Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

HISTORIC 

ST. LOUIS 

250 Years Exploring New Frontiers 

by J. Frederick Fausz, Ph.D. 

A publication of the University of Missouri–St. Louis

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HISTORIC ST. LOUIS 

250 Years Exploring New Frontiers 

by J. Frederick Fausz, Ph.D. 

A publication of the 

University of Missouri–St. Louis 

HPNbooks 

A division of Lammert Incorporated 

San Antonio, Texas

DEDICATION 

To the memory of James Neal Primm 

and to the UMSL students who inspired us both. 

First Edition 

Copyright © 2014 HPNbooks 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing 

from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to HPNbooks, 11535 Galm Road, Suite 101, San Antonio, Texas, 78254. Phone (800) 749-9790, www.hpnbooks.com. 

ISBN: 978-1-939300-61-4 

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 2014938682 

H I S T O R I C S T . L O U I S 

2 

Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers 

author: J. Frederick Fausz, Ph.D. 

contributing writer for sharing the heritage: Joe Goodpasture 

HPNbooks 

president: Ron Lammert 

project managers: Roxanne Landman, Bob Sadoski, 

Larry Sunderland, Michael Swengrosh 

administration: Donna M. Mata, Melissa G. Quinn 

book sales: Dee Steidle 

production: Colin Hart, Evelyn Hart, Glenda Tarazon Krouse, 

Christopher Mitchell, Tony Quinn

CONTENTS 

5 INTRODUCTION by UMSL Chancellor Thomas F. George 

6 FOREWORD Reflections by St. Louis Mayor Francis G. Slay 

7 PROLOGUE St. Louis: Where the Past is Present for the Future 

12 CHAPTER 1 Exploring the Confluence of Cultures and Rivers 

32 CHAPTER 2 Exploring St. Louis as Capital of the American West 

49 CHAPTER 3 Exploring a Steamboat City of Expanding Commerce 

80 CHAPTER 4 Exploring the World’s Fair City in a Railroad Era 

106 CHAPTER 5 Exploring Urban Challenges in an Automobile Age 

142 EPILOGUE Inspiring Community Spirit in the New Millennium 

164 SHARING THE HERITAGE 

310 SPONSORS 

312 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

C O N T E N T S 

3

Statue of King Louis IX of France. 

Known as the Apotheosis of Saint Louis, 

the statue by Charles H. Niehaus was 

unveiled at the 1904 World’s Fair. 

Two years later, the city had it cast in 

bronze and placed in front of the Saint 

Louis Art Museum, where it remains a 

beloved landmark. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE FAUSZ FAMILY, 2010. 

“We shall not cease from exploration, 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started, 

And know the place for the first time.” 

–St. Louis native, T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “No. 4” (1942). 


4

INTRODUCTION 

The history of St. Louis is one of opportunity and dreams coming true. 

That’s apparent in the pages of this outstanding book chronicling the birth and 

development of St. Louis over the past 250 years. It’s a story of individuals seeking 

better lives for themselves and their families. It’s a story of individuals coming 

together to create great communities, companies and institutions. It’s our story. 

I am especially proud of this publication as the University of Missouri–St. Louis 

is a primary sponsor and many of the individuals mentioned in the book have 

strong associations with our campus—either as graduates or supporters. I also 

was delighted that one of our faculty members, Dr. J Frederick Fausz, oversaw 

editorial direction and content creation. He’s a natural storyteller and an 

outstanding historian whose knowledge of Western American history makes him 

one of our favorite professors. 

St. Louis has a rich history. It has experienced much growth and change over 

the past 250 years. It has seen success and failure—many times over. For many, 

St. Louis was a gateway to somewhere else. For others, like me, it became a home. 

I consider us the fortunate ones. 

St. Louis will continue to grow and change. And, while I like to read about 

St. Louis’ rich, historic past, it’s working for a better future that inspires and 

excites us at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. 

We’re in the business of making dreams come true. 

Thomas F. George 

Chancellor 

University of Missouri–St. Louis 

I N T R O D U C T I O N 

5

FOREWORD 

Above: Mayor Francis Slay, City of St. Louis. 

Below: Official anniversary logo of the 

stl250 Committee; used with permission as a 

registered Signature Event. 

The brilliance of St. Louis’s celebration of its 250th anniversary year is that only the barest 

attention is being paid to the actual details of our foundation as a fur trading post by Pierre Laclede 

and Auguste Chouteau. 

Instead, our civic focus will be on other things: the river itself; the immigrants who found their 

way here; the buildings and neighborhoods in which they settled; the churches and civic 

cathedrals in which they congregated; the sports they adored; the great public spaces they built; 

the foods they popularized; the strength with which they struggled with the injustices of slavery 

and segregation, the ravages of Depression; and the mistakes they made. 

Like most St. Louisans, I am the descendent of immigrants. I was raised on a block in which 

I knew everyone. The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis is my idea of a church and the Eads is my 

idea of a bridge. I have never lived farther than a half mile from a park. I bleed red and blue for 

the Cardinals, Blues, and Rams. I have a taste for provel, in quantity. 

I have long thought that the Great Divorce of 1876, in which the city of St. Louis separated 

itself from St. Louis County, was our biggest civic misjudgment. From it can be traced the roots 

of a dozen other consequences that continue to vex us. 

The year in which we celebrate our founding is our most recent best opportunity to reflect 

on the courage and ingenuity of St. Louisans who faced flood, fire, discrimination, and violence; 

kept faith in their home; and built—if not yet a Shining City Upon a Hill, at least a vibrant and 

diverse city perched on the bank of a great river, where all are welcome. 

–Mayor Francis Slay, City of St. Louis 


6

PROLOGUE 

A C I T Y W H E R E 

T H E P A S T I S P R E S E N T F O R T H E F U T U R E 

“In joyful homes where the happy dwell, 

Where life is in gladness led, 

It cometh the heart with sighs to swell, 

The memory of the Dead.” 

–St. Louis poet Ethel Grey, The Memory of the Dead, 1850. 

In recent years, St. Louis has faced its greatest socio-economic crises since the Great Depression, 

with a dramatically diminished population and declining stature among American cities. In a 

Time magazine essay on Bastille Day, 2008, David von Drehle wondered if “Poor St. Louis”—a 

“Midwestern city with an Athenian heart”—could ever reclaim the global prestige of 1904, 

when it was the only city ever to host a world’s fair and Olympic games simultaneously. Would 

retaining local ownership of the iconic Anheuser-Busch Brewery, von Drehle queried, “be enough 

to give this city a few more years of dignity”? 

The new Saint Louis Art Museum East 

Building at sunset on June 6, 2013, 

reflecting the Statue of Saint Louis. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT COHEN, 

COURTESY OF THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. 

P R O L O G U E 

7

The iconic Clydesdales remain a popular 

St. Louis treasure. Copyright @ Anheuser- 

Busch, LLC. Used with permission of 

Anheuser-Busch, LLC. All rights reserved. 

St. Louis will never regain the international 

acclaim of that spectacular summer over a 

century ago, when, as America’s fourth largest 

city, with the nation’s biggest brewery, it 

welcomed the world as a gracious host. 

But it takes more than one event or a 

single business to nurture the civic pride 

and community spirit that are essential in 

determining a city’s true “dignity.” Residents 

are the key shapers of urban reputations, 

for by embracing and sharing an accurate 

knowledge of a city’s entire history, they 

create connections through time and well 

into the future among all people who 

have lived there. That reinforces the reality 

that everyone occupies the “same boat” and 

must tap all talents and share all sacrifices 

to keep the fragile craft of community 

from sinking. 

Remembering is the greatest honor and 

highest compliment that anyone can bestow 

on ancestors who created the society we live 

in. Respect for the debts owed to that local, 

familiar past is why people buy tombstones, 

publish obituaries, and name children after 

relatives. When a city honors famous citizens 

with street names, plaques, or monuments, it 

enhances the relevance of history, validating 

the shared humanity between the living 

and the dead and ensuring that our labors 

have created legacies that will last long after 

our passing. 

The site of St. Louis resembles an 

“amphitheater” and on that natural “stage” 

our city has played major roles in historical 

dramas for two-and-a-half centuries. Only 

three dozen U.S. cities are as old as St. Louis, 

and our “City of the Sainted King” has 


8

achieved national fame that is deserving of 

remembrance, recognition, and respect: 

S St. Louis was the first permanent European 

settlement closest to the strategic confluence 

of America’s two longest rivers—one 

of the best city sites on the continent. 

S St. Louis was the last permanent French 

city created in the present limits of the 

United States, and it perpetuated that 

special culture following France’s loss of 

its American empire in 1763. 

S St. Louis did not displace a Native American 

population and pioneered innovative, 

alternative frontier policies of peace and 

prosperity as a hospitable “Indian capital” 

of diplomacy and trade. 

S St. Louis was a true city by design, function, 

and significance from its earliest days, 

thanks to civic-minded businessmen, whose 

profits from global commerce developed 

a consumer culture of affluence, civility, 

and philanthropy. 

S St. Louis became a “refuge” for French 

colonists from all areas of North America; 

served as Spain’s northernmost regional 

capital in its New World empire; and was 

the first capital of the American West after 

the Louisiana Purchase. 

S St. Louis was the last home of the Corps of 

Discovery commanders, Meriwether Lewis 

and William Clark, and their influence 

made the city a “Gateway to the West” for 

generations of American entrepreneurs and 

European immigrants. 

S St. Louis served as the “Mother City” of 

the West, whose citizens promoted many 

“daughter settlements” that became future 

towns in Missouri and several other states. 

S St. Louis was the Union capital west of 

the Mississippi and the only southern 

city to support Lincoln, playing key 

roles in winning the Civil War and 

emancipating slaves. 

S St. Louis was a major commercial hub 

of the heartland, connecting eastern, 

western, northern, and southern regions 

via steamboats and railroads. 

S St. Louis became a large industrial center 

and America’s fourth largest city by 1900, 

promoted as the possible future capital of 

the United States. 

S St. Louis was a popular destination for 

international immigrants and tourists long 

before it achieved fame for the World’s Fair 

and Olympic Games in 1904. 

S St. Louis has played a major role in aviation 

history for over a century, before and 

after Charles Lindbergh’s famous transatlantic 

flight in a plane named for the city. 

S St. Louis achieved international prominence 

for its architecture, represented by the 

Eads Bridge, its early skyscrapers, Lambert 

Airport Terminal, and the Gateway Arch. 

S St. Louis has been a leading city in proposing 

progressive civic solutions to serious 

problems of urban decline since 1900. 

S St. Louis has world-class universities, free 

cultural institutions, and notable parks, 

historic sites, medical facilities, musical 

traditions, museums, and research libraries, 

with unparalleled archives on the history 

of the American West. 

S St. Louis has an incomparable heritage of 

baseball excellence, winning eleven World 

Series championships as the first National 

League city west of the Mississippi. 

S St. Louis has harnessed the potential of 

the new millennium most aggressively, by 

supporting innovative new businesses, 

improving the attractions of inner city living, 

revitalizing neighborhoods, expanding job 

opportunities, welcoming immigrants, and 

creating new options for popular entertainment 

and cultural refinement. 

That small sample of accomplishments 

should provide encouragement to the 3,000,000 

people who live in the St. Louis Metropolitan 

Map of St. Louis, 1892, from Shewey’s 

Pictorial St. Louis, Past and Present 

(St. Louis, 1892), p. 17. 


9

T H E U N F U L F I L L E D P R O M I S E S 

O F A N N I V E R S A R I E S 

Major public anniversary celebrations represent the best and worst aspects of history. 

They attract broad interest and temporarily make information about the past more popular, 

but such popularity often encourages fleeting entertainment over lasting enlightenment 

and the marketing of silly souvenirs instead of respect for serious research. Anniversaries 

highlight the difference between popular heritage—often flawed personal memories, 

mere rumors, and sheer fantasies about the past—and professional history, the disciplined 

accumulation of accurate, verifiable evidence about events that no one remembers. The 

arrival of the new millennium illustrated those differences. The many millions of people 

who participated in that massive global revelry celebrated the wrong year—revealing an 

astonishing level of ignorance about chronology in a commemoration that should have 

been all about chronology. 

St. Louisans have long had their own problems with chronology and seem incapable of 

reaching a consensus about the correct founding date of their city. The Official Bicentennial 

Celebration in 1964 honored the wrong “birth date” of February 14, and it has been 

virtually impossible to alter erroneous personal memories with professional research ever 

since. A popular publication recently proclaimed that “an actual date of the city’s 

founding…is unknown due to the lack of documents from 1764 and inconsistencies of 

these papers.” That is a lie fabricated by a PR promoter pretending to know history. 

Historians, like lawyers, give far more credence to written records than hearsay 

accounts, and the only founding date in a surviving manuscript written by an eyewitness 

(the city’s eminent co-founder, Auguste Chouteau) is February 15, 1764, which he 

consistently confirmed several times between 1804 and 1825—including testimony 

under oath. All of the earliest historians of St. Louis accepted and repeated that date, 

and the city’s first official public celebration of its founding was held on Monday, 

February 15, 1847. But flawed English translations of Chouteau’s Narrative of the Founding 

of St. Louis in 1858 and 1911 misread his “5” for an inaccurate “4”—and all of the leading 

city historians in 1964 were too careless to note that discrepancy. That error proliferated 

like a computer virus. As more and more citizens celebrated the wrong date in the past 

fifty years (unfortunately made more popular due to its association with Valentine’s Day), 

flawed memories became resistant to verified, irrefutable evidence from experts. 

Once the mistakes of the early translators became widely known, however, all recent 

scholarly historians have agreed that February 15 is correct. And national, neutral 

commentators cannot fathom the local dispute, as when Charlie Rose on the CBS Morning 

News wished St. Louis a happy birthday on February 15, 2013. Unless St. Louisans stop 

trivializing historical dating as a personal whim, they will continue to perpetuate fictitious 

heritage instead of factual history. How can we expect young students to respect history if 

our most mature citizens disregard that most basic fact about their hometown? And how 

many other of our biased beliefs defy accuracy and honesty? 

Area, reminding them that human potential 

and commercial capital for 250 years have 

resolved crises far worse than those of today. 

Sadly, however, few residents appreciate those 

major milestones of impressive leadership 

that stimulated civic loyalty in past generations. 

The most relevant, resonating history is 

usually local and personal, starting with an 

awareness of family genealogy, progressing 

to an appreciation of one’s unique neighborhood, 

and resulting in a broader, advanced 

understanding of the hometown and what it 

has contributed to the state, the nation, and 

the world. 


10

But for decades, public schools have 

almost entirely replaced local history with 

global “social studies”—while making all 

courses dealing with humanity subordinate 

to “STEM” subjects (science, technology, 

engineering, and math). The failure to excite 

young minds about the history of St. Louis is 

an inexplicably missed opportunity, since the 

city was co-founded by a teenager whose 

exciting frontier experiences with French, 

Spanish, British, American, and Indian populations 

over sixty-five years could serve as an 

engaging multicultural “textbook” by themselves. 

Reading any history for pleasure and 

enlightenment has also declined dramatically 

in our era of proliferating electronic devices 

and the quick, short, and misspelled text 

messages they facilitate. History would probably 

be more popular and palatable if it were 

marketed as “social networking with the dead.” 

History is the memory of an entire society, 

and amnesia about the events that predated 

one’s birth is akin to the confusion experienced 

when someone overhears only a partial 

conversation without knowing the topic or 

how it began. A knowledge of history is 

required for a meaningful patriotism that 

goes beyond mere flag-waving, because it 

provides details about the sacrifices of 

earlier generations in solving social crises. 

History also promotes citizenship and a wellfunctioning 

democratic government. People 

who live only in a self-absorbed present will 

never be able to differentiate between old 

trends and new ideas, lacking the wisdom of 

historical context when they enter the voting 

booth with no direction for improving the 

future. Finally, an intensive knowledge of the 

past is the best preparation for understanding 

the present. The study of history requires 

broad reading, a commitment to understanding 

all sorts of people and their motives for 

making decisions in a variety of contexts, and, 

especially, a commitment to factual accuracy. 

Throughout world history, cities have been 

special centers of multicultural convergence, 

where a rich mix of intellectual, technological, 

political, and commercial “explorers” advanced 

progress with new ideas and innovative 

solutions. St. Louis emerged as a great 

metropolis because of its urban entrepreneurs. 

In every century, its business leaders 

have invested in risky enterprises and used 

their expertise as political leaders, civic 

planners, and generous philanthropists to 

improve the lives of fellow citizens. The 

organizational profiles in the “Sharing the 

Heritage” section showcase the considerable 

accomplishments of major corporations, 

small businesses, important non-profit 

groups, and venerable cultural institutions. 

