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The
Historic House Museums of St. Louis
Spare the old house! The ancient mansion
spare
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| Despite
Matthew Field's best effort at rhyming, the stone house built in 1764 for
St. Louis' founder Pierre Laclede, his mistress Madame Marie Therese
Bourgeois Chouteau, and her children, and enlarged by Auguste Chouteau
in 1789, was razed in 1841 to make way for commercial development.
Fortunately for us, the buildings on this page, all built between the razing of the Laclede-Chouteau house and the end of the nineteenth century, have been spared that fate. Thanks to the generosity of individuals, businesses, and institutions, all six are now house museums open to the public for individual and group tours. The buildings listed below in the order of their construction stand as living monuments to their builders, women and men of differing ethnicities and origins, and to those who lived and worked in them. This page is dedicated to Elinor Martineau Coyle. From the early 1960s until her death in 1997, she worked to interest St. Louisans in the historic structures that surrounded them. |
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Roswell M. & Eugene Field
House
built ca. 1845
634 South Broadway
St. Louis, Missouri 63102
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| The first house on our chronological tour
was part of a row built as an investment by Edward Walsh ca. 1845. In 1850,
Walsh leased 634 South Broadway to St. Louis attorney Roswell Martin Field
and his family. Three years later, Vermont-born Field took the cause of Dred, Harriet, Eliza, and Lizzie Scott to the Federal Circuit Court, and then appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court in a test of the constitutionality of the "Missouri Compromise."  Nevertheless, it was not Roswell Field's role in history, but his son Eugene's popularity in nurseries across the country that saved the next-to-the-end unit of "Walsh's Row" from destruction in 1934. All that remains of the twelve row houses built by Walsh is the single three-story unit Roswell Field leased in 1850, the year in which his son, the future author of "Little Boy Blue" and "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod," was born. It was to commemorate the "children's poet" rather than the crusading (and pro-Union) lawyer that Mark Twain (former soldier in the Confederate Army) helped attach a plaque to the Federal-Style row house in 1902. And it was thanks to Eugene Field's enduring popularity that the house was spared by the Board of Education when the remainder of Walsh's Row was demolished in 1934. Ironically, the modest three-story also escaped the fate of the grand mansion on West Pine in Mill Creek Valley to which the proud developer Edward Walsh had moved in 1859. After serving as headquarters for the University Club and the St. Louis Republican Club, the Walsh mansion was razed in the 1950s.From 1936-68, the Eugene Field House was maintained by the school board as a museum; in 1968 that function was transferred to the Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Inc. In 1981 the poet's birthplace was turned over to the Eugene Field House Foundation which continues to maintain the house and its large collection. The decor and furnishings have been chosen to reflect the period during which the Fields were in residence. SInce both the poet's personal possessions and selections from a toy collection spanning several centuries are on permanent display, the name of the institution has since been changed to the Eugene Field House and St. Louis Toy Museum.
Click
HERE to learn more about Roswell Field, his son & how to tour the Field house.
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Chatillon-DeMenil
House, begun 1848
3352 DeMenil Place St. Louis, Missouri 63118 Although it wasn't begun until 1848, three years after the completion of Walsh's Row, the core of the Chatillon-DeMenil House reflects an earlier St. Louis culture. It sits on land that was once a part of the Common Fields leased to the first Europeans to settle in Laclede's village. In 1848, shortly after the city fathers began selling off the Common Fields, several plots were purchased by Odile Delor, the widowed granddaughter of the French-born founder of the nearby village of Carondelet. Later that year she married her first cousin Henri Chatillon and the two began the construction of a two-story brick farmhouse with the wide double verandah characteristic of traditional Creole houses. | |
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If Odile was the wealthier partner, her husband was soon to be the better known. In 1846, Chatillon, an experienced fur trader and frontiersman, had served as guide to Francis Parkman and Quincy Shaw, Harvard-educated tenderfoots. With the publication in 1849 of the first edition of Parkman's oft-reprinted Oregon Trail, Chatillon became an icon of the western adventurer. Indeed, the letters the illiterate fur trader later dictated for mailing to the "Harvard man" suggest Chatillon found his settled life less satisfying than his frontier expeditions: "I hope," reads one, "that you will soon get tired of Business and make up your mind to take another and longer trip to the Indian Country." It comes as no surprise then, that a year after the city limits were expanded to include the Chatillon residence the house was sold, apparently as a summer retreat from the bustling town center. In 1861 one of the new owners Nicolas N. DeMenil and his wife Emilie Sophie Chouteau, a great-granddaughter of Madame Chouteau herself, decided to live in the house year-round. They commissioned an ambitious expansion, transforming the Creole farmhouse into a mansion with a grand portico in the Greek-Revival style that had immigrated with the Anglo-Americans after 1804. Before his death in 1882, DeMenil would build again, adding a gloriously wrought iron fence and extending a wing to transform the more private west facade into a quiet entrance shielded from the bustle of the row houses he had built to the east and the Lemp Brewery -- then the city's largest -- located just south and across Cherokee Street from his residence. The brewery, however, was not the principal threat -- that came from the automobile. In 1961 the house was rescued thanks to a slight alteration in the route planned for Interstate 55, the generosity of the Union Electric Company, and the intervention of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis. After a major restoration, the house was turned over to the Chatillon-DeMenil House Foundation. In 1965 it was opened as a house museum displaying furnishings and artifacts from the last third of the nineteenth century. Click
HERE to learn more about touring the Chatillon-DeMenil House.
