May 27, 1861 - 153 years-ago today, Captain Constantin Blandowski, the first Union officer to be killed in the American Civil War, was buried at Holy Ghost Cemetery, the present-day location of Roosevelt High School. In 1861 St. Louis had the largest proportion of foreign-born people of any city in North America. Most were German, & this is believed to be the reason Missouri remained in the Union. The nearly-all German 3rd Missouri Volunteer Regiment was commanded by Colonel Franz Sigel, who would go on to become a Major General. Sigel Elementary School was named in his honor. Blandowski was in command of company F. He was a native of Silesia, a German area near the Polish border. Graduating from the military school in Dresden, Germany, he served as an officer in the French Foreign Legion in Algiers, in the Polish and Hungarian insurrections of 1848, & fought with Garibaldi in Italy in 1849. He came to America in 1850, becoming a fencing instructor in New York & Philadelphia before making his way to St. Louis. Like many on both sides, he joined the Army when war broke out. On May 10th, the 3rd Missouri was escorting Southern Militia prisoners from Camp Jackson (on the present-day SLU campus) when a melee broke-out. Twenty-eight civilians & seven soldiers were shot, including Captain Blandowski, who was shot in the knee. Complications set-in, & he died from his wound on May 25th. Due to overcrowding at the Citys McKinley & Cleveland High Schools, a new school was needed. With no vacant land in the area, the Picker Cemetery (also known as Holy Ghost Cemetery) was acquired for the schools site, and evacuation of its graves began in October 1922. Captain Blandowskis remains are believed to have been moved to Gatewood Gardens Cemetery, where they were buried in an unmarked grave. On September 14, 2007, a memorial headstone was dedicated at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery to Army Captain Constantin Blandowski. Photo: Constantin Blandowski; what is believed to be his unmarked grave at Gateway Gardens; his Memorial at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. Holy Ghost Cemetery was founded by the Independent German Evangelical Protestant Congregation of the Holy Ghost, the first German Protestant congregation in St. Louis. The Roosevelt High School site was only a small portion of their cemetery, & hundreds of Southside homes are built on the former gravesite, which ran along Arsenal Street from Louisiana to Compton, & each of those streets down to Gravois. The first burial was Nov. 9, 1846, & according to one source, by November 1884, there were 24,683 bodies buried there. At the request of area residents, the city forbid further internments in the cemetery in 1902, and later, the cemetery association was forced to arrange for the removal of the bodies. Many bodies were moved to Zion, New St. Marcus, Bellefontaine, St. Peter’s Evangelical, and Independent German Evangelical Protestant (now Gatewood Gardens) cemeteries. However, some remains were not relocated. During construction of the school, neighbors reported dogs and children bringing home bones from the site, and workers reported finding jewelry and coffin handles while constructing the building. In later years, athletes running track would often find bones breaking through the surface.
Posted on: Tue, 27 May 2014 05:15:23 +0000
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