The last person to be laid to rest at Old Lorimier Cemetery: Mary Russell Fox

The first person buried in Old Lorimier Cemetery was Cape Girardeau founding father Louis Lorimier's wife, Charlotte, in 1808.

Nobody quite knows how many thousands have been buried there since, city cemetery sexton Jim Crites said.

"There's truly no way to know," he said. "During fires or floods, records have been lost."

But the best estimate is about 6,500. The 5 1/2-acre grounds hold the remains of city mayors and Civil War soldiers, but mostly it holds that of everyday townspeople.

This Saturday, one last person of the latter category will be interred there: a plainspoken Cape Girardeau schoolteacher named Mary Russell Fox.

A view of tombstones at Old Lorimier Cemetery on Monday in Cape Girardeau.Andrew J. Whitaker

Fox was born in October 1926 to Helen Coerver and Burwell Fox Jr. at 323 N. Lorimier St., just down the street from the cemetery.

Her sister, Helen Glazer, was born in the same house about 20 months earlier and said while she misses Fox, she's glad she'll be laid to rest according to her wishes.

"She had to go before the city council to get permission to be buried there," Glazer said. "The cemetery had been closed, but she wanted to be buried next to our family."

Their family, she said, originally was from Germany but adopted the surname Coerver before ending up in Cape Girardeau.

"It was a name we always had to spell out for people," Glazer said. "My mother always said, 'I'm gong to marry a man with the shortest name I can find. The shorter the name, the better chance I'll marry him.'"

So her mother, Helen Coerver, found Burwell Fox Jr. particularly interesting.

"They met because she was the first librarian in Cape. She didn't have any training. ... Her handwriting was awful, his book was due, but he couldn't read her handwriting. He went to ask her what the note said, and that's how they met," she said. "She thought he was the smartest man in the whole world, and he thought she was the most beautiful woman. They were the perfect match."

Fox's grandfather, William Coerver, also is buried in Old Lorimier Cemetery.

"He was mayor two different times. He had a drugstore on Broadway," she said.

Fox's nephew, Saul Glazer, said her most lasting legacy is likely the children she taught at Jefferson Elementary.

"When you'd visit her, there was always someone who would come up and say, 'You taught me when I was a kid,'" he said.

One of her former students, Deb Baughn, called Fox's class "a turning point early on for my life," though Fox moved Baughn back a grade.

"I had come from a different school, and she recognized early on that I was really struggling in my studies," she recalled.

So Fox sent her and another boy back to the first grade.

"Oh my God, I was so devastated, but it was the best thing that happened to me. The next year, I led my classmates all the way through school. I maybe never would have gone to college if I had stayed in that class. She saw me and really helped."

When she wasn't teaching or attending church at St. Vincent's parish, Saul Glazer said, Fox had a love of travel. From Europe to China to Russia, her combined travels were enough to circle the world twice and then some.

But when it came to funeral arrangements, her sister said Fox always knew what she wanted.

"It's a beautiful cemetery. And I couldn't have had a better sister," she said. "Not a one."

tgraef@semissourian.com (573) 388-3627