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Sappington Family Cemetery has been referred to as Sappington Burial Ground, and Sappington Graveyard. Not to be confused with the Sappington Cemetery State Historic Site in Saline County.John Sappington established this cemetery for his family shortly after arriving in the area. Neighbors were also buried here, and it is believed that the remains of enslaved persons can also be found at the cemetery. The markers for enslaved persons would have been made of wood and have disintegrated over time.Some headstones have not withstood time but many have. A few soldiers are buried at Sappington Cemetery.Soldiers Burials include:<ul><li>Revolutionary War: Sgt. John Sappington, Capt. John Long, and John Wells</li><li>War of 1812: William Lindsay Long, Richard Wells, Zephaniah Sappington, Thomas Sappington, and John Sappington Jr.</li><li>Mexican War: Samuel Parke</li><li>Civil War: John Sappington Parks</li></ul>Sgt John Sappington was born September 3, 1750, and died August 10, 1815. He served with General George Washington at Valley Forge. He had 17 children. Capt John Long married one of Sgt John Sappington's daughters. Many of Sgt John Sappington's children are also buried here. Including Zephaniah Sappington, Thomas Sappington, Elizabeth Sappington Long, Margaret Sappington Parke, Rezin Sappington, and Patience Sappinton Smith just to list a few.Additional family names found at the Sappington Cemetery:BaylesBerryBowlesBrownByerlyGoskenHouserLongMauroParkeParksParrSaleSappingtonSmithSteinhauerThomasWells

Revolutionary War Veteran, John Sappington

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Sappington Family Cemetery is one of the oldest cemeteries in Missouri. This cemetery was originally a part of the vast plantation of John Sappington, father of Thomas Sappington. Within this cemetery rest the remains of pioneer settlers, servicemen, and the Sappington family. Sadly, some of the headstones have been lost to time, but many remain. 

Sappington Family Cemetery

This driving tour offers a way to explore some of the St. Louis area historic family homes and cemeteries.

Father Dickson Cemetery was established in 1903 and named after Moses Dickson. On October 6, 2021, the cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Father Dickson Cemetery was established on August 30, 1903, and is 12.36 acres purchased from the Sappington family. The International Order of the Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor members established the Father Dickson Cemetery Association in 1903. Father Dickson’s remains were relocated to the cemetery in 1903, and a midnight service was held.        Initially, ownership of the cemetery grounds was in the hands of shareholders Fred Authenreith, W.D. Turner, R.L. Johnston, and T. R. Appel. The property would be sold when Fred Authenreith passed away. Fred Authenreith was buried at Father Dickson Cemetery. The property changed hands many times before landing with the DiLiberto family. Under the ownership of the DiLiberto family, the cemetery records would be donated to the St. Louis County Library. The DiLiberto family would struggle to maintain the grounds at Father Dickson Cemetery. Over the years, they would attempt to sell the property, and once the Friends of Father Dickson Cemetery group was established, they would often butt heads with the group over the maintenance of the grounds. In 1988, the Friends of Father Dickson Cemetery group was established. To this day, the group has been instrumental in the maintenance and preservation of the cemetery, and in 2021 Father Dickson Cemetery became a registered historic site.

The resting place of underground railroad pioneer Moses Dickson. After travelling the south and settling in the St. Louis area, he organized he Knights of Liberty who played a vital role in the Underground Railroad in St. Louis, MO. He was also an ordained minister.

