Union Cemetery

The story

When Union Cemetery was dedicated on November 9, 1857, city founders carved out 49 acres halfway between the fledgling towns of Westport and Kansas City. They genuinely believed those 49 acres would accommodate every single dead resident from both towns until the end of time. They were aggressively wrong. Today, over 55,000 souls are packed into this historic plot in Union Hill, but you'd never guess it just by looking at the turf.

Walk the grounds and you'll notice a distinct, eerie emptiness. Only about eight percent of the burials here actually have marked headstones. The other 92 percent fell victim to a chaotic history of lost ledgers, stolen or swept-away stones, and urban record-keeping blunders. You are effectively walking over tens of thousands of unmapped graves, preserved right beneath the modern city line.

Among those buried here is famed Missouri painter George Caleb Bingham, but the real architectural monument to the cemetery's practical macabre is the stone holding vault. Long before heavy earth-moving machinery existed, Missouri winters froze the clay soil into impenetrable brick. Bodies that piled up through December and January had to be stored in the chilling dark of the holding vault until the spring thaw allowed grave diggers to break dirt again.