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Architect: George I. Barnett;
Contractor: Charles H. Peck
4344 Shaw
St. Louis, Missouri 63166
Curiously, the house on our tour in the most bucolic setting was built for one of the most "citified" owners. Henry Shaw was not only born in England; he was also educated at one of its best public (private) schools, the Mill Hill School not far from London. Before he left school at age 17 to join his father in business, Henry Shaw had studied French, German, Latin, Greek, and -- particularly -- mathematics. |
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| At age 19 Shaw arrived in
St. Louis and established himself as a seller of English hardware (including
the metalware for which his native city of Sheffield was known). Shaw appears
not to have shared the frontier fever of Chatillon or even Parkman. Although
he too was an enthusiastic traveler, his chosen destinations were in England
and Europe.It
was in the gardens and books of the Old World rather than the trading posts
of the New that he found the inspiration for the park (the nucleus of today's
"Missouri Botanical Garden") he opened
in 1857 near the Italianate country home he had commissioned from the English-born
architect George I. Barnett in 1849.
Shaw's parks - today's Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park -- consumed the last thirty years of his life. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that five years before his death Shaw again commissioned a work from Barnett -- the mausoleum that stands in a leafy glade some fifty yards from the front door of the country house into which Shaw had moved in 1851! Click
HERE to locate the house on a map.
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1508 Locust Street (formerly
Lucas Place)
St. Louis, Missouri 63103
Shortly after finishing Henry Shaw's country home, George I Barnett turned his hand to a larger project. Learning from the impact of commercial development on Summit Square, a restricted residential block developed in 1828 by Anne Lucas Hunt on land inherited from her father, the U.S. land commissioner for the Louisiana Territory and St. Louis' largest land-owner, Barnett worked with Anne's brother James Lucas to establish a buffer around Lucas Place, the exclusive enclave he developed in the 1850s. |
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| Lucas sold and deeded property to the
city for a park in order to establish a permanent greenspace between the
homes sited along St. Louis' first privately maintained street and the
bustling commercial development to its east. Mandating that the houses
be set at least 25 feet from the street insured that the development would
combine the park-like setting of Shaw's country house with the convenience
of urban living. The sole survivor of the Barnett-Lucas development is Number 20 Lucas Place. After changing hands twice in rapid succession, it was acquired in 1854 by the Irish-born Robert G. Campbell, who would become a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trading Company. Campbell, who died a millionaire in 1879, seems to have found this Lucas Place house an ideal setting in which to raise a family and to display his newly acquired wealth. Like his friend Henri Chatillon, Campbell had begun his career as a fur trader in the Western frontier. Unlike Chatillon, Campbell seems to have been happy to return to St. Louis and settle into urban life -- it was to Campbell's address that the more peripatetic Chatillon asked his Massachusetts correspondent Parkman to direct any letters. After Campbell's death, the house remained in the Campbell family until the late 1930s. In 1941, the department store Stix, Baer & Fuller celebrated its fiftieth anniversary by purchasing the fur trader's residence and donating it to the Campbell House Foundation. Campbell House is currently in the midst of a complete restoration using historic documents and photos from the Campbell family papers. Phase One was completed in 2001 at a cost of over $2 million. This stage of the restoration corrected structural problems, installed new mechanical systems and returned the building exterior to its 1880s appearance. Phase Two, the interior decoration, started in 2002. Almost completed, this phase will accurately recreate the Victorian interior of the Campbell House when it was one of the centers of St. Louis society -- a particularly grand testimony to the role of fur trading in the economy of nineteenth-century St. Louis. Click
HERE to learn more about the Campbell House Museum; its restoration and its hours.