Taken together, their stories serve as an 

enduring time capsule of 2014, which future 

generations can use to measure the progress 

of their ancestral explorers in years to come. 

This book chronicles 250 years of the most 

significant “explorations”—physical, political, 

intellectual, commercial, cultural, and social— 

that made the City of St. Louis famous in 

American history. The depth of coverage 

required, enhanced by a vast number of rare 

illustrations, precluded information on events 

beyond the city’s boundaries. But everyone 

in the entire metropolitan region should recognize 

that St. Louis is a special place where 

the past is still present for shaping a future 

filled with pride and dignity. What St. Louisan 

William Vincent Byars wrote about his ancestors 

over a century ago still holds true today: 

Aerial View of the downtown core of 

St. Louis on November 19, 2008. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BRIAN HOLSCLAW; 

PERMISSION FOR USE GRANTED THROUGH 

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. 

“Their deeds, their thoughts, each brave word bravely said, 

Live past the grave and master it, to give 

The living help and strength when life is fraught 

With sorest need of courage.” 

–J. Frederick Fausz 


1 1

“Indians live much better than men under tyranny and arbitrary government…. 

Nature has given them a soul which…condemns dishonesty, petty fraud, 

and all…vices which are daily practiced…in refined life.” 

–John Dunn Hunter, Osage captive (1823) 

C H A P T E R 1 

EXPLORING THE CONFLUENCE 

OF CULTURES AND RIVERS 

Above: Detail of the Mississippi-Missouri 

River Confluence, 1997. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BOB SRENCO 

(BOB@SRENCOAERIALPHOTO.COM) AND USED 

WITH PERMISSION. 

Right: Purported Portrait of Pierre de 

Laclede Liguest. The sailing ship in the 

background symbolized Laclede’s voyage to 

New Orleans in 1755, and his expensive 

clothing may have been a family gift to a 

second son as he began a commercial career 

in America. For the complex details about 

Laclede portraiture, see J. Frederick Fausz, 

Founding St. Louis: First City of the 

New West (Charleston: The History Press, 

2011), 207. 

COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS 

(OBJ: 1916 024 001); PERHAPS COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL 

IN THE FAMILY’S BEDOUS MANSION. 

While the crusader king, Louis IX of France, was killing Muslims in the thirteenth century, 

some 10,000 Native Americans were living at the future site of St. Louis, then a suburb of the 

impressive Mississippian metropolis of Cahokia. Five hundred years later, French colonists 

founded the first—and final—town here since those Indian mound-builders. Although they 

named it to honor the only French monarch to achieve sainthood, the popular nickname 

of “Mound City” was more appropriate, since two dozen of those man-made landmarks gave 

St. Louis a distinctive appearance for another century and 

imparted a special connection with Indians ever since. 

In his 1974 historical novel, Centennial, James Michener 

wondered why, of all the frontier towns founded near the 

same time, “St. Louis alone should grow into one of the 

world’s great cities.” His answer was “Brains”—referring 

to the many wise decisions made by the intelligent, 

well-educated city founder, Pierre de Laclede Liguest. 

That gentleman merchant was uniquely qualified to be 

a successful frontier entrepreneur, city planner, and 

Indian diplomat, given his multilingual abilities, 

commercial ambitions, military training, and tolerant, 

liberal attitudes derived from the French Enlightenment. 

Above all, he was an explorer who founded a city 

of explorers. 


12

W H A T ’ S I N A N A M E ? 

Pierre de Laclede Liguest is the full correct name of the founder. As a native of the French 

Pyrenees province of Bearn, he learned the local Occitan-Gascon language from infancy and 

had to study French as a second (and foreign) language. He never used diacritical marks in 

signing his name, and to do so retroactively is inaccurate with regard to proper non-French pronunciation. 

In his native dialect, Laclede was pronounced as “Laclayed”—neither the “Lacled” of 

proper French nor the anglicized “Lacleed” of the local St. Louis gas company. Laclede also 

insisted on attaching Liguest—a Bearnais word meaning “willow tree(s)”—to his surname, 

because as a second son who could not inherit his father’s estate, he was entitled to revenues 

from a family forest along the Aspe River. Liguest also functioned like “junior” or “younger” 

in distinguishing Pierre from his father of the same name. Liguest appeared only as an addon 

to the signature of his surname, and he was always addressed as “Laclede” in conversation. 

Laclede was born on November 22, 1729, 

into one of the “most distinguished” gentry 

families in the beautiful Aspe Valley of 

Bearn—a small but fiercely independent 

province of “free shepherds” nurtured by 

the rugged peaks of the French Pyrenees 

along the Spanish border. His surname 

means “gate” in the unique Bearnais dialect— 

most appropriate for someone who founded 

the “Gateway to the West.” His mother, 

Magdeleine d’Espoey d’Arance, was a noblewoman, 

and his father, Pierre de Laclede, was 

a wealthy landowner and university-educated 

attorney serving the judicial parliament of 

Navarre in the provincial capital of Pau. 

Young Pierre was born in a seventeenthcentury 

stone mansion at Bedous, then a 

village of 2,000 residents. He was remarkably 

independent at an early age, since his mother 

died when he was only four, after bearing 

seven children in seven years—twice delivering 

babies only eleven months apart. As a child, 

Pierre was tutored in a home filled with books, 

cultural refinement, and scholarly conversation, 

learning that the sterling reputation of one’s 

family was the “truest measure of wealth.” 

Above: “Maison Laclede,” the founder’s birth 

home in Bedous, remains in use today as a 

special holiday rental property. 

PHOTOGRAPH AND PERMISSION TO PUBLISH 

COURTESY OF THE PROPRIETOR, CECILE TEISSEIRE. 

Below: Panorama of the Monumental 

Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, 

by John J. Egan, c. 1850. This portrayal 

of Mississippian Indian mounds was one 

of twenty-five vignettes in a massive 

panoramic painting measuring 7’ high 

and nearly 350’ long, recently restored. 

COURTESY OF THE SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM; 

ELIZA MCMILLAN TRUST (34:1953). 


1 3

Lush “Garden of Bearn” landscape near 

Bedous, 2011. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PHOTOGRAPHER IAN STOKES 

OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM. 


14 

Generations of Lacledes had enough property 

to qualify as landed gentry or even 

aristocrats, but they achieved greater local 

distinction as industrious and talented public 

servants, scholars, physicians, lawyers, merchants, 

and priests. Laclede’s paternal grandfather 

was a merchant and royal officeholder 

under Louis XIV, who was respected for his 

personal integrity and public generosity. 

Pierre’s uncle, Jean Joseph Laclede, was a 

celebrated author and close friend of Voltaire, 

the famous philosopher. And Pierre’s older 

brother, Jean (heir to the family fortune) was 

an attorney and pioneering botanist, named 

by King Louis XV as the “Master of Waters 

and Forests in Bearn.” 

The Lacledes of Bedous lived in a fertile 

farming region known as the “garden of 

Bearn,” where numerous conical mounds and 

surrounding mountains made the landscape 

distinctive. It was a region as productive as 

it was picturesque, where the main food 

crop was maize, farmed by women as in 

Native America. Pierre grew up eating 

“Indian corn” and learned how his family’s 

water mill operated long before he owned 

one in St. Louis. Most importantly, Laclede 

lived along rivers his entire life and feared 

devastating floods in deep mountain gorges 

before he built St. Louis on a limestone ledge 

high above the “American Nile.” His boyhood 

also may have influenced his insistence on 

living in the first stone home built in St. Louis, 

then very rare in that region, because it was 

the traditional housing material for all classes 

in Bearn. 

Six other small villages within a few miles 

of Bedous offered additional lessons for a 

curious boy. In Accous, the popular pastoral 

poet, Cyprien Despourrins, wrote verses 

during Laclede’s lifetime that praised poor 

shepherds who valued personal pride above 

wealth. In Osse, Calvinism had flourished 

since the 1500s, and the Catholic Lacledes 

were notably tolerant in respecting and 

protecting those Protestants during frequent 

religious wars. Across the river from Bedous, 

the Laclede family forest supplied masts 

for the French Navy. Jean-Jacques Blaise 

d’Abbadie, a Bearnais nobleman and naval 

official, met young Pierre in the 1740s when 

he came to select the trees he needed. They 

would meet again—in 1763 New Orleans— 

when d’Abbadie, as the new Director-General 

of Louisiana, confirmed Laclede’s fur trading 

monopoly that helped get St. Louis started.

As a teenager, Pierre enrolled at the 140- 

year-old Jesuit College in Pau, some sixty 

miles from his home. There, he marveled at 

the magnificent palace of King Henri IV, 

a direct descendant of Saint Louis and first 

monarch of the Bourbon dynasty, who ruled 

Bearn prior to reigning over France. Laclede 

later moved to Toulouse, attending a military 

academy to expand his interests beyond 

book-learning. Active and athletic, he was 

awarded an ornate sword as a champion 

fencer and soon after joined the provincial 

militia. Patrolling the high Pyrenees passes 

between France and Spain, only thirty miles 

from Bedous, Pierre gained proficiency in 

Spanish and became a keen observer of 

cultural differences in that borderland of 

mixed populations. 

When he turned twenty-five, Laclede 

decided to pursue a merchant career in a 

transatlantic world of greater opportunities. 

With no prospects of inheriting his father’s 

fortune, he became a self-made entrepreneur, 

embracing the traditional Bearnais belief that 

every man had “wealth and power within 

himself,” but only “unremitting activity” 

would bring success and satisfaction. On 

June 7, 1755, the talented, multilingual 

swordsmen sailed from La Rochelle, exchanging 

the “grandeur and sublimity” of the 

Pyrenees Mountains for the steamy lowlands 

of Louisiana. Laclede departed from that 

port, rather than the closer City of Bordeaux, 

because the powerful, Protestant Rasteau 

family of La Rochelle had a dominant 

economic influence in New Orleans. Those 

transatlantic merchants were allied with 

Laclede’s future business partner and his 

attorney in Louisiana, and La Rochelle 

supplied the merchandise for the expedition 

that founded St. Louis. 

Laclede arrived in New Orleans as the 

French and Indian War began, and he became 

Left: The royal palace at Pau, birthplace 

and home of King Henri III of Bearn, 

who became Henri IV, King of France, as 

the first monarch of the Bourbon dynasty. 

Laclede studied nearby in the Jesuit 

school he founded, and his knowledge that 

Henri was a direct descendant of Saint Louis 

may have influenced the naming of his 

new settlement; nineteenth-century print in 

the author’s collection. 

Below: “Plan et Projet de la Nouvelle 

Orleans, August 9th, 1763”—dated one day 

before Laclede and Chouteau departed on 

the voyage to found St. Louis; nineteenthcentury 

facsimile in the author’s collection. 


1 5

Map of French Illinois settlements in the 

mid-1760s by British military surveyor/ 

cartographer Thomas Hutchins; from a 

1904 facsimile of his 1778 book in the 

author’s collection. 


16 

a business partner of Colonel Gilbert Antoine 

de St. Maxent, his commander in the Louisiana 

Militia. Maxent was a leading merchant and 

the government’s supplier of diplomatic 

gifts to dozens of allied native nations. 

He probably introduced Laclede to his Conti 

Street neighbor—Marie Thérèse Bourgeois 

Chouteau—whose husband had abandoned 

her and their young son, Auguste. Under the 

laws of Catholic France, she could neither 

divorce an absent husband nor remarry until 

his death. Considering herself “widowed,” 

she began a twenty-year liaison with Laclede 

that produced four children, all baptized with 

the Chouteau name for propriety’s sake. 

After the fall of Quebec and the surrender 

of Montreal, by 1760 New Orleans was 

France’s last unconquered capital in mainland 

North America. Officials there knew that 

Great Britain was certain to win the French 

and Indian War and control all lands east 

of the Mississippi River—including several 

French Illinois villages and the administrative 

capital at Fort de Chartres. Count Kerlérec, 

the Governor-General of Louisiana, had built 

that huge fortress and installed his brotherin-law, 

Major Pierre-Joseph Neyon de Villiers 

as Commandant of Illinois. Those two military 

heroes, who wore the coveted medal of 

the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis, 

along with leading New Orleans merchants 

and Director-General d’Abbadie, planned to 

build a new French regional capital on 

the west bank of the Mississippi to replace 

Fort de Chartres. The company of Maxent and 

Laclede received an official six-year monopoly 

on the furs of the Upper Mississippi and 

Missouri River valleys for privately funding 

several public projects at the new settlement. 

With a quarter share in that daring venture 

1,200 miles upriver, Laclede promoted Indian 

trade alliances to obtain the furs that would 

alleviate an economic depression in New 

Orleans; provided a new home for the 

Illinois French who refused to live under 

a military occupation by British Protestants; 

and protected the trans-Mississippi West 

from English invasion. 

Laclede headed upriver from New Orleans 

on August 10, 1763, with his teenaged 

stepson, Auguste Chouteau, while pro-French 

Indians were still battling British troops in 

Pontiac’s War. The partnership of the affluent, 

intellectual 34-year-old European and the 

poor, barely-educated 14-year-old Louisiana 

Creole represented a complementary convergence 

of different backgrounds and varying 

generations that provided unbroken continuity 

in the successful development of St. Louis until 

Chouteau died sixty-five years later! Those 

entrepreneurs did not take other residents of 

New Orleans with them as potential settlers, 

since the ideal founding families of St. Louis 

already lived in Illinois—veteran Canadians

and French Creoles acclimated to the region 

and used to daily interactions with African 

Americans, Indians, and metis in multicultural 

frontier communities. 

Reaching Illinois in early November after 

a voyage of eighty-five days, Laclede and 

Chouteau established a temporary home and 

company headquarters in the village adjoining 

Fort de Chartres. Just a few weeks later, 

in bone-chilling December weather, they 

explored the west bank of the Mississippi 

up to the mouth of the Missouri River, 

seeking an ideal site for Laclede’s new 

settlement. Fifteen miles south of that 

muddy convergence, they spotted a great 

mound rising thirty-two feet above a twomile-long 

limestone bluff. That strategic, 

flood-free site near the confluence of 

America’s two longest rivers (and close 

to the Illinois and Ohio Rivers, as well) 

was ideal for shipping heavy cargoes a 

thousand miles in every direction. That 

location also contained ample trees and 

abundant limestone for building, fresh 

water springs, and an extensive prairie 

for farming and pasturing livestock. 

Additional geological gifts nearby—salt 

for preserving animal skins, lead for 

making musket balls, iron for forging 

tools, surface coal for fuel, extensive clay 

pits for brick-making, and huge caves for 

cold storage—made Laclede’s location 

the best on the continent for contented 

residents pursuing large-scale, longrange 

fur trading. Such incomparable 

natural advantages allegedly caused 

Laclede to declare that his town “might 

eventually become one of the finest 

cities in America,” with the commercial 

clout and central location for “creating 

[other] settlements.” 

The most indispensable resource, 

however, was human: talented and loyal 

Osage hunters eager to trade for desirable 

European products of metal, cloth, and 

glass. Laclede could not have started or 

sustained a fur trade without a critical 

commercial alliance with that cooperative 

native nation. Long renowned by 

French Canadians as the “Masters of the 

Hunting Country” west of the Mississippi 

River, some 10,000 Osages possessed a huge 

animal empire of 100,000 square miles; a 

superior fighting force of some 2,000 mounted 

warriors to defend it; and expertise in procuring 

and processing all of the marketable mammals 

most desired in Europe. Historian Kathleen 

DuVal observed that the Osages were “far 

more successful than either France or Spain at 

building a mid-continental empire,” which 

encompassed most of present-day Missouri 

and large portions of Kansas, Oklahoma, and 

Above: The Big or Great Mound— 

La Grange de Terre (“barn of the 

earth”)—photographed by St. Louisan 

Thomas M. Easterly in the 1860s before 

it was destroyed. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE 

MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS. 

Below: Osage Warrior, painted from life 

in 1806 by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret 

de Saint-Mémin when this Indian visited 

President Jefferson in Washington, D.C. 

He wears a “crown” of vulture beaks and 

a deer-and-porcupine quill “roach,” 

but his other adornments were imported 

trade goods: the metal armband and brooch 

around his ear, Delft spotted beads, a long 

white “hair pipe” of French porcelain, black 

silk from Detroit, and red vermilion body 

paint from China. In addition, European 

razors, knives, and scissors would have 

allowed him to remove all body hair 

(including eyebrows), as was traditional 

with Osage warriors. 

COURTESY OF THE WINTERTHUR MUSEUM. 


