Salisbury Cemetery

(locally Salisbury City Cemetery)

Salisbury, Chariton County, Missouri

Salisbury Cemetery lies just east of town, outside the original plat, on Cemetery Avenue (County Route 43) between 2nd Road and East 9th Street (39.41720, −92.78360). Care and administration rest with the Salisbury Cemetery Association, an all-volunteer board. The City of Salisbury does not manage the grounds.

The town is named for Judge Lucius Salisbury.

In 1858 he settled the farm that became the town site. He had Salisbury platted in 1866 and founded the town on 1 April 1867. East of that plat he already owned a separate tract, where he had worked a rock quarry. From that east-side land he donated ten acres to the community for a public burying ground—this cemetery.

The cemetery tract had been traded among Tennessee settlers before it passed to Salisbury. Keytesville records show an original War of 1812 grant to Reuben McHawes of Tennessee; Salisbury purchased the land for $400 in 1847 and quarried it for several years before he bought the half-section of the town site.

The first grave was his own household. On 2 March 1866, eight-year-old Lucius Weber Salisbury was buried on the ground his father had given the community. Rev. William Penn preached the funeral—the first sermon in the settlement that would bear the family name the next year.

In December 1892 the judge traded the Chariton County farm for a place near Kenton, Ohio. He died there on 3 February 1904 at Maple Road farm. His widow and son brought him home. After services at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church he was laid in the cemetery he had donated, near his daughter Alice (Salisbury) Tindall.

Harriet (Newell) Hutchinson Salisbury died at Kenton on 7 December 1908 and was returned to the same lot. Standing in front of the family row, left to right, the graves are Harriet, Judge Lucius Salisbury, young Lucius Weber, and Alice (Salisbury) Tindall.

The cemetery has never been only a founder's lot. It is the principal burying ground of Salisbury and Chariton County pioneer families and their descendants: businessmen, doctors, and attorneys, and the farm families who remain the heartbeat of this prairie county.

It also holds a large immigrant community, especially families of German descent and others from the United Kingdom and Ireland who settled here in the nineteenth century.

Veterans of every American war from the War of 1812 through Vietnam lie here, including men from both sides of the Civil War. Many of those service graves carry only a civilian stone, not a government marker.

There are numerous unmarked burials (especially infants), and graves of formerly enslaved persons.

Among those named on the grounds are Missouri Attorney General Roy McKittrick (1933–1945) and Pearl (Sims) Gehrig, longtime chair of the Chariton County Republican Party.

The older monuments are the tall, slender marble of the nineteenth century; later markers are granite. A number of stones have sunk below grade, especially in the northeast quarter, where flat markers still come to light when the soil is worked.

In November 1975 vandals wrecked thirty-two stones, among them the 1881 monument of John C. Cravens.

In 2011, a team of volunteers led by Find a Grave contributor Nancy Meadows photographed every marker then visible, creating the principal modern visual record of the cemetery.

Nearby related grounds include Eastlawn Memory Gardens, Immanuel Cemetery, and St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery.

Sources:

• History of Howard and Chariton Counties, Missouri. St. Louis: National Historical Company, 1883. Sketch of Judge Lucius Salisbury, pp. 1104–1106 (settlement of the town-site farm, 1866 plat).

• Portrait and Biographical Record of Clay, Ray, Carroll, Chariton, and Linn Counties, Missouri. Chicago: Chapman Bros., 1896. Sketch of Judge Lucius Salisbury, pp. 218–219

• "Death of a Pioneer Citizen." Salisbury Democrat (Salisbury, Mo.), 12 Feb 1904, p. 1

• "Judge Jordan Bentley's Program Gives Interesting Facts About Salisbury." Salisbury Press-Spectator (Salisbury, Mo.), 28 June 1968, p. 2

• "Extensive damage to grave markers at city cemetery." Salisbury Press-Spectator (Salisbury, Mo.), 13 November 1975, p. 1

(Compiled by Find a Grave contributor Melanie S., Salisbury; local research and cemetery volunteer.)