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 Scott Joplin
House, ca. 1860s
State Historic Site
2658 Delmar Boulevard
St. Louis, Missouri 63103
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wealthy Anglo-Americans were settling into their homes in Lucas Place and
similar developments, nearby Mill Creek Valley was fast becoming the cultural
heart of St. Louis' vibrant African-American community. As had been the
case among European-Americans who had arrived in the city prior to the
rise of private places, merchants, professionals, and blue collar workers
often lived side by side on Mill Creek Valley's streets. Among the rental
properties built in the area after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation
Proclamation was the two-story brick four-plex that now houses the rich
collections of the Scott Joplin Museum.
The varied housing, cafes, and clubs drew visitors as well as St. Louisans to the Mill Creek area. A 1902 advertisement for one well-known cafe announced that "The Rosebud Bar" was the "Headquarters for Colored Professionals" and featured a private dining room. Among those who were drawn to St. Louis in the 1880s was a teenager named Scott Joplin. He was to return many times, and to become good friends with Tom Turpin, the owner of the Rosebud, and a composer himself. Of all the houses and clubs in which Joplin
lived and worked in St. Louis, only the brick fourplex into which he and
his wife Belle Hayden Joplin moved in 1900 survives. The building's almost prim facade, which shows only modest touches of the Italianate style then popular, seems suitable to the music teacher he became while living here, if not to the composer of gloriously flamboyant rags. Ironicallly, it was here that the composer who would be denied the chance to perform in the concert venues of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 wrote not only "The Entertainer," but also "Elite Syncopations." Despite its designation as a national historic landmark in 1976, the last surviving St. Louis home of Scott Joplin was almost razed a year later. In 1983, it was turned over to the state of Missouri by Jeff-Vander-Lou, Inc., the neighborhood development association that had preserved it from demolition. In 1991 the Scott Joplin house was opened as a museum dedicated to Scott Joplin's life and music, and to the vibrant community that surrounded the building at the turn of the century.
Click
HERE to learn more about Scott & Belle Joplin & how to tour their home.
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Samuel H. Cupples House,
built 1888
The Cupples House is not only most recent of the houses on our tour, it is also the farthest west of our tour's city residences (Shaw's Tower Grove House was the "country villa" or summer home of a man who spent most of his year in his city residence at Eighth and Locust); proof -- if proof were needed-- that St. Louisans have been moving away from the river for over a century. Like his wealthy predecessors, Samuel H. Cupples chose to build his principal residence within the city limits. When he built, more than a decade after the infamous city-county split, wealthy St. Louisans preferred to be near the cultural as well as the mercantile heart of things. Like Henry Shaw, Cupples was a successful entrepreneur; he began as a salesman and ended as a substantial philanthropist and builder. At age fifteen the Harrisburg native began selling woodenware for a Cincinnati dealer; in 1851, at age twenty Cupples established his own woodenware store in St. Louis. By the time he was fifty in 1882, he was able to donate generously toward the conversion of Rene Beauvais' two-story Greek Revival house into a home for elderly Protestant women. In 1894 he commissioned Eames and Young to design the first of a series of warehouses connected directly to the railroads (now running where Mill Creek had been) for the use of the Cupples Woodenware Company and other merchants. Ten of those warehouses remain. Between these philanthropic and commercial ventures lies the grand stone house the woodenware dealer commissioned in 1888, a mansion much farther removed from the flat in which Scott and Belle Joplin would soon settle than either chronology or geography would suggest. The massive 42-room house designed by Thomas B. Annan in the Romanesque Revival style popularized by H. H. Richardson was built at a cost of $500,000 -- the equivalent of $15 million in today's currency. No expense was spared: workers were imported from England to carve the Colorado sandstone and glorious woodwork. Louis Comfort Tiffany designed a series of stained glass windows, including one featuring a poem by Eugene Field, the poet celebrated in the first house on our tour! Like Walsh's mansion, Cupples' was too large for his heirs, who sold it in 1919 to the Order of Railroad Telegraphers. Acquired in the 1940s by St. Louis University, it was first used as office space and then, in the 1970s, restored and opened as a museum and reception space. Today the Methodist woodenware merchant would be delighted to see the woodwork and furnishings of which he was justly proud preserved in all their richness by the first Jesuit institution west of the Mississippi. Click
HERE to learn more about the Samuel Cupples house.
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