1 7

Above: Laclede Landing at Present Site 

of St. Louis (detail), by Oscar Edward 

Berninghaus, c. 1914. 


GIFT OF AUGUST A. BUSCH, JR. 

Below: Vincent Voiture [posing as] 

Saint Louis, by French painter Philippe 

de Champaigne, mid-seventeenth-century. 

Poet Voiture portrayed Louis IX, featuring 

items associated with the thirteenth-century 

crusading king: royal crown, fleur-de-lis 

scepter, ermine skin mantle, and Jesus 

Christ’s crown of thorns, remnants of which 

Louis allegedly brought from the Holy Land. 


FRIENDS FUND (719:1961). 

Arkansas. Thomas Jefferson and other credible 

eyewitnesses described Osage warriors as 

“most gigantic”—averaging about 6’6” in 

height. They were ruthless foes of rival tribes 

but reliable friends of the French, who made 

them “free men” able to make a living by 

providing European muskets over several 

decades. In 1725, an Osage chief was the 

honored guest of King Louis XV—Onontio, 

the “Great Father” in France—and his visit to 

the “other side of the sun” represented the 

mutual respect among devoted allies. 

The French and Indian War had curtailed 

shipments of new weapons, however, and the 

Osages welcomed Laclede because he could 

export their backlog of valuable furs to the 

best markets for guns and other premium 

products. That European gentleman with business 

acumen—a rare founder of a colonial 

American city who was not a nobleman, missionary, 

military leader, or buckskin-wearing 

hunter—succeeded in forging one of the 

longest, strongest, and most lucrative multi- 


18

ethnic commercial alliances ever. Fur trading 

was the only frontier enterprise that united 

Indians and Europeans in a mutually-desired 

peaceful partnership. Colonial St. Louisans were 

richly rewarded for befriending the Osages, 

earning their trust, valuing their talents, 

supplying their needs, and protecting their 

lands, liberties, and life-ways from hostile 

competitors that threatened financial ruin 

for everyone. The “English, Anglo-Americans, 

and Spanish nations have succeeded only in 

inspiring fear and alienation” among Indians, 

wrote a Parisian visiting Missouri in 1800, 

while the French nurtured their “affection.” 

Their “proximity to the Indians, the ease of 

communicating with them, [and] the need to 

…live in their villages in order to trade… 

had no small influence on the character of 

the colonists.” 

“Towns were the spearheads of the frontier,” 

wrote historian Richard Wade, and the “story 

of Western urbanism begins at St. Louis.” 

But Laclede and Chouteau were successful 

city founders because they recognized that 

“Western urbanism” really began with Indian 

mound-builders and that Native American 

towns were the sustaining sources of economic 

development before Europeans ever arrived. 

When Chouteau and thirty laborers from 

Illinois began building St. Louis on Wednesday, 

February 15, 1764, they did not displace any 

resident Indians. But the Osages identified 

with the familiar, welcoming symbolism of the 

St. Louis site because of the many Mississippian 

mounds. The Osages were known as “elevated 

mound people” and lived on high hilltops at 

their capital of Marais des Cygnes (“Swamp of 

Swans”) in southwestern Missouri. Claiming 

cultural connections with ancient moundbuilding 

societies, the Osage Nation in 2009 

purchased “Sugar Loaf” on Ohio Avenue—the 

last surviving Indian mound in the city limits 

of St. Louis—as the future site of an interpretive 

center about their heritage. 

The ambitious new town that was taking 

shape on a strategic section of the mighty 

Mississippi did not have a name for three 

months. While Chouteau’s construction crew 

cleared the land, Laclede had stayed in Illinois 

protecting his merchandise and recruiting 

new settlers. But he returned in the Spring, 

and according to Chouteau’s written recollections, 

on or near April 25, 1764—the 550th 

birthday of Saint Louis—Laclede named his 

town in honor of that crusading medieval 

monarch. The forty-three-year reign of 

King Louis IX was a golden age of art and 

architecture, education and charity, but Pope 

Boniface VIII canonized him because he led 

two crusades in the Holy Land and died there 

on August 25, 1270 (his Feast Day). Laclede 

hoped to flatter the current King Louis XV 

by honoring his patron saint, even though 

the medieval monarch’s killing of cultural 

aliens was incompatible with the goals of his 

namesake town in America. 

But Laclede wasted that self-serving 

compliment to the reigning French monarch 

because he had given western Louisiana, 

including the site of St. Louis, to his Bourbon 

cousin, King Carlos III of Spain, in November 

1762. The transaction was so secret that not 

even royal officials in New Orleans knew of 

it for twenty-two months, and St. Louisans 

only learned about that shocking situation in 

December 1764. Realizing that the Kingdom 

of France did not now protect its countrymen 

on either side of the Mississippi River, the 

twice-“orphaned” Illinois French reconciled 

themselves to the fact that St. Louis was built 

International boundaries following the 

French and Indian War, showing St. Louis 

in an imperial setting. “File: North America, 

1762-83” created by Jon Platek in 2008 and 

reproduced under the free use policy of 

Wikimedia Commons. 


1 9

First St. Louis Courthouse, built in 1770 

and used for a century; shown here in the 

1890s at Third and Plum Streets. Typical 

of most buildings in eighteenth-century 

St. Louis was Colonial French vertical log 

construction clearly seen here. Logs were 

hewn flat and either set directly in the 

ground or placed on sills. The spaces 

between the timbers were filled with clay 

and grass (bouzillage) or rubble stone and 

clay (pierrotage). Flat boards could then 

be applied, but most residences would be 

plastered and whitewashed, giving a more 

refined appearance for town living than the 

crude, horizontal-log cabins of frontier 

Americans in a forest. 

FROM A PRINT IN THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 

on a legal bluff more gigantic than the city’s 

limestone one, and that they had to rely on 

one another to protect their property and 

livelihoods. New settlers continued to arrive 

steadily until late 1765, after Great Britain’s 

“Black Watch” regiment had reached Fort 

de Chartres. For almost two years, dozens of 

French Illinois families had dismantled their 

houses, salvaging “the boards, windows, and 

door frames, and everything else they could 

transport” and crossed the international 

boundary line of the Mississippi River to 

begin new lives in St. Louis. They brought 

something much more valuable than building 

materials—a heritage of multiethnic toleration 

living in racially-mixed societies. 

The “sensible and clever” Laclede was 

a pragmatic problem-solver who fashioned 

St. Louis into a true city by design, function, 

and significance, despite its small population. 

He laid out streets on a grid pattern like New 

Orleans, already conceiving his city as a thriving 

port serving a vast inland empire. By 

investing heavily in a grist mill and other 

buildings for the benefit of the community, 

Laclede enhanced the reputation of St. Louis 

as imaginatively conceived, innovatively 

developed, and immediately populated. 

But Laclede’s greatest legacy was encouraging 

his colonists, who already lived on free 

riverfront home sites, to govern themselves. 

The first Spanish lieutenant governor would 

not take up permanent residency in St. Louis 

until late 1770, giving Laclede’s colonists six 

years to design the society they desired— 

without an intrusive national government, 

a meddlesome local bureaucracy, a coercive 

military, or judgmental priests. As perhaps the 

freest European population anywhere in 

North America, early St. Louisans enjoyed 

unprecedented liberties, self-governance, and 

financial success, without the need for a 

constitution, a legislature, an army, police, 

judges, juries, jails, or lawyers to live 

comfortably, safely, and compatibly in Indian 

Country. The customary laws of Paris, 

Catholic teachings, peer pressure from closeknit 

families, and Creole traditions of neighborliness 

and camaraderie restrained serious 

violence among liquor-loving residents who 

built billiard parlors many years before they 

constructed a church. 


20

S T . L O U I S ’ S F O U N D I N G F A M I L I E S 

Beaugenou 

Becquet/Bequette 

Chancellier 

Chouteau 

Cotté 

Delin 

Dodier 

Gamache 

Hervieux 

Kierserau/Kiercerau dit (“known as”) Renaud 

Labrosse 

Laclede 

La Grain/La Grange 

Mainville dit Dechenes 

Marcheteau dit Desnoyers 

Martiqné/Martigny 

Mercier 

Picard 

Pichet 

Pothier 

Prunet dit La Giroflee 

Ride 

Rivière dit Bacuné 

Roi 

Salé dit La Joie 

Taillon/Tayon 

Laclede’s colonists maintained good relations 

with, and were actually protected by, 

some of the most feared Indian warriors 

in the West, because they were business 

partners who rejected the punitive European 

heritage of military conquest and coerced 

conversion of native nations. Created solely 

to make money, St. Louis represented an 

admirable, alternative western frontier of 

tolerant trade and tender ties with friendly 

“savages” in a civilized “wilderness” more 

profitable than dangerous. Even the town’s 

derogatory nickname of “Pain Court” (“meager 

bread”) became a badge of honor, since 

St. Louisans chose to cultivate good relations 

with Indians rather than to cultivate native 

lands that produced conflict and intruded on 

animal habitats. While farming gave the 

colonists “little or no gain,” commerce made 

“them rich”—but also dependent upon 

Indian hunters for the type, size, condition, 

and timely delivery of fur harvests. 

French residents and Spanish rulers used 

to different monarchs decided to respect a 

single king—the fur trade. As early as 1766, 

rival British merchants complained that 

Laclede’s town already dominated the “whole 

trade of the Missouri, of the Mississippi 

northwards, and of the Indian Nations near 

Lake Michigan”—far exceeding the profits 

expected by the New Orleans planners. 

Demonstrating the value of the Missouri 

Valley that the royal courts of Europe had 

discounted, the Osages and other Indians 

supplied Laclede with 625,000 pounds of 

furs between 1772-1775, including 215,000 

pounds of shaved, brain-tanned deer leather 

expertly manufactured by Osage women and 

Statue of Laclede by Jonathan Scott Hartley, 

1904, modeled on facial features of his 

nineteenth-century Chouteau descendants. 

Described by contemporaries as having a 

“commanding presence,” Laclede probably 

stood about 5’ 9”—short for Bearn—but a 

height that made him up to a foot taller 

than most of the French troops stationed at 

New Orleans in the mid-eighteenth century. 

PRINT FROM THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 


2 1

Right: Portrait of York by Michael Haynes 

(www.mhaynesart.com); used with 

permission of the artist. William Clark’s 

slave, York, made vital contributions to the 

Corps of Discovery and then spent several 

years in St. Louis. The author used this 

image to represent African Americans in 

colonial St. Louis, both slave and free, 

who worked in the fur trade as traders, 

voyageurs, or hunters. 

Opposite: Furs, Indian weapons, and 

European metal imports associated with 

French St. Louis’s commercial alliances with 

native nations; author photograph of objects 

in his collection. On the front cloth are an 

Indian trade musket and an early version of 

the “Missouri War Ax,” both from 

the 1790s. 

133,000 pounds of raw skins. Everyone knew 

that the Osages were the true “bankers” of 

the region, because their “buck”-skins served 

as St. Louis’s currency for decades. Until the 

Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the St. Louis 

fur trade averaged $220,000 per year in 

wholesale prices (half of the London retail 

price and equal to many millions today), 

with profit margins reaching 80 percent. 

The governor in New Orleans compared 

such vast wealth from furs to the gold and 

silver mines of Spanish America and declared 

that St. Louis was “one of the most populous, 

extensive, well-managed, and respectable of 

all settlements that have been established.” 

Spanish officials praised French St. Louis 

as the most “modern settlement” in all of 

Louisiana, and they were delighted to discover 

that collecting dead mammals was “very 

advantageous” in providing full employment; 

nurturing “the affection of the natives;” and 

preserving “Public Security.” A 1779 military 

census revealed that fur trading provided 

the sole livelihood for 67 percent of all 

St. Louis men—22 merchants, 17 traders, 

84 boatmen, and 24 hunters—not including 

a silversmith and a tailor who made items 

for Indians. Those who profited indirectly 

from the Indian trade included two bakers, 

two cobblers, a butcher, and a “musician.” 


22

The frequent presence of Osage hunterwarriors 

was nothing to fear, and since 

they preserved the peace and promoted the 

prosperity of their St. Louis partners, the 

young frontier town became famous as a most 

desirable “refuge of all the French,” especially 

those from traditional fur trading regions. 

As of 1780, 63 percent of adult males in the 

town had been born in Canada (137); 21 

percent (46) originated in the “Illinois Country,” 

including native-born St. Louisans; and a 

surprising 13 percent (29 men) emigrated 

from France—including wealthy, well-educated 

merchants known to Laclede. 


2 3

A C O L O R F U L C O L O N I A L C A P I T A L 

Americans today can appreciate the “modern” racial diversity in eighteenth-century 

St. Louis, inhabited by people of many hues, multiple heritages, and mixed bloodlines. 

In a 1787 Spanish census, analyzed by historian Peter K. Johnson, the small city contained 

896 whites, 188 blacks, and 83 “tan or colored” mixed bloods. 

A F R I C A N 

A M E R I C A N S 

One or more highly-respected and talented black pilots skillfully navigated the boat that 

brought Laclede and Chouteau from New Orleans in 1763, and eight years later, their new 

settlement had at least 124 African American slaves (74 males, 50 females)—totaling 25 

percent of the population. St. Louisans adhered to the 1724 French Code Noir [“Black Code”], 

as liberalized by Spanish officials. Those slave laws were more humane than racial policies 

in most Anglo-American colonies. Masters were required to feed and clothe their slaves 

properly and to care for those who were old, infirm, or sick. Officials encouraged the 

Catholic conversion of blacks and enduring slave marriages. It was illegal to split up slave 

spouses and their young children in separate sales. Slaves could attain their freedom, after 

which they enjoyed the same rights and privileges of other residents. “Slave tutors” were 

automatically considered “freemen.” 

Seven African Americans were slain and thirteen captured defending St. Louis from 

the British-Indian attack in May 1780. By 1800 the town had 269 black slaves and 67 free 

blacks, up from 37 in only nine years. Free African Americans included Joseph Neptune; 

Esther, a former slave who received a Spanish land grant; and the famous Jeanette Forchet, 

who owned a house and farm and married two black men, including Valentin, a gunsmith 

and Indian trader. 

N A T I V E 

A M E R I C A N S 

Indians from twenty different cultures, including Osages, Pawnees, Sioux, Omahas, 

Mesquakis, and at least one Mohawk, also lived in colonial St. Louis. In 1770 Indians 

comprised about 17 percent of the town’s population, with 69 (12 percent) being highlyvalued 

household slaves. In the late 1760s and early 1770s, 14 Native American slaves lived 

in the Laclede-Chouteau home alone. One of them, Therese, managed Madame Chouteau’s 

household for forty-six years before being freed in 1814. According to Johnson, in the 

1780s, about 10 percent of European households contained at least one Indian slave, and 

at least 15 white men had Indian wives. St. Louisans baptized 103 Native Americans in 

the 1770s alone, a third of all Indians baptized there until 1821. Historian Tanis Thorne has 

estimated that by 1800, at least one adult in 80 percent of St. Louis households may have 

had some Indian ancestry. 

As early as 1765, Laclede’s thriving town also 

became the mid-continental center of Indian 

diplomacy. That coincided with the arrival of 

Captain Louis Saint Ange de Bellerive, the last 

French commander at Fort de Chartres, who 

transferred his flag and the last twenty royal 

marines to St. Louis after surrendering that 

stone citadel to British troops. A Montreal 

native and a close friend of Chief Pontiac, Saint 

Ange had vast experience negotiating with 

many native nations. As the only French commandant 

in St. Louis history, Saint Ange worked 

with Laclede to create a hospitable, centrallylocated 

site where “red men could walk the 

white road” in the “clean earth” of a friendly 

village not “dirtied by bloodshed.” In most 

years, thirty-two tribes from the Siouan plains, 

Caddoan prairies, and Algonquian lakes sent 

diplomatic delegations to St. Louis—and stayed 

to shop, drink, and dance with residents— 


24

without any serious violence. In 1781, 130 

tribes from both sides of the Mississippi 

gathered in that “Indian Capital” to discuss the 

dire consequences of the successful American 

Revolution. In 1769, Saint Ange further solidified 

the special, Indian-friendly “spirit of 

St. Louis” by retrieving the corpse of Chief 

Pontiac, who had been murdered across the 

river. He had him buried in a French officer’s 

uniform coat under one of today’s major downtown 

intersections. That popular legend can 

neither be confirmed nor refuted, but it has long 

symbolized yet another pro-Indian connection 

among early St. Louisans, who like Pontiac, 

also hated, defied, and battled the British. 

