Special Feature

Sage Chapel

CEMETERY

Fresh-cut flowers, old photographs and personal effects: these are the items you’d expect to see adorning grave markers and tombstones dotted across a well-manicured grounds. But, for many years, all that greeted a visitor to one of O’Fallon’s oldest cemeteries was tangled brush and overgrown grass, shrouding the final resting places of our community’s ancestors.

Tucked away on a quiet, shady plot of land along Veterans Memorial Parkway and marked by a proud wooden sign, Sage Chapel Cemetery stands as a testament to the Black community who have long called this area home. Glance at the names on the well-worn markers, and see a veritable who’s-who of long-time O’Fallon families: Dierker, Morris, White, Edwards, Hayden. The cemetery is home to them and many more waiting to be identified. But, while the peaceful grounds stand today as their final resting place, so too does Sage Chapel Cemetery remind us of a darker period in O’Fallon’s history.

Black men and women have been an important part of our community’s heritage since before O’Fallon even existed as an incorporated city, working jobs, raising families, going to church and, it must be stated, toiling as slaves. In the early 1800s, Samuel Keithly and his family settled in the region, bringing along their workforce of slaves. They purchased hundreds of acres of farmland adjacent to Arnold Krekel—brother of O’Fallon’s founder Nicolas—and by the 1840s were one of the largest slave-holding families in St. Charles County. Burials had long been taking place on the Keithly plantation when Samuel’s daughter Mahala Keithly-Castlio inherited the land, and she and her husband deeded an acre in 1881 to the St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church so that former slaves and their descendants could continue to be buried where their forebears had lain in peace for decades. That same deed also awarded another half-acre of land (and the small church building that sat upon it) to the St. John’s A.M.E. The cemetery, and the chapel that shared its name, were officially born. The cemetery’s earliest burials were men and women born into slavery, like Pricella Ball (1812–1900) and Rufus White (1852–1919). As O’Fallon grew, Sage Chapel Cemetery continued to faithfully serve the Black community, and members of Cravens Methodist and Wishwell Baptist were interred in the cemetery as well.

In the 1940s, Black residents began moving away from O’Fallon in search of new economic opportunities. Facing shrinking congregations, the churches serving the dwindling community closed as well, their buildings sold off and razed throughout the intervening years. Records of burials and ownership of the land itself were lost, and Sage Chapel Cemetery soon fell into disrepair.

TOP RIGHT: Simon White (left), b. 1881, is one of many long-time O’Fallon residents buried at Sage Chapel. TOP: Families like the Edwards have multiple generations buried within the one-acre site. LEFT: Pricella Ball’s gravestone reveals one of the oldest marked burial sites in Sage Chapel Cemetery. As decades passed, Sage Chapel Cemetery was cared for by family members of those buried within, but true preservation was too tall a task for volunteers. In the early 2000s, the City of O’Fallon took over the maintenance of the site, and the City’s Historical Preservation Commission took a special interest in the legacy of Sage Chapel. In 2018, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places by the U.S. Department of the Interior, and just this year the City of O'Fallon was officially deeded ownership of the cemetery and named it a protected historical site. All across America, cities are realizing the importance of protecting Black cemeteries, a critical and often untold part of their heritage. While Sage Chapel has been an active cemetery for generations, many gravesites cannot be precisely located. As a result, no further burials will be allowed to prevent potential desecration. Currently, 37 marked plots have been identified, but at least 117 burials are known to be located on this one-acre plot.