Indeed, the cemetery is more than a memorial to its dead citizens.  It is also a lasting monument to all the inhabitants - men and women, young and old, slave and free, Indian, French, Spanish, German, and American - who brought Missouri's oldest town to life.