In 1778, Laclede died suddenly and prematurely 

at the age of forty-nine. His fortune had 

diminished over the years, as he spent large 

sums improving his town and loaning money 

to residents. But he bequeathed a legacy of 

lifelong learning and talented leadership to 

his trusted stepson, Auguste Chouteau, and 

his only birth son, Jean Pierre Chouteau. With 

support from the Osages and two merchant 

in-laws from southwestern France—Sylvestre 

Labbadie and John Cabanné—the Chouteau 

brothers succeeded admirably as Indian traders 

and city fathers for decades to come. Auguste 

advised his accomplished descendants in the 

“Royal Family of the Wilderness” that the 

fur trade “requires…a complete knowledge of 

Indian customs, characters, habits, ways of 

living, [and] hunting, …without which one 

will always…fall from errors to errors.” 

“Trade Territory of St. Louis in the Late 

18th Century,” a map by James B. Musick 

in his St. Louis as a Fortified Town 

(self-published, 1941), between pp. 78-79. 

Author long deceased and copyright 

not renewed. 


2 5


26

L A C L E D E ’ S 

B O O K S H E L F 

Laclede imparted a legacy of cultural refinement to his little city, derived from his formative 

years when Enlightenment rationalism was a dominant influence in France. He was 

described as “very well educated,” and he used profits from dead animals to buy books to 

satisfy his curious mind. While living in St. Louis, he purchased 215 imported volumes in 

only fourteen years. His library included an impressive range of subjects: dictionaries in 

French, Spanish, and English; French, Spanish, and British histories; military codes and 

tactics; French, international, and maritime commerce; business finance and accounting; law 

and judicial studies; geography and geometry; theology and philosophy; anatomy, medicine, 

and surgery: engineering and hydrology; agronomy and botany; ancient histories of the 

Holy Land, Greece, and Rome; biographies of the Roman emperors; classic philosophical 

treatises by Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and Rousseau; political commentary by Addison and 

Steele; a surprisingly large number of plays and dramatic criticism; and a 1751 London 

edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity! 

The Chouteau brothers faced the most 

serious threat to St. Louis just two years after 

Laclede’s death. At the “Battle of St. Louis” 

on Friday, May 26, 1780, several hundred 

British-led Great Lakes Indians attacked the 

town of only 700 people. Suffering casualties 

of 7.5 percent (21 residents killed, 7 wounded, 

and 25 captured), St. Louisans drove off the 

jealous fur rivals to win the westernmost 

conflict of the American Revolution for Spain 

and its U.S. allies. That victory also prevented 

Great Britain from gaining control of the 

Mississippi River. With tempers flaring and 

spirits undaunted, some 147 French kin and 

neighbors, plus dozens of Indian allies, 

launched two successful revenge raids against 

British outposts along Lake Michigan in the 

winter of 1780-1781. 

Following its wartime triumphs, St. Louis 

emerged stronger than ever, enjoying enhanced 

prestige and greater prosperity as a maturing 

regional capital. By its twenty-fifth birthday 

in 1789, St. Louis was the oldest permanent 

French town on its original site in Upper 

Louisiana, thanks to Laclede’s ideal placement 

high above the river. The town of Ste. Genevieve 

had been destroyed in the Great Flood of 

1785, which forced a total evacuation and 

rebuilding miles away. St. Louis was also 

the largest French town in Upper Louisiana, 

with a population of 1,168 (200 more than 

“New” Ste. Genevieve). Its residents were 

“more wealthy” than other colonists, living 

in “200 Houses, most of…Stone,” that were 

“better built than [at] any Town on the 

Mississippi.” Even Anglo-Americans described 

St. Louis as “the handsomest and genteelist 

village” in Upper Louisiana and perhaps “the 

happiest on earth.” 

Opposite: Vintage volumes and antique 

spectacles (Laclede wore glasses in his 

later years). 

PHOTOGRAPHED BY THE AUTHOR FROM OBJECTS IN 

HIS COLLECTION. 

Below: Troops of the Spanish Louisiana 

Regiment in St. Louis, 1804, an 

original painting by Michael Haynes 

(www.mhaynesart.com) and used with 

permission. The captain, sergeant, 

drummer, and fusilier (with a 1757 musket) 

shown here in uniforms “almost identical to 

the way they had looked in 1769”—as well 

as 1780, when 34 troops from this regiment 

helped militiamen and civilians defend 

St. Louis against a British and Indian attack 

in “The Battle of St. Louis.” 


2 7

Above: The Mansion of Auguste Chouteau 

(c. 1794-1841), the grandest early house 

in the West, a view “engraved expressly” for 

[Richard] Edwards’s Great West and Her 

Commercial Metropolis, Embracing… 

A Complete History of St. Louis… 

(St. Louis, 1860), 534. 

Below: Bourbon St. Louis, with a French 

population but a Spanish commandant from 

1770 to 1804, is represented by these two 

coins from the 1760s—the larger one from 

France with the profile of King Louis XV, 

and the smaller one from Spain, issued 

by Carlos III. 

PHOTOGRAPHED BY THE AUTHOR FROM OBJECTS IN 

HIS COLLECTION. 


28 

In terms of colonial French architecture, 

St. Louis by 1795 was older than its mother 

city of New Orleans, due to two huge fires and 

three hurricanes that recently destroyed over 

a thousand buildings in the southern capital. 

Preserving the style of former French Louisiana 

plantation homes was the magnificent mansion 

of Auguste Chouteau. In the 1790s, he had 

thoroughly remodeled and dramatically 

expanded the original stone home he had 

built for Laclede in 1764. That showpiece of 

merchant affluence occupied an entire block in 

St. Louis’s city center, with large dimensions 

that were nearly identical to those of George 

Washington’s impressive “Mount Vernon.” 

Chouteau’s imposing “castle” served as a 

community hospitality center for visiting 

European nobles, Indian chiefs, and prominent 

American dignitaries for decades. The mansion 

had floors of black walnut; a crystal chandelier; 

a dining room with three large tables, 46 chairs, 

40 tablecloths, and 42 pounds of sterling silver 

eating utensils; 11 landscape paintings; framed 

portraits of Napoleon; a 600-volume library; 

and a fancy clock with a bust of Voltaire on top. 

Auguste shared the Laclede family’s affinity for 

that famous French philosopher, as well as his 

stepfather’s commitment to living well. 

Chouteau was able to afford that expensive 

lifestyle because of vastly increased fur profits 

in the 1790s, which the Spanish Bourbon 

regime facilitated. In building the trading outpost 

of Fort Carondelet (named for the Spanish 

governor) exclusively for the Osages in southwestern 

Missouri, Auguste and Pierre curtailed 

Indian raids on white farms and averted a 

Spanish war against their Osage friends and 

relatives. As a reward, the Chouteaus received 

an eight-year royal monopoly on all Osage furs, 

which amounted to nearly 60 percent of the 

entire Missouri Valley trade annually. In order 

to provide Osage customers and St. Louis consumers 

with luxurious products from London, 

the Chouteaus shipped the most expensive furs 

up the Illinois River and Lake Michigan to 

Michilimackinac. From there, British merchants 

took them to Montreal’s coffee house auctions.

Thanks to lax Spanish enforcement of 

smuggling laws, in 1794 alone the Chouteaus 

brought their Indian allies dozens of new 

muskets, 10,000 European-knapped gunflints, 

2,160 knives, 2,160 awls, 4,300 rings, 

70,000 trade beads, 670 virgin wool blankets, 

and 200 pounds of vermilion (mercuric 

sulfide red body pigment). St. Louisans 

enjoyed 2,000 pounds of Canadian maple 

sugar, 30 gallons of rum, 27 gallons of 

Madeira wine, 50 pounds of chocolate, 

30 pounds of Chinese tea, 108 pairs of 

Moroccan leather shoes; silk stockings; 

and fancy cloth products made in England, 

Ireland, Russia, Holland, and India. Pierre 

Chouteau purchased a custom-made saddle 

from Sam Beazley of London, with tacking, 

stirrups, and his initials all in sterling silver. 

The Chouteau brothers were true internationalists 

well in advance of modern globalization. 

Those French Creoles living under 

a Spanish flag used a German agent in 

London to procure trade goods from Europe 

and Asia; had them shipped to Scottish, 

Irish, Jewish, English, and French merchants 

in Canada; transported those cargoes to 

St. Louis by Algonquian birch-bark canoes; 

and engaged traders and voyageurs from 

many ethnic origins to deliver imported 

merchandise to a vast variety of native 

nations up to a thousand miles from 

St. Louis. The success of the Chouteaus also 

stimulated explorations far up the Missouri 

River by envious St. Louis competitors, 

such as Jacques Clamorgan, Manuel Lisa, 

James Mackay, and John Evans. 

The late 1790s represented the zenith of 

Bourbon St. Louis’s global commerce, as the 

wealth of the world poured into that tiny 

town suddenly grown to almost 2,500 

residents (a 78 percent increase). Flush 

with desirable consumer goods but 

needing to buy food for its non-farming 

business elites, the capital city of Upper 

Louisiana resembled the “hub” of a 

large wheel, with “spokes” connecting 

it to several surrounding agricultural 

villages that provided sustenance. The 

international fur trade stimulated a 

flourishing, diversified regional economy 

involving 3,300 residents, who, 

F O R E I G N E L I T E S I N A F R O N T I E R C I T Y 

“St. Louis was always remarkable,” observed a nineteenth-century American, 

“for the degree of gentility among the better sort of its inhabitants.” Among 

European-born notables who settled in late eighteenth-century St. Louis were: 

Gabriel Cerre, a wealthy Montreal-born merchant with London connections. 

Jacques Ceran de St. Vrain, the merchant brother of the Spanish commandant. 

Charles de Hault de Lassus, a Flanders-born Frenchman, who was Spain’s last 

Lieutenant Governor of St. Louis. 

Pierre Francois de Volsay, Paris-born army officer and member of the Royal and 

Military Order of Saint Louis. 

Father Pierre Joseph Didier, procurator of the Abbey Church of St. Denis, Paris. 

Louis Chauvet Dubreuil, French merchant son of a La Rochelle attorney. 

Charles Gratiot, Swiss-born French Huguenot trading with London and Canada. 

Joseph Hortiz, a well-educated Spanish native; secretary to lieutenant governors. 

Sylvestre Labbadie from Tarbes near Bearn, the richest St. Louis merchant by 1794. 

Marie Philippe Leduc, Paris-born officeholder with extensive legal expertise. 

Dr. Claude Mercier, a physician and surgeon from France. 

Charles Sanguinet, son of a Quebec notary and avid book collector. 

Dr. Antoine Francois Saugrain, a Paris surgeon related to Guillotine who knew 

Jefferson and Franklin and introduced smallpox vaccinations in the West. 

Antoine Soulard, a French navy veteran and the royal surveyor in Upper Louisiana. 

Benito Vasquez, an army adjutant and merchant from Galicia, Spain. 

Giuseppe Maria Francesco (Francis) Vigo, an Italian-born Spanish fur trader who 

helped fund the American Revolutionary expeditions of George Rogers Clark. 

in 1796, produced 75,000 bushels of maize, 

35,000 bushels of wheat, 25,000 pounds 

of tobacco, 219,000 pounds of lead, and 

6,000 bushels of salt, while pasturing 

4,000 cattle and 600 horses. Laclede’s 

original prediction that St. Louis’s “central 

position” would stimulate other settlements 

had come true, and his foresight was 

reflected in the late twentieth-century motto 

of the Regional Chamber and Growth 

Association: “St. Louis, Perfectly Centered, 

Remarkably Connected.” 

St. Louis in 1796; detail of the map, 

“Plan de la Ville de St. Louis Des Illinois,” 

by Georges de Maillard de Bois Saint Lys to 

accompany the published journals of French 

General Victor Collot in that year. 

REPRODUCED WITH PICTORIAL EDITING FROM 

A 1907 PRINT IN THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 


2 9

L A C L E D E ’ S L A S T I N G L E G A C I E S 

He was an entrepreneur and an explorer who made business the priority of St. Louis 

He co-founded the Chouteau Dynasty that remained influential for many generations 

He commanded the expedition that founded St. Louis 

He selected an incomparably strategic town site, significant for commerce ever since 

He gave his town a name of fame, which has never changed 

He laid out a grid system of streets considered “modern” in 1764 

He linked the destinies of New Orleans and St. Louis as river capitals 

He established a very successful, long-term fur trade for economic stability 

He was a master of Indian diplomacy, achieving a key and long-lasting Osage alliance 

He created a tolerant, enlightened “Indian Capital” for multi-tribal diplomacy 

He helped keep the British out of the trans-Mississippi West 

He assisted Spanish officials, earning their trust by speaking their language 

He recruited the perfect settlers for a multicultural trading town 

He promoted unprecedented freedoms and self-governance among residents 

He recruited diverse immigrants, while making St. Louis a “refuge of all the French” 

He promoted French culture, civility, literacy, and affluent consumerism 

He made St. Louis a bookish, intellectual frontier city of great libraries and avid readers 

He invested a fortune in city buildings, amenities, merchandise, and loans to residents 

He encouraged confidence by his steady, consistent, and rational decision-making 

Walnut Armoire made in St. Louis, 

c. 1765 to 1790, by Jean Baptiste Ortes 

(from Laclede’s hometown of Bedous). 

PHOTOGRAPH BY CARY HORTON; COURTESY OF 

THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS 

(OBJ:1905 013 0001). 

The highly successful boom town of buckskins 

disproved the Jeffersonians’ belief that 

“primitive” Indian hunting “only afforded a precarious 

subsistence” and could never support 

a sophisticated society. The alliance between 

astute merchants and accomplished Indian 

allies had made St. Louis the most prosperous, 

peaceful frontier city in America long before the 

Louisiana Purchase. That “center of manners, 

urbanity, and elegance” supported full employment 

and even cultivated “the fine arts,” as 

a Parisian intellectual noted. The affluence of 

St. Louis’s consumer society in the last decade of 

the eighteenth century challenged the frontier 

stereotypes of crude cabins, deficient diets, 

and scarce schooling, as increasing numbers of 

distinguished Europeans, with excellent educations, 

expensive tastes, and enormous talents, 

moved to that remote little center of “refinement 

and fashion” funded by mammal skins. 

Increasing numbers of Anglo-American 

backwoodsmen also moved near the St. Louis 

area in the late 1700s, including Daniel Boone 

and his extended family. They came from a 

violent trans-Appalachian frontier that contradicted 

the tolerant, Indian-friendly conduct of 

St. Louisans. Elite French families feared 

“brawling” Kentuckians, as “too Numerous 

[and] too Lawless…ever to be restrained”— 

loathing that “plague of locusts” determined 

to “gain all the vast continent occupied by the 

Indians.” But Anglo-Americans have always 

loved their frontier fighters. A hero-worshipping 

writer in 1829 characterized Boone as 

one of the prominent “riflemen of the west, 

the daring sons of the forest, to whom danger 

was sport, hardship was pastime, death was 

nothing, and glory everything.” Such mythmaking 

has never died. Historian R. Douglas 

Hurt recently wrote that Boone “epitomized 

the frontiersman” as “an excellent hunter 

and trapper,” who led western pioneers to 

“a dangerous frontier” and protected them 

with “his rifle, courage, and leadership.” 

But killing Indians was a cruel and uncreative 

solution to intercultural conflicts, compared 

to St. Louis’s alternative frontier policies 

that generated lucrative exports in partnership 

with Indians, while never profiting from 

genocide. Laclede and other Catholic businessmen 

demonstrated all of the capitalistic 

achievements erroneously believed to be 

exclusive to the “Protestant Ethic.” They also 

shared the stereotypical “frontier traits” of 

Anglo-Americans—self-reliance, individualism, 

and personal freedom—without slaughtering 

their native neighbors. Rather than venerating 

buckskin-wearing baby-killers of the backwoods 

as national heroes, citizens in today’s 

complex and increasingly dangerous multicultural 

world could learn some lessons 

from Laclede. He may have been the ideal 

frontiersman, because he promoted interethnic 

commerce while rejecting blood-thirsty 

prejudices that destroyed Indians and dispossessed 

them of their homelands. That talented, 

tolerant French explorer was more insightful, 

progressive, and compassionate than the 

“American heroes” who practiced “wilderness 

savagery” from sea to sea. While Americans 

then and now have typically ranked the success 

of our society based on its victories, colonial 

French St. Louisans took a more humane 

approach and judged a society by its victims. 

While Boone’s brawn epitomized the heritage 

of rural Missouri, Laclede’s brain created 

a civilized, non-violent, and economically 

advanced city in his century that remains a 

marvel of creativity and compassion to this day. 


