Rider Cemetery in Belleville, Illinois

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Get directions Belleville, Illinois, USA

Coordinates: 38.49750, -89.92920
Cemetery ID:

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About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

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1 open photo request.

Located in Section 25, Survey 505, off Green Mount Road, on Green Mount Trail, Belleville, in Township 1 North, Range 8 West, St. Clair Township of St. Clair County, Illinois. It is located east across the road from the Jewish Cemetery, B'Nai Israel. Cemetery rewalked and inventoried by Teri Bromley Sept. 2021. The cemetery faces east with row 17 at the roadway and row 1 at the back of the cemetery. Rows were read from left to right and numbered by tombstones, not graves. There are many open spaces and more graves than are listed here.

The original owner, John Rider, owned 250 acres on which the cemetery was located. His son Matthew, who died in 1814, was the first burial. The last burial occurred in 2006. John willed the property to his wife Elizabeth Rider, nee Hendricks. Upon her death, James Hill bought the Rider lands. In James' will to his son, he exempts "The one acre of ground used as a graveyard, to be used as a burial ground and no other purpose, to my son, George W. Hill, in trust to be used there and for the benefit of the Owens, Varners, Hendricks, Merrills, and families of the old settlers buried there." The cemetery deed is still held in 2021 by a Hill descendant. It is sometimes called Hill Cemetery or Rider-Hill Cemetery but is recorded in the land records only as Rider Cemetery.

This cemetery is an O'Fallon Historical Society restoration project. Gravestones are being unburied, repaired and reset upright and unmarked graves being identified by the OHS [O'Fallon Historical Society] Cemetery Detectives, volunteers Tim Ogle, Tom Schwarztrauber, Dan Fietsam, Babe Papproth, and Teri Bromley.