Quinette Cemetery

Quinette Cemetery is believed to be the oldest African American burial ground west of the Mississippi and the final resting place of between 100 and 200 people. Oral histories indicate that the property was originally federally owned and used as a burial place for prisoners of war during the Civil War period. Written records show that the property was in private hands in 1866, and an 1873 quitclaim deed transferred it to trustees of Olive Chapel AME Church. The cemetery offered free burial for people of African-American descent who lived within five miles or who received approval from the church trustees, and it became the resting place of formerly enslaved people, military veterans, and Kirkwood founders. Olive Chapel operated the cemetery into the 1960s, but development pressures and the church's finances made upkeep difficult, and the grounds suffered damage and neglect. The final burial took place in 1973, and in 1978 Kirkwood ended burials there. After further disrepair, a developer purchased the property in 2002, deeded the cemetery to the City of Kirkwood in 2003, and restoration continued through city bodies, descendants, and volunteers, with the cemetery added to the Kirkwood park system in 2007. The burial ground emerged near the end of the Civil War to meet a need among African Americans, many of them former slaves who before emancipation would have been buried on their master's land. Families with limited means could bury loved ones there, often without coffins or with simple pine boxes, using limestone slabs, plants such as yucca, shells, and mason jars to mark or decorate graves. Burials were arranged haphazardly rather than in formal rows, and after a fire at Olive Chapel destroyed the few existing plot records, the combination of irregular burial patterns and vague grave markings left many individual grave locations unknown today.

Kirkwood, Missouri · United States