30

The 1914 Statue of Laclede by George 

Julian Zolnay, photographed with the Civil 

Courts Building and The Bell Telephone 

Building in the background; no date. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORY 

MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS. 


3 1

Detail from the John Mitchell Map of 1755, 

one of several versions in the Library of 

Congress; pictorial editing of a reprint in the 

author’s collection. That British cartographer 

anticipated the Paris treaties of 1763, 1783, 

and 1803 in which “Greater Virginia” 

expanded aggressively westward into 

French and Spanish territory according to 

its early seventeenth-century sea-to-sea 

royal charters. 

“The time is not far distant…when the uncultivated wilds of the interior part of the continent, 

which is now only inhabited by the tawny sons of the forest, …will be exchanged for… 

agriculture…[and] turn those sterile wildernesses into rich, cultivated…fields.” 

–American William Fisher, 1812 


EXPLORING ST. LOUIS AS 

CAPITAL OF THE AMERICAN WEST 

On the evening of August 6, 1803, St. Louisans received sudden and shocking news when an 

American courier arrived from Vincennes and delivered a dispatch to Carlos Dehault Delassus, 

the last Spanish lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana. It was a note from General William 

Henry Harrison, the Virginia-born governor of the Indiana Territory, announcing “the entire 

cession of New Orleans and the whole of Louisiana to the United States.” As darkness descended 

on that distressful evening, the Chouteau clan feared that their extensive fortune and expansive 

family had reached the twilight of their dominance under Bourbon administrators. 


32

The bitter disappointment of being sold 

to the Americans was considerably magnified 

because French St. Louisans had spent 

the previous nine months anticipating a 

“golden age” of cultural rebirth and expanded 

commerce under Emperor Napoleon. He had 

reclaimed the Louisiana territory from Spain 

in 1800, but his ambitious plans for a new 

French-American empire were dashed by a 

successful slave revolution in Haiti and war 

with Great Britain. Those St. Louisans who 

remembered being abandoned by France in 

1763 especially resented Napoleon’s insincere 

“regret” in not reuniting with “those who 

have been Frenchmen.” When U.S. officials 

replaced the national banners of Spain and 

France with the stars and stripes in the March 

1804 “Three Flags Ceremony,” it seemed like 

a final, bitter surrender to Anglo-Americans. 

An eyewitness reported that “the cheers of 

the [French] crowd were faint and few, as 

many, many of the people shed bitter tears of 

regret at being transferred…to a strange 

government, with whose manners, habits, 

language, and laws they were not familiar.” 

It was Captain Amos Stoddard, the first U.S. 

commandant in St. Louis—not Napoleon— 

who expressed his delight with St. Louis in 

1804: “The town contains about 200 houses, 

mostly very large and built of stone; it is 

elevated and healthy, and the people are 

rich and hospitable; they live in a style equal 

to those in the large seaport towns, and I 

find no want of education among them.” 

Despite an anti-Indian prejudice that refused 

to credit the Osages for St. Louis’s success, 

Stoddard predicted that the city would 

“soon become a star of no 

inconsiderable magnitude in 

the American constellation.” 

And he was right. Even 

though American officials 

originally regarded New 

Orleans as the most desirable 

city in the Louisiana Purchase 

Territory, St. Louis would 

prove far more influential 

in developing the potential 

of that gift from Napoleon. 

The Louisiana Purchase 

was a transformative event 

that quickly revolutionized and completely 

traumatized French and Indian populations in 

the West. The acquisition and initial, partial 

exploration of those 828,000 square miles 

Left: Portion of the “Town Layout in 1804,” 

by Dr. Robert Moore of the National Park 

Service at the Gateway Arch. 

USED WITH PERMISSION. 

Below: Nineteenth-century portrait of 

Auguste Chouteau. 

COURTESY, MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS (1869 001 0001). 


3 3

Meeting the Cajaux, June 8, 1804, 

painting by Michael Haynes 

(www.mhaynesart.com) and used with 

permission. As Lewis and Clark headed up 

the Missouri River, they passed several 

French fur convoys on their way to St. Louis 

in a variety of vessels, including the lashed 

together canoes seen here and another boat 

paddled by an Indian woman—all loaded 

with animal skins from a thousand 

miles away. 


34 

were accomplished by Virginians to benefit 

Virginia, which claimed sea-to-sea sovereignty 

via royal English charters to the Jamestown 

founders. Two centuries of westward expansion 

followed, as land-hungry Virginia frontiersmen 

invaded Indian homelands and created terrortories 

of terrible atrocities to procure the 

fresh, fertile lands needed to grow their soildestroying 

tobacco. By 1774, Spanish Louisiana 

was already called the “Western Parts of 

Virginia,” and after George Rogers Clark’s 

invasion of British Illinois four years later, 

there was a “Fort Jefferson” on the Ohio River 

and a Randolph County (named for the family 

of Jefferson’s mother) across from St. Louis. 

Despite old animosities and continuing 

misgivings, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau were 

determined to remain rich and relevant by 

demonstrating their usefulness to President 

Jefferson and his fellow Virginia “Sovereigns 

of the Country” who administered St. Louis. 

By 1803, Virginia was being called a “new 

Rome.” It was already the largest state in area 

(117,000 square miles) and population, with 

514,000 whites and 346,000 black slaves, 

and its leading aristocratic revolutionaries 

were on their way to monopolizing the U.S. 

presidency for 32 of the first 36 years of the 

new nation. 

Accepting the reality that numerical 

superiority, military supremacy, and commercial 

indispensability had shifted from the Osages 

to the Americans, Laclede’s heirs volunteered 

their services as city leaders, political advisors, 

multilingual diplomats, treaty negotiators, 

and liaisons with other French residents. 

The potential to exert greater influence on 

a grander scale convinced the pragmatic 

capitalist, Auguste Chouteau, to write his 

famous “Narrative of the Founding of 

St. Louis” in 1804—informing U.S. officials 

about the indispensable role his founding 

family should continue to play. According to 

historian Jay Gitlin, those “French founders 

are still celebrated today,” because they 

literally “earned a place in the city they had 

created,” allowing St. Louis to avoid “the 

marginalization that was the fate of other 

non-Anglo communities” taken over by the 

United States.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition broke the 

ice with formerly resentful French merchants, 

who supplied the Corps of Discovery with 

several skilled boatmen, essential merchandise, 

valuable advice, and even maps of the 

Missouri River made a decade earlier. But 

St. Louisans did not condone the prejudicial 

attitudes and hostile actions of the Expedition 

commanders toward Indians that reflected 

Virginia’s traditional frontier bellicosity. The 

Corps of Discovery killed two Indians 

and threatened countless others. Lewis 

and Clark expected “Father” Jefferson’s 

dependent “red children” to “Demean 

themselves towards our government” 

and “readily yield their exclusive 

friendship to those whose Power 

they Dread.” Those commanders, who 

carried special surveyors’ compasses 

that Indians called “land stealers,” 

forged the “future path of civilization” 

that would all too soon “receive… 

the overflowing tide of our own 

population.” The one million words 

that Lewis and Clark wrote in their 

travel journals encouraged generations 

of Americans to exploit a future white 

West after it was emptied of native 

populations and traditions that had 

made French St. Louis so successful. 

After traveling over 8,000 miles 

in twenty-eight months, the Corps 

of Discovery ended triumphantly at 

St. Louis on September 23, 1806. 

Acknowledging Laclede’s ideal town 

location, Lewis and Clark made 

St. Louis the first capital of the 

American West—and their new home. 

Lewis became territorial governor, 

while Clark was chief of Indian affairs, 

and together they altered the traditional 

trade and native relations of French St. Louis. 

Most of present-day Missouri was to be 

cleared of Indians to make room for voting 

American farmers, while fur trading beyond 

its borders was permitted for the time being 

with more stringent bureaucratic regulations. 

President Jefferson viewed Indian commerce 

as a coercive means to deprive native nations 

of their homelands. He planned to have 

“good and influential” Indians “run into debt” 

with white traders, forcing them to surrender 

tribal territories to eliminate those obligations. 

Once native territories were too small for 

productive hunting, Indian males would 

have to become “civilized” plow- farmers—or 

starve. Historian Woody Holton observed 

that Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” was 

designed to benefit whites, and “there could 

be no empire without the extermination of 

Indians that blocked its path.” 

Lewis and Clark’s revolutionary policies 

for the Far West encouraged white trappers 

to harvest beavers in the Rocky Mountains— 

stealing those valuable resources without 

sharing the profits with native hunters. The 

Corps commanders had discovered prime 

beaver pelts in those high altitudes of the 

U.S. West that finally matched the quality of 

Canadian ones in northern latitudes, and 

they created a beaver boom upon their return 

Beaver pelts in every size and color from the 

Fausz family collection. 


3 5

The expulsion of all Indians by 1830 from 

the new State of Missouri was represented 

in this illustration from Ballou’s Pictorial 

newspaper of Boston on July 28, 1855. 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 

to St. Louis. In 1807, Clark and Lewis’s 

brother became partners with Manual Lisa, 

Pierre Chouteau, Sr., and other investors, in 

the new “St. Louis Missouri Fur Company.” 

Governor Lewis procured a $7,000 federal 

grant to fund one upriver trapping 

expedition, and that conflict of interest in 

using his public office to enhance the private 

profits of friends would ultimately doom 

the Osages. 

Even though Osage furs were still 

lucrative, deerskins could not compete with 

beaver pelts in profitability. As both explorers 

and administrators, Lewis and Clark made 

the Osages expendable, because their 

territory—“immense tracts of fine Country” 

that were “much more fertile” than Virginia— 

now had greater value than their trade. 

The Osages were victims of their own 

success in making French St. Louis a 

profitable town that proved so appealing 

to land-hungry Anglo-Americans. The 

native allies of Laclede and Chouteau 

generously shared their precious wisdom of 

the West with President Jefferson’s fellow 

Virginians, who used that knowledge to 

undermine Osage hegemony and to diminish 

their legacy. 

Jefferson was determined to make the 

United States the supreme power beyond 

the Mississippi, but he could not risk 

an immediate confrontation with the 


36

A M O T L E Y M I X O F M I G R A N T S 

While the Americans forced out native populations, the Louisiana Purchase encouraged an influx of new white residents from 

across the country, which perpetuated a different type of multiculturalism than colonial St. Louis. 

U.S. General James Wilkinson arrived at St. Louis in July 1805 as governor of Upper Louisiana. Theodore Roosevelt wrote that 

“in all our history, there is no more despicable character.” He was already controversial, having been implicated in army plots against 

General Mad Anthony Wayne and even George Washington and would survive several courts martial. In September 1805, Aaron Burr, 

Jefferson’s former vice president, met with Wilkinson at St. Louis, allegedly to discuss the treasonous plot to create their own western 

empire. General Wilkinson’s controversial and contentious tenure as governor ended in August 1806, after which it was revealed that 

he had been a well-paid Spanish spy for years and plotted to destroy the Lewis and Clark Expedition! 

Sacagawea came to St. Louis to visit her Shoshone-French son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau (“Pomp”), being raised by William Clark. 

Baptized by a Trappist monk in 1809, with Auguste Chouteau serving as his godfather, Pomp studied at the Catholic academy that 

evolved into Saint Louis University. At nineteen, he accompanied the Duke of Wurttemberg on his western travels and lived in Europe 

from 1823 to 1829. He spent the next four decades as a valued western guide, conversant in English, French, Spanish, German, and 

several native languages. 

Clark’s slave, York, lived in St. Louis after his valuable contributions as the only African American member of the Lewis and 

Clark Expedition. 

Captain Joseph Conway, a friend of Daniel Boone, had fought Indians in Ohio, where he had been shot three times and scalped 

three times but killed seven warriors. 

Judge James Hawkins Peck from Tennessee literally delivered “blind justice” by conducting court while wearing a blindfold. 

Massachusetts-born fur trader Russell Farnham took the longest route to St. Louis, traveling from the Columbia River by way of 

the Bering Strait, St. Petersburg, Paris, and an Atlantic crossing, to deliver British bank drafts to John Jacob Astor in New York City 

before arriving here as a suspected British spy captured in the Great Lakes. 

“great nation” of the populous Osages. The 

president was respectful in his 1804 meeting 

with Osage chiefs—the first Indians in the 

Louisiana Purchase Territory to visit him. 

But he grew more aggressive by 1806, after 

they had obeyed him by not retaliating 

against the vicious attacks of tribal enemies. 

Once the Osages began behaving like 

“Quakers,” the emboldened president 

demanded that they abandon their traditional 

homeland—or else. Americans, he threatened, 

“are strong, we are numerous as the stars 

in the heavens, and we are all gun-men” 

who “do not fear any nation.” 

Indian artifacts representative of those in 

Clark’s Indian Museum on Main Street, 

St. Louis. 



3 7

U.S. government gifts to Indians. 

As Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 

St. Louis, William Clark chose this cotton 

fabric and other designs, as official gifts 

to native delegations. The tomahawk is 

marked “USID” (Indian Department) 

and was given to tribes as a treaty gift. 

Author’s photograph of his artifacts. 

In 1808, Governor Lewis suddenly 

suspended trade with the Osages, falsely 

accusing them of killing white settlers. He 

threatened a war of extermination using their 

many Indian enemies unless they signed the 

controversial Treaty of Fort Osage. Several 

intimidated Osage chiefs ceded 52,480,000 

acres of their traditional territory to the U.S. 

government, receiving only a fraction of a 

cent per acre. Having never warred with the 

Americans, the Osages were shocked to be 

the first western Indians dispossessed of their 

homelands and the only ones forced to 

abandon a still-profitable fur trade. In the 

Second Treaty of St. Louis in June 1825, 

Clark took the last 40,000 square miles of 

Osage lands and soon forced them to leave 

the state they had helped create. 

St. Louis under the Americans remained 

the center of Indian diplomacy in the West. 

An eyewitness in the 1820s described how 

Indians, “a hundred or more at a time” would 

“promenade down our Main Street in Indian 

file,” including bare-legged chiefs wearing 

U.S. army officer coats and “military hats 

with plumes,” while warriors, draped in 

“Mackinaw blankets,” each carried “a flaming 

scarlet umbrella…in one hand and…a palm 

leaf fan in the other.” They headed for 

William Clark’s Indian Council Chamber 

and museum of Indian curiosities on North 

Main Street. The museum was described as 

“the most complete” collection of Native 

American artifacts and portraits in white 

hands “anywhere in the United States” that 

early. In 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette was 

very impressed by what he saw—especially 

the grizzly claw necklace—as were other 

European elites of the era who were 

fascinated by Native American cultures. 

Although the Indian items collected by “Red- 

Headed Chief” Clark honored indigenous 

cultures in one sense, his filing cabinets 

were filled with treaties documenting the 

419,000,000 acres he wrested from the 

homelands of many western tribes. 

Clark’s rapidly rising career symbolized 

the new opportunities for U.S. army officers 

in St. Louis. The town’s strategic site made it 

an ideal launching point for new explorations. 

In 1805, Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike left 

there in an unsuccessful attempt to seek the 

source of the Mississippi River. With soldiers 

from Fort Bellefontaine, a U.S. army base 

north of St. Louis, Pike then led an 1806-07 

expedition to the Arkansas and Red Rivers, 

eventually reaching the Rio Grande. A dozen 

years later, Major Stephen H. Long left 

from St. Louis to map present-day Kansas 

and Nebraska—establishing a precedent by 

taking artists Samuel Seymour and Titian 

Peale to paint exquisite scenery that helped 

Americans to visualize the West. 

During the War of 1812 army personnel 

from Fort Bellefontaine protected the town 

from British and Indian invasion. In 1813 

Clark led a successful raid on the pro-British 

Sauk and Fox stronghold at Prairie du Chien 

(Wisconsin) with 60 soldiers and 140 St. Louis 


38

militiamen. Following the war, Clark, 

Auguste Chouteau, and Ninian Edwards 

of Illinois, negotiated new treaties with 

thousands of Indians from twenty-nine native 

nations assembled at Portage des Sioux. 

The necessity to document such federal 

Indian treaties with legal precision 

symbolized the increasing influence of 

American attorneys in a French town that 

never had any use for that profession. 

Legions of U.S. lawyers also thronged to 

St. Louis to litigate contested Spanish land 

grants, with a mostly negative impact on the 

French founding families. For at least half 

a century after the Louisiana Purchase, 

“lawyering” provided upward social mobility 

for Americans in Missouri, whose training in 

English common law, rather than the nowobsolete 

French civil law, gave them a distinct 

advantage in courtrooms and political 

campaigns. In 1808, Virginia-born Frederick 

Bates, a St. Louis judge and future Missouri 

governor, produced a 372-page Compilation 

of the Laws of the Territory of Louisiana—a 

milestone of territorial maturity. It was printed 

in St. Louis by Irishman Joseph Charless, 

who, that same year, began publishing the 

Missouri Gazette and Louisiana Advertiser, 

the first newspaper in the West. 