Father Dickson Cemetery

Thomas Sappington's 200 acres were gifted to him by his parents, John and Jemima (Fowler) Sappington, as a wedding gift. Thomas Sappington's first wife was Mary Ann Kinkead. Thomas had the house built in 1808. The labor of enslaved persons was used to complete the house.The construction of the house is very unique. The design of the house is Federal style. The bricks used for the house are not kiln-baked. Instead, they were set to dry out in the sun. The house frame is held together with wooden pegs, no nails were used. Wooden shingles were used for the roof. The wooden fireplace mantles and cabinetry are something to be seen.Inside the house are many unique artifacts. Some of the artifacts are original to the Sappington Family. One item is the prayer book of Thomas Sappington's adult daughter, Lucinda Sappington. Inside the prayer book, she lists the birth and death dates of the enslaved people who served her household. Some other unique items include a courting candle, apothecary's chest, beautiful embroidery pieces, and so much more. There is even a cherry sugar chest.There is much to be seen on the property as well. Including, the gardens surrounding the house which are designed to match the historical accuracy of the original gardens.

The Thomas Sappington House is one of the oldest brick structures in St. Louis County. Built in 1808 by enslaved people, it is named after its namesake, Thomas Sappington (1783-1843), whose family was one of the first to settle in the county. The house is a well-preserved and rare example of Federal-style architecture in the state. Given its association with Sappington and architecture, the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. The house is part of a complex that features the research Library of Americana and Decorative Arts, and The Barn restaurant. The site is owned and maintained by the City of Crestwood, and the Sappington House Foundation, conservators for 55 years, operate the facility, with the exception of the restaurant.

Thomas Sappington House Museum

The property was later transferred to William Vanderbilt to satisfy Grant's debt. Adolphus Busch later acquired the property and operated an animal reserve on the estate. The National Park Service offers free tours of the property and a number of exhibits.

Since 1989, this historic plantation home known as White Haven has been managed by the National Park Service which offers exhibits and interpretive tours of the property. The ten-acre historic site includes the birth home of Julia Dent Grant as well as the home where she lived with her husband, Ulysses S. Grant. The property was owned by Colonel Frederick Dent who gifted a small portion of land to the Grants after their marriage. In recent years, interpretive efforts have focussed on the people who were enslaved by the Dent family, in addition to the estate and acreage that became the property of the future president upon his marriage. The couple moved to White Haven in 1854 and lived here until 1859. The outbreak of the Civil War led to Grant's appointment as a commander in the West, and his violent but successful military campaigns against Confederate forces led to his promotion to commanding general of Union forces at the end of 1863. Grant won election to the Presidency of the United States in 1868 and was reelected in 1872.

Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site

Henri Chatillon, guide and hunter for the American Fur
Company of St. Louis, built the first section of the house, a four-room brick
farmhouse, in 1849. The house was a simple, two storied brick structure with
four rooms. 

For some reason, in 1856, Chatillon sold the house to
Nicholas DeMenil and his business partner Eugene Miltenberger. Nicholas DeMenil
was a wealthy French physician, married with Emilie Sophie Chouteau, who was a
descendant of St. Louis’ founding family. In 1861, the DeMenil family hired
English architect Henry Pitcher to turn the farmhouse into a Greek Revival
Mansion. Work was completed in 1863, at which time the DeMenil family moved
into the house. Dr. DeMenil died in 1882 and his only child, Alexander,
inherited the entire estate. After Alexander’s death in 1928, the Mansion was
maintained by caretakers, Edwin and Jennie Kaiser. 

The house remained in the hands of custodians until 1945
when it was sold to Lee Hess, a pharmaceutical manufacturer. An accidental
discovery made by Hess gives an added dimension to the house's history. &nbsp;The area around the house is inter laced with
caves. One cave, the Cherokee Cave (which runs into the Minnehaha Cave), has
its entrance near to the house. Hess developed a popular tourist attraction,
Cherokee Cave Museum, which operated from 1950 to the early 1960s. Planning of
the route for the Ozark Expressway, forced the closure of the caves and
threatened demolition of the DeMenil house. 

Intervention from the newly organized Landmarks Association
of St. Louis rescued the house through Union Electric's gift of the $40,000
purchase price. Restoration work began in 1964; formal dedication took place in
May, 1965 when the house was turned over to the Chatillon-DeMenil House
Foundation, which still owns and runs the house. 

