South of Downtown Columbia is a small cemetery where Missouri’s twenty-second governor is buried, as is the founder of William Jewell College. The site is bordered by a low stone wall with an iron gate. The cemetery was once part of the estate of George Jewell, who founded one of Missouri’s early dynasties. In 1841, he deeded the cemetery to his son William and grandson Thomas. More than forty descendants of George Jewell are buried there. A plaque on the gate reminds visitors that only Jewell kin are to be buried within. The most noteworthy are William Jewell and Charles Hardin.
William Jewell (1789 to 1852) was a man of many callings: physician, politician, reformer, architect, and ordained minister. As mayor of Columbia, Jewell pushed for surveying and paving the city’s streets. As a minister, he helped establish the first church in Columbia. As a state legislator, he worked for prison reforms and more humane punishments. He served as an army surgeon in the Black Hawk War from 1831 to 1832. In 1833 he helped establish Columbia College, a precursor to the University of Missouri, which absorbed its land and buildings when it was established in Columbia in 1839. Indeed, Jewell chaired the Boone County committee to raise subscriptions for the state university and pledged $1,800 to the fund.
Deeply committed to education, Jewell also tendered $10,000 worth of land—provided that the Baptist Church would match his contribution—for the establishment of a Baptist college. By 1849 his offer was more than matched, including $7,000 by the citizens of Clay County, so the college was chartered in Liberty and named for Jewell, who as an architect supervised construction until his death. He was joined as a supporter and early trustee of the college by, among others, Waltus Watkins, who built Watkins Mill, now a state historic site, and the Reverend Robert James, Frank and Jesse’s father.
Another trustee of William Jewell College was William’s nephew, Charles Henry Hardin (1820 to1892), who was practicing law in Fulton when he was elected to the Missouri legislature—first to the house of representatives and later to the senate. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Hardin, a Constitutional Unionist, introduced in the senate a successful amendment intended to prevent a precipitous decision in favor of secession. He was the only senator present at Neosho in October 1861 to vote against secession, but when he was considered a Southern sympathizer and disfranchised, he returned to his farm near Mexico in Audrain County. In 1872 he returned to the senate, part of the Democratic resurgence in postwar Missouri, and in the fall of 1874, he was elected governor, having previously defeated ex-Confederate Brig. Gen. Francis M. Cockrell for the Democratic nomination.
An advocate of education like his uncle William Jewell, Charles Hardin founded the Hardin College for women in Mexico, Missouri, and contributed substantially to it. In 1889 he led the fundraising campaign for the establishment of the Missouri Military Academy, also in Mexico. He earned his right to burial in the cemetery through his mother, a daughter of George Jewell.
Gov. Charles Henry Hardin, interred here, is known for reducing a large state debt from the Civil War and for the sale of bonds for railroad construction. He also issued a “grasshopper proclamation,” in which he encouraged citizens to pray for the end of a plague of Rocky Mountain locusts. People gathered in churches to pray on June 3, 1875, and within days, it began to rain and the grasshoppers left.
Jewell Cemetery came under state management in 1970 after the state legislature in 1967 mandated the State Park Board to “suitably mark and maintain every grave of a former governor of this state, which is not within a perpetual care cemetery.” In addition to Dunklin’s Grave and Sappington Cemetery, which like Jewell are state historic sites, the park division also has a program to mark with plaques all governors’ graves in the state and even those out-of-state. There are two governors’ graves in California.
Jewell Cemetery is a tiny, half-acre remnant of the nineteenth century amid the twenty-first-century sprawl of south Columbia. But within its stone walls, the site retains its integrity. The earliest grave dates from 1822, and the most recent from 1968. At the back of the cemetery are about twenty unlettered but neatly quarried blocks of native limestone, thought to be markers for the graves of slaves or former slaves of the Jewell family. Jewell freed some of his slaves in 1836 and the remainder upon his death in 1852. If these are slave graves, they represent an unusual exception to traditional nineteenth-century practices, as slaves were usually not buried inside walled-in family enclosures. Perhaps these stones bear mute testimony to the humanitarian ideals of William Jewell.
JEWELL CEMETERY STATE HISTORIC SITE • SOUTH PROVIDENCE ROAD, COLUMBIA
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