Political institutions also reflected the 

maturation of St. Louis, which was officially 

incorporated as an American “town” in 1809. 

The first elected trustees represented a cultural 

confluence, as Auguste and Pierre Chouteau 

and brother-in-law Bernard Pratte served with 

Edward Hempstead (a Connecticut lawyer 

who married into the French Dubreuil family) 

and Alexander McNair (a former army officer 

from Pennsylvania). They established the 

first “police patrol” and set curfews for a 

diverse and potentially disruptive population 

that included Indians, “bragging” Mississippi 

boatmen, Canadian voyageurs, and rifle-toting 

Kentucky hunters. 

In 1815 old French elites formed the 

“Little Junto” dominated by the Chouteau 

brothers and their commercial kinsmen: 

Pratte, Charles Gratiot, John P. Cabanné, 

Sylvestre Labbadie, and Gregoire Sarpy. 

They sought to have their extensive Spanish 

land grants confirmed and favored fur 

A N “ O R N A M E N T E D C I T Y ” I N A N E W S T A T E 

In the year that statehood was achieved, St. Louis had 651 homes—232 built 

of stone or brick—with 108 new dwellings constructed in the last six years alone. 

The 1821 St. Louis Directory and Register, compiled by John A. Paxton, recorded 

the current status of Missouri’s “commercial metropolis.” Despite an economic 

recession from 1819 to 1823, the town featured: 

Thriving Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Methodist congregations; 

Saint Louis College with 65 students using Bishop DuBourg’s 8,000-book library; 

10 common schools; 

5 weekly newspapers, several printers, and a bookstore; 

a portrait-painter “who would do credit to any country”; 

“professional musicians” who played at balls to encourage “healthy” dancing; 

2 “cordial distillers” and candy-makers; 

12 tailors, 3 hatters, 13 shoemakers, 5 jewelers, and at least one watch-maker; 

4 hair-dressers, several perfumers, and a comb factory; 

46 “mercantile establishments” trading with the “distant parts of the Republic”; 

27 attorneys; 

a hospital, 13 doctors, 3 midwives, and 3 druggists; 

57 grocers and 4 bakers; 

3 gunsmiths; 

8 large inns/hotels, plus many boarding houses; 

6 livery stables, 3 saddlemakers, 9 blacksmiths, and 3 coach builders; 

a ferry to Illinois and stages running to Edwardsville and Franklin; 

2 brickyards, 2 potteries, a nail factory, a tannery, and 3 soap and candle manufacturers; 

28 carpenters, 3 masons, 14 brick-layers, 13 furniture makers, and 10 house painters; 

4 “Coopers, Block, Pump, and Mast-makers”; 

5 billiard parlors, each paying $100 in annual state and city taxes; 

one brewery “of a quality equal to any in the western country”; 

2 beer gardens for “entertainment and recreation”—one atop an Indian mound, 

and a theatre at 72 North Main Street. 

trading over extensive farming. Those French 

town leaders were supported by General 

Clark and his nephew, John O’Fallon, along 

with Hempstead and McNair, who were 

sympathetic to those priorities. Opponents of 

the Junto included John B. C. Lucas, Joseph 

Charless, Rufus Easton, William Russell, and 

David Barton, who supported American real 

estate speculators and increasing the number 

of immigrant farmers. 

Such political rivalries among local luminaries 

took on greater importance as statehood 

approached. Meeting in St. Louis’s Mansion 

House Hotel, a constitutional convention 

produced a draft document by July 1820. 

With representation based on population, 

St. Louis dominated the proceedings with 


3 9

An 1820 Bank of Missouri $10 Note, signed 

by president Auguste Chouteau. It portrays 

Thomas Jefferson as a Roman emperor, 

but with French St. Louis’s symbols of 

commerce, rather than the president’s 

preference for agriculture. 


18 percent of the delegates, including: David 

Barton (who presided over the convention), 

Virginian Edward Bates (the future first attorney 

general), fur traders Pierre Chouteau, Jr., 

and Bernard Pratte, Alexander McNair 

(the state’s first governor), General William 

Rector (U.S. army surveyor), banker Thomas 

Riddick, and John C. Sullivan (a justice of 

the county court). 

Eighteen years after the Louisiana Purchase, 

Missouri entered the Union as the twentyfourth 

state on August 10, 1821—the first 

one located entirely west of the Mississippi 

and also have a bilingual constitution in 

French and English. The new state had a 

population of 56,000 whites, mostly from 

Virginia and Kentucky, and 10,000 black 

slaves, representing 19 percent of the state’s 

population and 15 percent of St. Louis’s. 

Missouri would be the northernmost slave 

state in the West—as mandated by the 

Missouri Compromise of 1820—sharing a 

southern border with Virginia and Kentucky 

at a latitude of 36 degrees, 30 minutes, as 

predicted by the Mitchell map of 1755. 

But Virginians had compromised the 

Bourbon culture of St. Louis long before 

statehood, making an Indian-friendly city 

into the capital of a white-dominated state 

cleared of Native Americans. That cultural 

victory was apparent when Missouri’s new 

state capital and St. Louis’s latest army base 

were both named for Jefferson in 1826, the 

year he died. By mid-century, St. Louisans 

universally praised the once-contentious 

Louisiana Purchase, regarding it as a “Happy 

Annexation,” without which, their city 

“would be in everything at least a quarter 

century behind where we are now.” Most of 

the old French families were reconciled with 

Americanization, widely praising Jefferson, 

whose “pen gave freedom to the eastern half 

of our republic, and his diplomacy united it 

to the other half.” Today, Missouri has more 

monuments honoring Jefferson, including his 

original tombstone on the Mizzou campus, 

than any state except Virginia. 

The past of Virginia had become the future 

of Missouri because, despite their different 

religions, languages, laws, and cultures, the 

French founders and American administrators 

shared two traditional socioeconomic 

goals: perpetuating race-based black slavery 

and profiting from all natural resources in the 

West. From 1804 to 1816, Virginians represented 

the largest group of Anglo-Americans 


40

(30 percent) who migrated to Missouri, and 

three of the first four Missouri governors 

had been born in Virginia. Of the next seven 

governors down to 1857, two were Virginians, 

while the other five came from the Virginiainfluenced 

trans-Appalachian frontier states 

of Kentucky and Tennessee. For many decades, 

the most prominent leaders throughout 

Missouri had all been born somewhere else. 

“The most obvious result of Americanization 

in St. Louis,” wrote historian James Neal Primm, 

“was deplorable public behavior.” There was 

a growing acceptance of increasing violence, 

as illustrated by the measly $500 fine levied 

against an 1840 murderer who had beaten a 

newspaper editor to death with an iron cane. 

Primm observed that such violence was 

not attributable to the “wild” frontier, since 

“St. Louis was no longer the frontier”—“it 

had been less violent when it was.” From the 

1820s to the 1840s, a growing number of gun 

shops opened in St. Louis after the removal 

of so-called “hostile savages” out of Missouri. 

On sale in St. Louis were a large variety of 

dueling pistols, “pocket” guns, “desperate” 

knives, sword canes, daggers, Bowie knives 

with pistol attached (“which will shoot and 

cut at the same time”), self-cocking revolving 

pistols that fired “6 times in only 4 seconds,” 

and even small cannons for personal use. 

Ironically, the Hawken advertisement for 

firearms adjoined one for grave stones, and 

both businesses were located on Washington 

Avenue. Ads from the St. Louis Business 

Directory for 1847. 



4 1

L I T I G I O U S L A W Y E R S D U E L I N G T O T H E D E A T H 

Deadly duels were extremely rare under the French and Spanish, and “there had been no murders in St. Louis for forty years” 

prior to the Louisiana Purchase, according to Primm. But American attorneys, influenced by the traditional dueling culture of 

the Old South, sought to defend their “honor as civilized gentlemen” by shooting other lawyers, often on “Bloody Island” in the 

middle of the Mississippi River. 

In 1810 the earliest notable duel involved attorney James A. Graham and Dr. Bernard G. Farrar of Kentucky—a second who had 

to stand in for his cowardly brother-in-law when he failed to appear. Farrar mortally wounded the man he had no grievance against 

and then offered medical assistance. 

In 1817, only a year after arriving in St. Louis from Tennessee, future U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton killed lawyer Charles Lucas, 

son of his political rival, Judge J. B. C. Lucas. It was their second duel, after both men had been wounded three months earlier. 

The most spectacular duel on Bloody Island occurred in August 26, 1831, when Congressman Spencer Pettis faced off against 

U. S. Army Major Thomas Biddle. They stood only five feet apart and fired simultaneously. A large crowd on the riverbank heard 

the chilling result, “both mortally wounded!” Pettis died the next day at the age of 29, while Biddle succumbed two days later, 

aged 41. Senator Benton, a close friend of Pettis, wrote a stirring account of “one of the most desperate encounters that had ever 

occurred in the country,” an essay circulated in newspapers throughout the nation. 

John Smith “T” (identifying his Tennessee roots) claimed that he had killed 14 men in duels, including a nephew of former 

Vice President Aaron Burr. He was always acquitted and strolled St. Louis streets with four pistols, a rifle, and two knives. 

In addition to the standard “pistols at ten paces,” an 1845 duel was fought with swords, and in 1857, adversaries considered 

using rifles at sixty paces. A. B. Chambers and Thomas B. Hudson shot a total of six bullets at each other, missing every time, 

and ended their dispute without bloodshed. Duels continued until the Civil War, but they were outlawed in the 1865 state 

constitution—a provision that remained until 1945! 

Changing Street Names from French to 

English—a map by Musick in his St. Louis 

as a Fortified Town; copyright expired. 

In 1826, the St. Louis city council adopted a 

“modern” system of naming most downtown 

streets for trees (Walnut, Pine, Chestnut, 

etc.) like Philadelphia. Market Street and 

Washington Avenue were already too 

familiar to change, however. 

In 1822, the state legislature made St. Louis 

an official “city” with a mayor and 9 original 

aldermen. The city’s population had increased 

300 percent by 1818, and in the early 1820s, 

it had 5,500 residents, with another 4,200 

people living on the outskirts. When 

Pennsylvania native, Dr. William Carr Lane, 

defeated both Auguste and Pierre Chouteau 

in successive elections for mayor of St. Louis 

in the mid-1820s, the 155 old French families 

realized that an ever-expanding population 

of foreigners would forever put them at 

a disadvantage at the polls. A 187 percent 

increase in immigrants between 1810 and 

1820, and another 208 percent from 1820 

to 1840, had diluted the French population 

and diminished the recognition of their 

past contributions among the new citizens. 

A visiting Parisian observed that the city’s 

“rich, esteemed French” residents were 


42

“reclusive [and] irrelevant, clinging to slavery 

and their traditions.” A Presbyterian geographer 

in 1834 claimed that the St. Louis French 

were “a population of a very peculiar character.” 

They were “amiable” and “quiet” and retained 

their own language,” which was “somewhat 

corrupted” by living with Americans. 

French residents endured the changing 

names of their original streets and the 

tiresome mispronunciation of their native 

language. Leaving politics to the Americans, 

they seemed content with making money 

from their vast inventory of properties—and 

hosting the most lavish balls and receptions 

in the city’s largest, fanciest mansions. 

Hospitality had long been a French specialty, 

and in April 1825, the descendants of the 

founders threw the biggest party of all in 

welcoming the Marquis de Lafayette to St. Louis. 

Clark joined the Chouteau brothers as the 

official hosts who wined and dined him and 

his entourage, after the state legislature and 

Virginia-born governor declined to honor the 

old military hero who had helped America 

win its independence. Auguste Levasseur, 

Lafayette’s secretary and chronicler of his 

“Farewell Tour,” wrote that the April ball 

was attended by “the most brilliant and 

most numerous company,” and he praised the 

“luster of the decorations…and the elegance 

of the ladies,” which “made us forget entirely 

that we were at the entrance of the wilderness.” 

Lafayette’s immensely popular visit contributed 

to the resurgence of pride and 

productivity in every sphere of traditional 

French influence—from Catholicism to fur 

trading. Between 1818 and 1834, St. Louis 

became famous as the “Rome of the West,” 

constructing a church, a cathedral, and a university 

under inspired leadership. In 1818 

the Right Reverend Louis William DuBourg, 

a Sulpician priest born in Santo Domingo 

and former president of Georgetown College, 

assumed his duties as the new Bishop of 

Louisiana. His critically important decision to 

make St. Louis his diocesan headquarters, 

rather than New Orleans, confirmed the city’s 

position as the ideal gateway for Catholic 

missionaries to reach potential Indian 

converts in the Far West. 

DuBourg began the expensive and nevercompleted 

first brick Catholic church on 

Laclede’s Church Lands and founded the 

St. Louis Academy, which evolved into Saint 

Louis University, the first college west of the 

Mississippi, in 1832. He also encouraged Jesuits 

to open the first Catholic school for Native 

American boys in the nation and recruited 

Grenoble-born Mother Rose Duchesne (now 

Saint Philippine) and five other French nuns 

French St. Louisans, like French Canadiens, 

were famous for their formal balls. This 

Dance in the Château St. Louis, Quebec 

was painted by George Heriot in 1801. 

COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES OF CANADA, 

ACCESSION NO. 1989-472-1; COPYRIGHT EXPIRED. 


4 3

Les Indiens Osages, one of two matching 

1827 lithographs of original portraits by 

Parisian artist, Louis-Leopold Boilly. 

This shows three of the six Osages, 

most prominently the woman, Mohongo 

(“Sacred Sun”), who went to Europe in 1827 

with St. Louis promoter, David Dulauney, 

and interpreter Paul Loise, a Chouteau 

metis. They performed popular native 

dances for French, Dutch, and German 

crowds and met King Charles X. But they 

were abandoned and stranded in France, 

until Lafayette and Bishop DuBourg paid 

for their passage home in 1830. That strong 

French connection continues today, as the 

Osage Nation selects young men and 

women to make a similar journey. 


of the Society of the Sacred Heart. They 

founded a convent school in St. Charles— 

“the first free school for American and Creole 

girls west of the Mississippi”—according to 

Barbara O. Korner. She noted that the 

“Society of the Sacred Heart was the only one 

of the six European orders that came to 

America prior to 1830 that survived.” Its 

local legacy also included a similar school for 

French girls and a female Indian seminary, 

both based in Florissant, because property in 

downtown St. Louis was too expensive, having 

increased 500 percent in only two years. 

DuBourg’s equally energetic successor— 

and the first bishop of the Diocese of 

St. Louis—was Joseph Rosati. His leadership 

helped St. Louisans forget the funding 

nightmare associated with the brick church 

and redirected community efforts to create 

a beautiful limestone cathedral worthy of a 

growing city of increasing fame. After three 

years of construction, his masterpiece was 


44

completed in 1834. Known today as the 

Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, King 

of France, the “Old Cathedral” adjoining 

the National Park Service grounds of the 

Gateway Arch is undergoing extensive 

interior and exterior renovations that will 

make it a much-visited historic showpiece 

once again. 

Rosati’s cathedral faced south, but almost 

everything else associated with St. Louis was 

focused on the West. The religious resurgence 

of the French community was accompanied 

by an even more impressive commercial 

revival. The elite Chouteau family 

had never stopped expanding its 

influence and affluence through 

marriages with prominent Americans 

and Catholic immigrants, while lowerclass 

Frenchmen worked for William 

Clark as U.S. Indian agents and interpreters 

of native languages. The early 

1820s, however, brought revolutionary 

changes that dramatically expanded 

the scope and profitability of the western 

fur trade. Mexico gained its independence 

from Spain, which opened 

the Santa Fe silver trade to daring 

Missouri entrepreneurs, who enjoyed 

profits of 2,000 percent that helped 

fund fur trading. St. Louisans needed 

such capital to compete with the 

newly-merged old Canadian rivals— 

the Hudson’s Bay Company and the 

North West Company of Montreal— 

which now invaded the northern 

plains of the United States searching 

for furs and Indian allies. And in 

1822, too, Congress closed the government’s 

subsidized nonprofit fur factories and 

stopped competing with private merchants. 

Exploiting those simultaneous, interconnected 

developments at the perfect time was 

William H. Ashley, Missouri’s first lieutenant 

governor, general of the state militia, and a 

gunpowder manufacturer. The St. Louis fur 

trade was already contributing 

about $600,000 to the city’s total 

annual commerce of $2,000,000. 