Architecturally, the house today largely retains its
appearance chiefly from its years of occupation by the DeMenils. In 1966, the
American Institute of Interior Designers restored and decorated the rooms. All
of the ceiling medallions and marble mantelpieces, as well as the parquet floor
and chandelier in the foyer, are original to the house. The furniture and
accessories, some of which came from the DeMenil family, are authentic pieces
dating from 1830 to 1870. Built of brick, in the Greek Revival style, two-story
porch with fluted Ionic columnns supporting a pediment, rise the full height of
the building eastern facade. The strength of the porch is carried out through
the wall behind it. Doric pilasters divide the wall into sections which
correspond to the porch. The Ionic order is also employed in the design of the
gallery-type porch on the western facade, but slimmer columnns and the use of a
balustrade rather than a pediment give a more informal effect.&nbsp;

The Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion, built in 1848 in the historic Benton Park neighborhood and one of the few remaining examples of Greek Revival architecture in St. Louis, provides an in-depth glimpse into the lives of two French families. The construction of the house spans two building programs undertaken by families of very different styles of living, yet each reflecting significant aspects of St. Louis' French cultural heritage. The house today serves as a house museum. Although many other houses were built throughout the city in the grand antebellum manner, the DeMenil House is the only remaining Greek Revival house of such monumental proportions in the City of St. Louis. 

Chatillon-DeMenil House

In recent years, the museum's programs and exhibits have focused on Roswell Field, son of the children's author and an attorney who brought into federal court the freedom suit of Dred Scott. The trial took place in 1847 and brought national attention to the issue of slavery and the growing division between states that continued to practice slavery. While the Scott family had several attorneys during their battle for freedom, without Roswell Field’s creative legal strategy, the Supreme Court would have likely not been compelled to hear the case. While Scott and his attorneys emphasized that he had lived in states where slavery was illegal and should, therefore, be freed from bondage, the Court declared that no enslaved person could be a U.S. citizen or seek legal protection provided to citizens through the nation's courts. The decision anger abolitionists as well as those who defended the rights of Northern states to prevent slaveholders from bringing enslaved people into their state as property in violation of their laws. The decision also widened the political gap between those who hoped to extend slavery into the West and those who sought to contain it to the Southern states. Roswell Field's father, Eugene Field, was an American writer best known for his children's poetry and humorous essays. At the time this home became a museum, Eugene Field was the focus of exhibits and the museum collection centered on literature, toys, and other items related to childhood. Field's career spanned multiple genres, but he was best known as the author of many poems and short stories for children. His most famous poems are “Winken, Blinken, and Nod” and "The Duel", to name but a few. Field first started publishing poetry in 1879, when his poem "Christmas Treasures" appeared in A Little Book of Western Verse. He died in Chicago of a heart attack at the age of 45.The land on which Field House was built was once owned by Pierre Laclede, a man widely recognized as a leading founder of St. Louis. After he died, Laclede’s estate sold the property to Auguste Chouteau, Laclede’s associate. Following Chouteau’s death in 1820, the land was conveyed to the City of St. Louis with the provision that revenue from its use be spent for public schools. The Field House was one in a series of roadhouses within a fashionable residential neighborhood known as Walsh’s Row. Developed in the 1840s by Edward Walsh, it comprised twelve identical three-story row houses, including this last-surviving remnant of Walsh’s Row. In 1934, when Walsh's row was about to be torn down, Irving Dilliard wrote a spirited editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch decrying the destruction of Eugene Field's birthplace. Insurance agents Jesse P. Henry and Carl formed a committee to save the house, and the Board of Education took possession, preserving that single unit of Walsh's Row. Under Henry’s leadership, the building was restored and opened as a museum in December of 1936. The Board of Education maintained the house until 1968 when it transferred that function to the Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Inc., who oversaw the house until 1981 when the Eugene Field House Foundation took over. In March of 2007 the Eugene Field House was designated as a National Historic Landmark by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.

