During the mid-19th century, the two city blocks from Cherokee north to Utah Street and from Lemp west to Wisconsin served as a cemetery. Theodore Schrader's 1867 Map of St. Louis identified the land as Baptist Cemetery, and a St. Louis Genealogical Society publication documents burials there as early as 1848. The 1859 St. Louis Directory listed Baptist Cemetery on Lemp Avenue between Cherokee and Utah as the first of 16 cemeteries in alphabetical order, alongside other nearby cemeteries later abandoned or removed, including City Cemetery, later transformed into Benton Park following the Civil War, German Evangelical Cemetery on the grounds of Shepard School just south of Cherokee, and Old Picker at the current site of Roosevelt High School on Gravois. Yet Pictorial St. Louis, drawn in 1875, showed no cemetery there and instead depicted more than a dozen buildings scattered across the former cemetery grounds, leaving unanswered what became of the Baptist Cemetery, how many people were buried there, and where those buried there were taken.