But the recent death of Manuel 

Lisa, the masterful fur magnate 

who pioneered combined trading 

and trapping expeditions up the 

Missouri River, created an opening 

for Ashley. In 1822, he partnered 

with Andrew Henry, a former 

Michilimackinac merchant, to 

dispatch white trappers into the 

Rockies to harvest beavers from 

Indian territories while avoiding 

hostile river tribes. Ashley’s expedition to 

Green River, Wyoming, required 70 trappers, 

160 pack mules, and $20,000 worth of 

merchandise to produce profits of $60,000 

on 9,000 pounds of pelts. 

Left: The “Old Cathedral,” a year after 

its completion in 1834, showing the rectory 

on the right and an orphanage to the left. 

An 1835 lithograph by L. D. Pomarede. 

COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS. 

Below: The “Old Rock House”—a stone 

fur warehouse built in 1818 by Spanish 

entrepreneur, Manuel Lisa, as it appeared in 

the mid-twentieth century before being 

dismantled to make way for the 

Gateway Arch. 

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 

AT THE JEFFERSON NATIONAL EXPANSION MEMORIAL. 


4 5

Above: Trappers on the Prairie: Peace or 

War? Lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1866. 


Below: Replica Medal of the Upper Missouri 

Outfit, dominated by Pierre Chouteau, Jr. 


Predictably, Indians attacked white intruders 

stealing their resources, and by 1831, had 

killed at least 170 trappers. From 1823 to 

1828, St. Louis companies lost $100,000 

to Indian thefts of horses, mules, guns, 

traps, supplies, and pelts. Despite those 

losses, trapping was very profitable, netting 

$1.65 million in 1831 after expenses of 

$2.1 million, partly because trappers earned 

only $150-$200 per year for risking their 

lives. Ashley also created the rendezvous 

system, which kept mountain men in the 

West year-round without the need to build 

expensive permanent forts. He reaped a fortune 

on markups of 2,000 percent for essential 

supplies (and recreational liquor) needed by 

about 600 western trappers per year. 

In 1826, Ashley sold his successful company 

to fellow St. Louisans, where neighbors and 

even family members fought fiercely for 

supremacy in the fur trade. At least eight 

Chouteau kinsmen, for instance, served in 

four different fur companies, until Bernard 

Pratte’s French Company of five Chouteau 

cousins drove the others out. In 1822 the 

American Fur Company (AFC) owned by 

the German immigrant, John Jacob Astor, 

established a “Western Department” in 

St. Louis. Historian Walter Stevens claimed 

that Astor was “baffled” by the Chouteaus’ 

“well-established relationship with the 

Indians,” and in 1834, he sold the “Missouri 

River Outfit” of the AFC to St. Louisans 

Pratte and his cousin, Pierre Chouteau, Jr. 


46

C O R E D I S C O V E R I E S B Y S T . L O U I S M O U N T A I N M E N 

Historian Howard Lamar observed that “it was the fur trappers, rather than Lewis and Clark, who found the actual paths by which 

settlers could move themselves and their possessions to Oregon, California, and Utah.” Although the following mountain men were 

born elsewhere, most lived in St. Louis and died in Missouri: 

S James Pierson Beckwith, inaccurately known as “Beckwourth” 

(1798-1866?) was born a Virginia slave and became the 

most famous of several African American mountain men. 

He traveled in California, Colorado, and New Mexico, before 

living with Crow Indians as an adopted chief. His many 

adventures were recorded in a popular 1856 book. 

S Charles and William Bent operated Bent’s Old Fort (“the Adobe 

Castle”) trading post in Colorado between 1833-1849 with 

Ceran St. Vrain, the great-grandson of Laclede. 

S Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville (1796-1878) was a 

U.S. army officer who failed as a fur merchant in the Far West 

but pioneered a heavy-wagon route across the Continental 

Divide in the 1830s and was immortalized in a book by 

Washington Irving. 

S Jim Bridger (1804-1881), a Virginian, was among the first of 

Ashley’s trappers in 1822, and in 1824-25 was the first white 

man to discover the Great Salt Lake and geysers of Yellowstone. 

He also established stagecoach and rail routes in Wyoming 

and Montana. 

S Robert Campbell (1804-1879), a Northern Ireland immigrant, 

enjoyed a meteoric rise as a self-made mountain man and 

St. Louis merchant with partner William Sublette. Campbell 

invested in steamboats, railroads, real estate, the Merchants 

National Bank, and the Southern Hotel. Living in a mansion of 

Victorian splendor on fashionable Lucas Place, he entertained 

President Grant, General Sherman, and other notable leaders 

and helped negotiate Indian treaties. When he died in 1879, 

his $2,000,000 estate far eclipsed that of city patriarch, 

Auguste Chouteau. 

S John Colter (1775-1813), a valued Virginia veteran of the 

Lewis and Clark Expedition, returned to the Far West in 

1806-08, becoming one of the first white beaver trappers in 

the Bighorn Basin and the Yellowstone Valley. 

S Andrew Henry (1775-1833) was an innovative entrepreneur 

with the early St. Louis fur companies under Lisa and Ashley 

and a major proponent of using white trappers. 

S Wilson Price Hunt (1783-1842) led a successful overland 

1810-12 expedition from St. Louis to Astor’s Fort Astoria in 

Oregon, pioneering a route through the Snake River Valley 

and parts of the later Oregon Trail. He sold Russian sealskins 

in China and exported rare Chinese goods to New York. 

S Jedediah Smith (1799-1831) was a talented ex-Ashley trapper 

who explored South Pass, Wyoming; Utah’s Great Basin; the 

Oregon coast; and Sierra Nevada Mountains. He led the first 

American expedition to reach California from the southwest. 

S William Sublette (1799-1845) began trapping with Ashley 

and helped develop the Overland Trail—being “the first to 

prove that wagons and cattle could be taken across the 

Great Plains,” according to historian Mary Ellen Rowe. He was 

a successful business partner of Robert Campbell in St. Louis. 

The last mountain man rendezvous in 

1840 signaled the end of the beaver boom, 

which, in only two decades, had attracted 

3,000 trappers but alienated ten times that 

many western Indians. Many of the 150 forts 

and outposts built between 1822 and 1840 

were named for prominent St. Louisans 

(using their first names like European royalty). 

And the most innovative of those entrepreneurs 

had one final trick up their fur sleeve— 

switching to an Indian trade in buffalo hides 

after beaver pelts ceased to be profitable. The 

younger Chouteaus, in particular, prospered 

for more decades by selling sturdy, heavy 

bison leather from the Northern Plains to 

eastern industrial cities that needed belts to 

run factory machinery. In 1840, St. Louisans 

shipped 67,000 huge buffalo hides to their 

hometown and 110,000 more eight years 

later, along with the popular delicacy of 

25,000 buffalo tongues. 

The deaths, only a decade apart, of very 

different but equally revered frontier leaders— 

Auguste Chouteau and William Clark—represented 

the creation of a composite western 

culture synonymous with nineteenth-century 


On Tuesday, February 24, 1829, the 

Missouri Republican reported that “the venerable” 

Chouteau, the co-founder and long-reigning 

“Patriarch of St. Louis,” had died that morning 

in his famous mansion along the riverfront 

that had shaped his career. He was the 

centerpiece in the influential, multicultural 

dynasty created by Laclede and Marie Therese 

Bourgeois Chouteau—the oldest and most 


4 7

Nineteenth-century animal hide coat with 

Indian quill embroidery in Canadian metis 

style, perhaps owned by Auguste Chouteau. 


MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (OBJ 1906 013 0002). 


48 

successful of her five children, 52 grandchildren, 

and 69 great-grandchildren when 

she died in 1814. A Frenchman in the 1830s 

observed that the Chouteau name remained 

“a passport that commands safety and 

hospitality among all of the Indian nations 

of the United States, north and west,” as 

two generations of family members had 

founded fur posts and future towns in 

Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, 

and Montana. 

During his sixty-five-year residency along 

the Mississippi, Chouteau had survived the 

debts, doubts, and dangers of frontier fur 

trading, merging business ties with bloodlines, 

while St. Louis increased 2,000 percent 

in population and expanded its commerce 

“over a larger territory…than any other city 

in the Union.” Auguste retired from active 

fur trading in 1816 and devoted the remainder 

of his life to civic service, philanthropy, 

nurturing his many merchant kin, and 

advising the U.S. government on Indian 

issues. When he died in 1829, he left an 

estate that included 21,500 acres of land and 

another 39,000 acres of debatable legality— 

not counting developed city properties. 

He left $83,000 in IOUs, mortgages, and 

promissory notes from 800 people and 

over $17,000 worth of personal property, 

which included 600 books and 50 slaves, 

but only $32.12 in cash, which reflected a 

fur trader’s traditional reliance on credit. 

Subsequent generations of Americans have 

found Chouteau’s most precious 

possession to be his 

“Narrative of the Founding 

of St. Louis”—making his 

city even more distinctive as 

one of only a handful in history 

to have an eyewitness 

document on its beginnings 

by a founder. 

William Clark outlived 

Chouteau by nine years and 

died a revered local celebrity 

and national hero on 

September 1, 1838, at the 

age of sixty-eight. The city’s 

diverse citizenry honored 

him with a mile-long funeral 

procession. In addition to 

being co-commander of the 

famous, influential Corps of 

Discovery, Clark had served 

as brigadier general of 

Missouri’s militia; territorial 

governor from 1813 to 

1820; and head of U.S.- 

Indian affairs in the West 

between 1807 and 1838, 

under different titles. His 

Indian museum and cartographical expertise 

enhanced St. Louis’s reputation as the capital 

of the American West. As a diplomat, he 

personally negotiated thirty-seven treaties 

that dispossessed Indians of their homelands 

and played some role in 20 percent of all 

370 U.S. treaties with native nations. 

According to his biographer, Landon Y. Jones, 

“the cruelties of Clark’s time and the 

strengths of his character did not contradict 

one another…. He was a man whose 

complexity encompassed both.”

“No country on earth, of equal extent, has so many advantages…as the Valley of the Mississippi…. 

The introduction of steam-boats into this vast region, watered by large rivers, 

…has greatly increased…the facilities for trade and emigration.” 

–Robert Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 1834 


EXPLORING A STEAMBOAT CITY 

OF EXPANDING COMMERCE 

As Laclede and Chouteau intended, St. Louis was always the capital of a river empire, 

extending its influence via multiple tributaries from the Plains to Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes 

to the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, the city’s waterfront had welcomed local log canoes (pirogues), 

large birch-bark canoes made by Canadian Indians, and a wide variety of flatboats, keelboats, 

rafts, barges, and other vessels. Between 1763 and 1816, human muscles powered watercraft for 

the 90-120 days it took to travel the 1,200 miles upriver from New Orleans. But that all changed 

quite suddenly in 1817, when a small steam-powered paddle-wheeler, named Zebulon M. Pike, 

chugged into St. Louis to make startled residents aware of revolutionary technology that would 

alter their lives and livelihoods. In 1825 the traveling companion of the Marquis de Lafayette 

observed that the improved steamboats of that era could make the trip from New Orleans in a 

mere ten days, returning downstream in only five. Described in that year as “the great warehouse 

for all the commerce…west of the Mississippi,” St. Louis was already building its own fleet of 

steamboats in a large facility. Paddle-wheelers made such an enormous impact on the region— 

both immediate and long-lasting—that a steamboat is still the prominent illustration on the 

official seal of St. Louis City. 

Nineteenth-century Mississippi River 

steamboats published in Alcee Fortier’s 

History of Louisiana, vol. I (New York and 

Paris, 1904). 


4 9

St. Louis Levee, a mid-nineteenth century 

daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly. 

A contemporary St. Louisan wrote that 

“a mile and a half of steamboats lying at the 

wharf of a city one thousand miles from the 

ocean, in the heart of the continent, is a 

spectacle which naturally inspires large 

views of commercial greatness.” 


MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (17070). 


50 

The geographical realities of steamboat 

navigation on the Mississippi enhanced the 

value of Laclede’s central site. According to 

historian Jeffrey Adler, “it was unsafe for 

larger boats to operate above St. Louis, and it 

was unprofitable for smaller steamers to work 

the river below the town.” As an ideallylocated 

“reloading point,” St. Louis truly 

became the “Lion of the Valley” that dominated 

the commerce of the region’s waterways. 

The Mississippi split America in half, and 

St. Louis’s strategic site made it the dominant 

interior river port for a century—first as 

America’s western-most of eastern cities and 

later as the eastern-most of the nation’s western 

cities. From whatever direction St. Louis 

was viewed, it seemed destined to be the 

“future seat of empire,” wrote an observer in 

the 1820s, because “no place in the world 

situated so far from the ocean,” could match 

its “commercial advantages.” In the next 

decade, a visiting U.S. senator noted that 

St. Louis’s “gentlemen of fortune preferred… 

the sound of…steamers arriving or departing 

to the lowing of herds,” as the region 

transitioned from the plodding pace of 

plows to the unprecedented speed of steampowered 

vehicles. 

St. Louis’s rapid growth and rising stature 

were directly tied to the evolving size, 

speed, and sophistication of steamboats, 

which poured “wealth and prosperity into 

her lap.” Harnessing the latest technology 

to maximize its ideal location, St. Louis was 

being discussed as “the future capital of a 

great nation” and received “the attention not 

only of our own inhabitants, but also those of 

foreign lands.” Surpassing both New Orleans 

and Cincinnati in river traffic by the early 

1840s, St. Louis shipped nearly 263,000 tons 

of merchandise and greatly expanded its 

work force. Twenty years later, St. Louisans 

owned 168 steamboats, more than the 

residents of any other interior port city, and 

they employed 3,500 men just in building or 

repairing them. In addition, there were 

jobs for large numbers of pilots, crewmen, 

deckhands, dockhands, and warehouse 

workers, many of them African Americans. 

In 1860 almost 3,500 riverboats, averaging 

550 tons, called at the city, obscuring 

the wharf with a “forest of chimneys.” 

Counting 170 steamers jostling for access to 

the levee at one time, an observer thought 

they resembled huge “white bears” in a 

feeding frenzy.

Reflecting the prominence, pride, and 

prosperity that the Steamboat Age brought 

to St. Louis, residents erected a magnificent 

Greek Revival courthouse of monumental 

proportions between 1839 and 1864. Rising 

192 feet high like a riverfront beacon on the 

crest of a hill, it was the city’s tallest building 

from 1864 to 1894, after the Civil War 

addition of its huge iron dome, modeled 

after St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. With one 

columned entrance facing the river and 

another focused on the vast hinterland of 

future expansion, that big, beautiful building 

represented the dual focus of St. Louis in 

the mid-nineteenth century as both “Queen 

of the River” and “Gateway to the West.” 

As important as the Mississippi was, steamboats 

also increased the fame and fortune of 

St. Louis with trade and travel along the 

Missouri River. In 1831, St. Louisans demonstrated 

how a new invention could improve an 

old fur trade, when the steamer Yellow Stone 

(120’ long x 20’ wide) left the levee with 

22 crewmen, 75 employees of the American 

Fur Company, and 1,000 gallons of whiskey 

on a successful maiden voyage to Fort Union 

(near today’s North Dakota-Montana border). 

Two years later, that “Fire Boat that walks 

on the Waters” transported German Prince 

Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied and Swiss artist 

Karl Bodmer deep into Indian Country, making 

St. Louis a tourist capital for a steady 

stream of European sightseers, who enhanced 

the city’s reputation around the world. That 

same year, the United States designated St. 

Louis as an official “port of entry,” which provided 

federal funding for Robert E. Lee and 

other army engineers to clear river sandbars. 

The “Old Courthouse” in the mid-1840s, 

without the huge iron dome of the 

Civil War era. 

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGRAVING IN THE 

AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 


5 1

Karl Bodmer’s 1848 lithograph portraying 

Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied 

visiting the Minitaree/Minatarre Indians 

at Fort Clark in 1833. 


ST. LOUIS (41863). 


52 

The confluence of the continent’s most 

notable commercial rivers attracted increasing 

hordes of investors and immigrants who 

boosted St. Louis from the nation’s fortyfourth 

largest city in 1830 to sixth place 

by 1850. Farmers seeking western lands 

purchased them in St. Louis, while eastern 

merchants created prosperous futures even 

before Missouri entered the Union. Among 

the earliest businessmen from the East were 

St. Louis’s first Jewish residents—the three 

Polish Philipson brothers from Philadelphia. 

They invested in the fur trade, opened a store 

stocked with desirable merchandise from the 

Atlantic coast, and in 1815, founded the 

“St. Louis Brewery,” the city’s second oldest. 