This museum is located in the birthplace and early childhood residence of Eugene Field *1850-1895), a popular author of children’s literature in the 19th century. Field's poems for children led to his rise in the literary world, and when he passed away at age 45, he was known as "the Children's Poet." In 1902, Mark Twain unveiled a plaque honoring Field that recognized this rowhouse as Field's birthplace. The remaining rowhomes was so well-known that In recent years, there has been greater emphasis on the life of Eugene's son Roswell Field, the attorney who formulated the legal strategy for Dred Scott's lawsuit for freedom before the Supreme Court. The house is a museum with a vast collection of historic toys, and it also serves as a place where visitors can learn about the Dred Scot case. The museum includes artifacts and items related to the era in which Roswell, Frances, and Eugene Field lived within its walls. The house features special exhibits, workshops, and conferences on civil rights, law and social justice. The museum was also offers displays related to Eugene Field's career and historic toys. Eugene Field came to be known as the “Children’s Poet” for his stories and poems, which include “Little Boy Blue” and “Wynken, Blynken and Nod.” The house was saved from demolition in 1934 due to its significance as the early boyhood home of Eugene Field, the “Children’s Poet” and Roswell Field’s son.

Field House Museum

In the mid 1850s, the area where the Campbell House is situated
was named Lucas place. It was the first suburban clearly defined wealthy neighborhood,
a very expensive, upscale residential neighborhood with very large homes. 

Built in 1851, the first house in this elegant Lucas Place
neighborhood, the Campbell House was built by &nbsp;John H. Hall (born in 1801 in Kentucky) who,
along with his business partner James F. Donaldson (born about 1800 in
Maryland), owned a hardware, cutlery, and mechanics tools store. Hall sold the property
at 1508 Lucas Place to Cornelia Wilson in April 1853, witch lived here for only
one year. In 1854 Robert Campbell, legendary fur trader and merchant, became
its third owner, and the house remained in his family for more than 80 years, until
1938.

After settling in St. Louis, Campbell began an important
business career which included the fur trade, dry goods, steamboats, banks and
real estate. He also helped develop places like Kansas City and El Paso, Texas.
At the end of this career, Campbell owned the Southern Hotel, the biggest hotel
in St. Louis. When Campbell died in 1879, he was considered the wealthiest man
in Missouri. 

Two of Campbell's sons, Hugh and Hazlett, continued to live
in the house after Robert's death. After Hazlett's death in 1938 the house was
willed to Yale University and it was put it up for sale. The furnishings were
sent to the Selkirk Gallery to be auctioned. Stix, Baer and Fuller, a local
department store, bought the home in 1941 as part of its 50th anniversary
celebration and gave it to the Campbell House Foundation, a group that was
formed to turn the home into a museum. The Foundation raised enough funds to go
to Selkirk Gallery to buy back 90 per cent of the Campbell furnishings. The
house was opened as a museum in 1943 showcasing Victorian furnishings and
decorative arts.

In 1973 an important album of 60 photographs was donated to
the Museum. The photos, dating from about 1885, show the house interior, exterior
and surrounding neighborhood. The discovery of the Campbell House photo album
allowed for accurate restoration of the interior of the rooms and after the exterior
in 2005, returning the building to its opulent 1880s appearance. 

The house was one of the centers of St. Louis society,
hosting notable Americans as President Ulysses S. Grant, General William
Tecumseh Sherman and Sioux Chieftain Red Cloud. It is the only surviving
building from the Lucas Place neighborhood.

