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Site 2 on the St. Louis Sundial Trail:

Bellefontaine Cemetery
(38°41'26.64"N, 90°14'7.55"W)

The Bellefontaine Cemetery is located at 4947 W. Florissant Ave. in St. Louis, MO. It is a site founded in 1849 that is well known for the many prominent people of St. Louis and United States history who are interred there. There is an interesting obelisk and a sundial located in the cemetery.

The obelisk was designed by William Conrad Severson (1924-1999) for his family gravesite. It was constructed of pink granite in 1990. While the obelisk is not a sundial, it does display certain solar events each year as the earth orbits the sun. Severson designed his obelisk to display a cross in its own shadow at solar noon on the days of the vernal equinox on about March 21, the northern solstice on about June 21, and the autumnal equinox on about September 21.

The Serverson Obelisk

Shadow of the Severson Obelisk on Sept. 22, 2017

There is also a sundial in Bellefontaine Cemetery. It was installed on September 10, 2018, to commemorate the life of St. Louis architect Eugene J. Mackey III (1938 - 2016). St. Louis sculptor Abraham Mohler made the pedestal from EW Gold limestone quarried near Ste. Genevieve, MO. It is 18 x 18 inches square and 40 inches tall. The triangular gnomon is made of 3/8 inch thick stainless steel.

Eugene J. Mackey III sundial

The dial plate (designed by DLS and made by Abraham Mohler) is a 16 x 16 inch square piece of milk glass, with the hour lines and numerals made by sandblasting through a photoetched stencil and then spraying black lithichrome paint into the etchings. The time shown by the dial is 3 PM. This is solar time. The (civil) time when the photograph was taken is 3:54 PM CDT as displayed on the cell phone used to take the snapshot, and the date was Sept. 15, 2018. When the relationship SolarTime = CivilTime - DST - L - EOT is used with DST = 1:0:0 (h:m:s), L = 0:0:55, and the Equation of Time EOT = 0:4:30 on Sept. 15, the result is SolarTime = 2:59:25, indicating that the dial displays solar time accurately.

More can be learned about the Bellefontaine Cemetery site by navigating to the website Bellefontaine Cemetery.  To learn more about the obelisk, click on The Severson Obelisk. To go to the next site on the St. Louis Sundial Trail, click on  Site 3, Old Courthouse of St. Louis, or to go to other sites on the trail, return to the  trail map.