Covering 160 acres, this historic Kansas city cemetery was incorporated in 1888 and has grown to include both the historic Forest Hill Cemetery and Calvary Cemetery. It is located near the University of Missouri - Kansas City and the historic battlefield of Westport. The cemetery includes the final resting places of Kansas City residents from the Civil War to the present, from Confederate officers to innovative businesswomen and civil rights leaders. It was designed by notable Kansas City architect George Kessler and landscape designer Sid Hare.

Forest Hill Cemetery became Forest Hill and Calvary Cemetery after seventy bodies of Confederate soldiers were interred there. On October 22-23rd, 1864, General Sterling Price's raid on Missouri ended in a bloody battle resulting in 1,500 soldiers killed, captured, and wounded. The Battle of Westport was the last Confederate military operation west of the Mississippi. In 1866, a local man named George W. Briant decided he would give the soldiers of this battle, who had been buried where they died, a proper burial if they would be removed from their current burial spots. He then deeded a fraction of his land to Byrum's Ford Internment Association. The bodies were slowly moved from the battlefield of Westport to unmarked graves in a small cemetery on the southeast corner of modern-day Troost and Gregory Boulevard. One notable internment was that of Confederate Colonel Upton Hayes, who died at Newtonia, Missouri in 1862 and was re-interred at the request.

The cemetery originally had 104 species of domestic and foreign trees. In fact, Theodore Roosevelt during his last visit to Kansas City before his death remarked that the grounds consisted of the finest collection of trees he had ever seen