Since opening in 1943, the Campbell House Museum has served the greater St. Louis area as one of the nation’s premier historic property museums.
The house served as a family home of Robert Campbell from 1851 to 1938. The Museum preserves not only the Campbell’s house, the family home of Robert Campbell—a prominent figure in the history of St. Louis and of the American West— but also the family’s collection of original furniture, fixtures, paintings,  letters, objects , thousands of pages of family documents, and unique album of 60 interior photographs taken in the mid-1880s. 
In 2000, the Museum began a meticulous restoration project that returned the building to its opulent 1880s appearance, when the house was one of the centers of St. Louis society. The museum  is considered to be one of the best preserved mid-Victorian house museums in the United States.

Campbell House Museum

The individuals involved in the organization&nbsp;and direction of the new rural cemetery in St. Louis in 1849 were the cream of the young city's elite, involved in railroads, banking and real estate – businessmen, lawyers, politicians... and more than a few opportunists. Prior to that date, there had been&nbsp;more than twenty informal burial grounds&nbsp;scattered throughout St. Louis, which were in the way of the city's rapid expansion. By&nbsp;that time, St. Louis had existed for exactly 100 years, and the goal of the directors was to see their city compete with the most prestigious metropolises of the eastern U.S., including Philadelphia, Boston and even New York. These older cities had modern cemeteries, and the St. Louis directors wanted one equally modern and refined. (The cemetery was named after&nbsp;Fort Bellefontaine, originally located a few miles&nbsp;north of St. Louis, as well as Bellefontaine Road, which connected the city to the fort.) The need to bury the city's dead had also become more urgent: in 1849 seven percent (one source says 10 percent) of the total population, over 4000 people, succumbed to the cholera epidemic. The directors looked for inspiration to both Europe (Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, the first rural cemetery, opened in 1804) and the East Coast, which boasted, among others, Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery and Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. These new cemeteries have been described as "didactic landscapes, repositories for history and knowledge, showcases for fine art and horticulture, schools for the living."&nbsp;The superintendent of Green-Wood cemetery was a young man named Almerin Hotchkiss (born 1816), who expanded the site's original 178 acres by more than 200 acres. One of the directors from St. Louis came east to hire him, and Hotchkiss moved west soon thereafter. Though he would later plan sites in Illinois as well, including the community of Lake Forest, Bellefontaine became the chief work of his career.&nbsp; Many well-known figures are buried here, including Gen. William Clark (of the famous Lewis &amp; Clark expedition); Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri's first U.S. Senator; Adolphus Busch, founder of the Anheuser-Busch brewery; Brig. Gen. Richard B. Mason, the first military and civil governor of California; Charles Henry Peck, who was both an architect and a railroad and banking baron; and the notorious brewer Ellis Wainwright, whose monument for his wife and himself was designed by legendary architect Louis Sullivan. Many prominent African-American figures are buried here as well including John Berry and Merry Meachum, who&nbsp;taught Black children how to read and write even though that was illegal; Rev. John Anderson, founder of the Second Baptist Church who reportedly helped white abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy print ant-slavery pamphlets (Lovejoy was killed by pro-slavery mob and is also buried at the cemetery); and William and Francis Roberson, the inventors of barber scissors that made them wealthy before the Civil War.&nbsp;

Bellefontaine Cemetery was established in 1850, becoming the first designed large-scale rural cemetery west of the Mississippi. The parcel reached its largest size, 336 acres, in 1865, the year the American Civil War ended (it stands at 314 acres today). Its design combines elements of the rural cemetery concept, modeled on Boston's 1831 Mount Auburn Cemetery (which was itself derived from Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris) and the landscape-lawn movement, pioneered by Adolph Strauch in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery in the 1840s. Designed and originally supervised by Almerin Hotchkiss, the designer of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, the landscape features rolling hills, trees, and man-made lakes, around which many imposing funerary monuments and mausoleums are arranged. Over 87,000 people are interred here, many of them in unmarked gravesites. The cemetery was entered in the National Register of Historic Places in August 2014. The cemetery is also an accredited arboretum, the only one in St. Louis.

Historic Houses and Cemeteries of St. Louis Driving Tour

Sappington Family Cemetery

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources

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