Following the example of Laclede, they brought 

culture to the city along with their capital. 

Joseph Philipson performed and taught music; 

Jacob was a tutor of English, German, and 

French; and Simon assembled a significant 

collection of 150 paintings and 100 prints, 

including works by Boticelli, da Vinci, Hals, 

Holbein, Murillo, Raphael, Rubens, and Titian! 

Many other “Yankee merchants” soon 

followed—young, aggressive members of 

family firms in New York and New England 

who opened business outlets in the capital 

of western capital. They established about 

75 percent of new companies in the 1840s, 

and by 1850, New Yorkers represented 

36 percent of all St. Louis businessmen and 

New Englanders another 20 percent. More 

than fifty financial institutions were founded 

in less than thirty years to handle the 

58 percent of city investments contributed 

by those easterners. The appropriately-named 

“Boatmen’s Bank” opened in 1847 as the 

first savings bank west of the Mississippi. 

Insurance brokers also enjoyed rapid growth, 

since 550 very expensive steamboats were 

destroyed in accidents between 1820 and 

1850. Thirty steamers owned by city 

residents sank in only four years in the 

“Mississippi Graveyard” between St. Louis 

and Cairo, Illinois. 

Among leading Yankee merchants were 

Daniel Page of Maine and his partner, Henry 

Bacon from Massachusetts, who invested in 

flour mills. Beginning in 1827, they built 

twenty-two others at a rate of nearly one 

per year, vaulting St. Louis into first place 

among U.S. cities in flour production. 

Hudson Bridge of New Hampshire made a 

fortune selling cotton, surplus army goods, 

stoves, and steel plows. Henry and Edgar Ames

from New York invested in meatpacking 

and grain elevators, while Connecticut-born 

William and Henry Belcher founded the 

country’s largest sugar refinery. Oliver and 

Giles Filley, also from Connecticut, manufactured 

stoves that dominated the national 

market. In 1851, Samuel Cupples moved his 

woodenware factory from Cincinnati, and 

only twenty years later, St. Louis “ruled the 

world in this trade.” The furniture-making 

firm of Heslep and Taylor relocated from 

Pennsylvania in the early 1800s, and within 

a few decades, St. Louis had fifty such 

factories, generating $5.8 million in exports. 

By 1850, manufacturers who used the 

Mississippi to ship their products had 

increased the city’s custom receipts 1,200 

percent in a single decade. The assessed value 

of taxable property rose from $1.5 million in 

1828 to $43 million by 1855. 

Profitable products stimulated the city’s 

population growth at a rapid rate. The number 

of residents rose from 14,000 in 1837 to 

78,000 by 1850—twice the population of 

Pittsburgh, which had been founded the 

same year. The Missouri Republican reported 

that 1,500 people arrived in some weeks, 

including 800 in one thirty-six-hour period! 

Chouteau’s Pond, the city’s earliest and 

much-loved recreation area, which was 

drained as a health risk following the 

1849 cholera epidemic. Oil painting of 

1844 by D. Barbier. 


ST. LOUIS (1908 001 0002). 


5 3

Interior of Chauncey L. Filley’s 

Queensware Importing House, 108 Main 

Street, St. Louis, an illustration from 

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 

November 24, 1860. 


With the city’s population at least doubling 

with predictable regularity, one resident 

boasted that St. Louis had grown larger and 

changed more in only fifty years than 

“England [had] in five hundred years after 

the Norman Conquest.” But St. Louis faced 

a far greater challenge than medieval 

England, for it had to accommodate, and try 

to integrate, throngs of European immigrants 

whose cultures were neither French nor 

Anglo-American. As early as 1828, a welltraveled 

observer noted that “very few towns 

in the United States, or the world have a 

more mixed population,” with “immigrants 

from all of the states…[and] people from 

all quarters of the world.” As a popular 

consumer reflection of such cultural 

diversity, the St. Louis Directory of 1840 ran 

advertisements for “all kinds of German 

Goods,” as well as “French and American 

paper hangings.” 

In 1850 nearly 16 percent of St. Louisans 

were Irish, 70 percent of whom were recent 

arrivals in the Potato Famine era. They were 

welcomed by Irish-Americans who had 

settled in St. Louis much earlier from other 

states—not directly from the old country. 

Those original arrivals tended to be affluent, 

accomplished, and acculturated enough to 

surmount any prejudicial impediments to 

their careers. They included Alexander McNair 

(Missouri’s first governor), John Mullanphy 

(the city’s first millionaire), Joseph Charless 

(pioneering publisher), Sheriff James Rankin, 

and Benjamin and John O’Fallon—Irish 

Protestant merchants and Indian agents who 

were nephews of William Clark. Those and 

later residents demonstrated their cultural 

pride by organizing the city’s first St. Patrick’s 

Day celebration in 1820 and established a 

private relief agency to help “distressed Irish 

Families.” When former judge and mayor, 

Bryan Mullanphy (son of John) died in 1851, 

he left one-third of his estate to “furnish relief 

to all poor emigrants” coming to St. Louis— 

the forerunner of the Travelers Aid Society. 


54

Eighteen German families were also in 

St. Louis by 1833, with some pre-dating 

the Louisiana Purchase. Only a decade after 

Gottfried Duden circulated enthusiastic reports 

about Missouri in 1827, 6,000 Germans were 

living in St. Louis, with 24,000 more engaged 

in farming and wine-making amid the 

Rhine-like landscapes of central Missouri. 

Among those “Thirty-ers” were conservative 

Lutherans from Saxony, who founded 

Concordia Seminary, Missouri’s first coeducational 

college. In 1835, there were enough 

Germans in St. Louis to support a weekly 

newspaper, Anzeiger des Westens (“Information 

of the West”). Some 20,000 German “Forty- 

Eighters”—political activists who had failed 

to revolutionize their country in that year— 

arrived by the early 1850s to make a permanent 

impact on the city. Some of them resided 

in Belleville and other Illinois communities 

due to the expensive and scarce housing in 


The Missouri Republican in 1857 reported 

that Germans had “inundated [the city] with 

breweries, beer houses, sausage shops, 

…Swiss cheese and Holland herrings. We 

found it almost necessary to learn the 

German language before we could ride in 

an omnibus, or buy a pair of breeches, and 

absolutely necessary to drink beer at a 

Sunday concert.” The “Vauxhall Beer Garden” 

was popular as early as 1823, and thirty years 

later, “Uhrig’s Cave” attracted large crowds 

that mixed suds with songs, including 

operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan. Johann 

“Adam” Lemp opened the Western Brewery in 

1840 to produce lager (aged) beer, mellowed 

in the cool caves under the city. His son 

pioneered the use of refrigerated railroad cars 

to distribute St. Louis beer nationally, as the 

Lemp Brewery became the largest one outside 

of New York with a single owner. At least 

forty other St. Louis breweries predated 

Anheuser-Busch, producing 190,000 barrels 

Old trunks symbolizing the wave of 

immigrants who came to St. Louis in the 

mid-nineteenth century. 



5 5

Portrait of Constantin Blandowski by 

Carl Wimar,1861. Blandowski (1812-1861) 

was a Polish soldier and noted fencer born 

along the Prussian border. He served in 

Algeria with the French Foreign Legion, 

the Polish Revolution of 1848, and both 

Sardinia’s and Hungary’s wars for 

independence from Austria, before arriving 

in St. Louis in the 1850s. As a captain in 

a company of German volunteers who 

captured Camp Jackson, he was wounded 

by civilian gunfire and died following the 

amputation of his leg. (Details from William 

C. Winter’s The Civil War in St. Louis: 

A Guided Tour [1994], pp. 65-66.). 

COURTESY, SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM; 

GIFT OF MRS. F. W. SCHNEIDER (179:1946). 


56 

per year before the Civil War, worth well 

over $1,000,000. In one six-month period 

in 1854, city residents consumed 18,000,000 

glasses of beer—thirteen years after St. Louisans 

had founded a “Total Abstinence Society.” 

By 1850, more than 20,000 Germans and 

11,000 Irish comprised over 40 percent of 

the city’s population. The large, sudden 

presence of so many “foreigners” with strange 

accents prompted a nativist backlash by 

anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Americanborn 

extremists in the Whig and Know- 

Nothing parties. The “worst riot in the 

city’s antebellum history” occurred in August 

1854 between nativists and Irish immigrants, 

resulting in 10 fatalities and 33 injuries, with 

93 buildings damaged. When naturalized 

as voting citizens, most of those immigrants 

supported the Democratic Party, which elected 

two Irishmen and one German as mayors in 

three successive elections between 1847 and 

1849. Despite facing common prejudices, 

the “Scrubby Dutch” in south city and 

“Kerry Patch Irish” in north city maintained 

separate neighborhoods; rarely cooperated to 

challenge hostile nativists; and often clashed 

over cultural differences and the competition 

for jobs.

Another group of immigrants in St. Louis 

has received much less attention than they 

deserved. In their recent book, When the 

Saints Came Marching In, Fred E. Woods and 

Thomas L. Farmer revealed that “three to four 

thousand Mormons were living in St. Louis” 

by 1849, with many establishing permanent 

roots. Despite Governor Lilburn W. Boggs’s 

1858 executive order to exterminate the 

Mormons, “the Latter-day Saints found a safe 

haven of tolerance in St. Louis” and steady 

employment as well. An official Mormon 

publication in 1855 observed that “this city 

has been an asylum for our people from 

fifteen to twenty years…. There is probably 

no city in the world where Latter-day Saints 

are more respected, and where they may 

sooner obtain an outfit for Utah.” 

Historian James Neal Primm described 

mid-century St. Louis as a “city in motion,” 

with large numbers of people coming in 

and going out on a daily basis. A large group 

of St. Louisans “went out” to fight in the 

Mexican-American War, earning great distinction 

and generating future prosperity for 

their hometown. Jefferson Barracks mobilized 

U.S. soldiers and supplied support services, 

while local militia units with memorable 

names—the “St. Louis Legion,” the “Native 

American Rangers,” and “The Laclede 

Rangers”—were commanded by leading 

citizens, such as Colonel Robert Campbell 

and Major Meriwether Lewis Clark. St. Louis 

General Stephen Watts Kearny, commander 

of Jefferson Barracks, led his elite U.S. 

Dragoons in the capture of Santa Fe and the 

pacification of California, and he served as 

military governor of Mexico City. 

The war with Mexico reinforced St. Louisans’ 

traditional interest in the Southwest. Reputedly, 

some residents had smuggled nearly $3,000,000 

in silver out of Santa Fe before the fighting 

began. No sooner had the war ended than 

gold was discovered in California, creating 

a rapid rush of prospective prospectors 

through the Gateway City. In 1849, alone, 

Marching St. Louis Militiamen on 

Market Street, a watercolor painting by 

Mat Hastings, 1843. 


ST. LOUIS (1949 097 0041). 


5 7

Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 

steel engraving by F. O.C. Darley, 

in William Cullen Bryant, ed., Picturesque 

America. The Land We Live In, vol. I 

(New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1872). 


an estimated 60,000 people arrived in 

St. Louis on their way to gold-fields or 

other western sites. City merchants provided 

whatever they needed, from shoes to saddles, 

and guns to grub—and especially the famous 

Murphy Wagons made in town—experiencing 

a more reliable rush of gold locally without 

risking their lives in California. 

About a third of those new arrivals chose 

to stay in St. Louis, and the influx of so many 

young, unmarried men lowered the average 

age of city residents to 21 by 1850, with 

males outnumbering adult women by nearly 

two to one. At mid-century, over 50 percent 

of St. Louis residents had lived here less than 

two years, and many of them would remain 

for only a couple more. St. Louis’s hospitality 

industry capitalized on that constant mobility 

by operating 23 restaurants and 33 hotels 

in 1850—including the fashionable Planters’ 

House Hotel, where the famous “punch” was 

created. New Yorker Edgar Ames, who owned 

the luxurious Lindell Hotel, was passionate 

about “work[ing] to beautify our city,” both 

as a philanthropist and a businessman who 

realized that an attractive appearance appealed 

to tourists. New trends in public transportation 

kept pace, as twelve-passenger, horse-drawn 

carriages, known as “omnibuses,” served “the 

citizens of St. Louis and strangers visiting 

the city.” 

Many of those “strangers” never left, 

bringing new ideas and different customs 

in attempting to transform fluid St. Louis 

society to suit their goals. Ten percent of the 

“Eastern Migration” in the mid-nineteenth 

century consisted of doctors, lawyers, and 

ministers. Some of the most fervent New 

England Protestants hoped to make St. Louis 

a “New Jerusalem” by “civilizing” what a 

Massachusetts congressman called the “wild 

men of the Missouri,” who were plagued by 

“savage” Indians, “foreigners,” and “papists.” Far 

more tolerant, and a great boon to the city’s 

intellectual progress, was the Reverend William 

Greenleaf Eliot. He was only twenty-three 


58

when he arrived in 1834 to found the first 

Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson called him the “Saint 

of the West,” as a crusader for educational 

excellence, the abolition of slavery, women’s 

rights, and the creation of a city art museum, 

among other cultural causes. 

Less spiritual Eastern capitalists hoped 

to make St. Louis a secular, profitable “New 

York of the West.” They succeeded to a degree, 

because the 300,000 people who migrated 

to California maintained a commercial 

connection with the welcoming Gateway 

City that many knew well. In 1858, John 

Butterfield’s Overland Stage linked St. Louis 

with San Francisco, the largest town west of 

it, while the later Pony Express delivered mail 

between St. Louis and Sacramento. Although 

maps depict Independence, Missouri, as the 

embarking point for most of the major 

western trails to California, Oregon, Utah, 

and elsewhere, St. Louis was the true “Mother 

of the West,” before and after those massive 

treks across the Plains. 

Oil portrait of William Greenleaf Eliot, 

1854, by Charlotte C. Eliot. 


ST. LOUIS (1960 057 0001). 


5 9

H O R R I F I C D I S A S T E R ! 

By late 1855 the Pacific Railroad stretched to Jefferson City, and although far short of the California coast suggested by the 

company name, that achievement was worthy of a public celebration. On All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1855, some 600 prominent 

St. Louisans, including the mayor and aldermen, boarded a fourteen-car train for a festive, promotional trip to the state capital. 

But a pouring rain and a temporary, poorly-designed wooden trestle over the Gasconade River resulted in a “terrible catastrophe.” 

Eight miles west of Hermann, the bridge collapsed, catapulting the engine and most of the wooden cars into the river or onto its 

banks thirty-six feet below. Thirty-one passengers were killed, including politicians, pastors, railroad promoters—and Henri Pierre 

Chouteau, scion of the city’s founding family. At least 70 others were severely injured, and they suffered for two days until reaching 

professional medical treatment in St. Louis. Monday, November 5th was a day of public mourning in the city for what proved to 

be the worst train disaster in Missouri history. 

With few exceptions, natives and newcomers, 

alike, arrived in St. Louis having 

traveled on, or at least crossed, water, but 

the increasing allure of the Far West alerted 

St. Louisans of the need to develop railroads. 

No one saw the limitless potential of one city 

dominating both modes of transportation 

better than St. Louis’s hometown Democratic 

Senator, Thomas Hart Benton. He was an early 

and influential national prophet for the 

profits promised by the “Manifest Destiny” of 

westward expansion. He dreamed of fulfilling 

the ancient goals of Columbus by accessing 

the wealth of Asia via modern rail links to 

the Pacific coast. In 1849 he captured the 

attention of a railroad planning conference at 

the courthouse by pointing to the West and 

proclaiming: “There Lies India!” Entrepreneurs 

found no incompatibility with investing in 

riverboats and railroads at the same time, for 

steel train wheels and wooden paddle-wheels 

both used steam efficiently and profitably 

to transport people and products. In 1849 

the river-dredger, Captain Henry Shreve, 

promoted St. Louis’s Pacific Railroad when 

he lived here. Joining him were Yankee 

capitalists, Hudson Bridge, Thomas Allen, 

and Henry Bacon, among others. In 1853, 

the locomotive St. Louis reached Franklin, 

Missouri, at a top speed of twenty-one miles 

per hour along the first rail line west of 

the Mississippi. 

Above: Portrait of Thomas Hart Benton 

in 1854, long-serving U.S. senator from 

St. Louis. Frontispiece engraving in his 

Thirty Years’ View, or A History of the 

Working of the American Government 

for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850, 

vol. I (New York: D. Appleton and 

Company, 1854). 

Right: Although no illustrations of the 

Gasconade Train Disaster are known to 

exist, this is a nineteenth-century image of 

a similar railroad wreck in the 



60

Daguerreotype of Henri Pierre Chouteau 

(1805-1855), son of Auguste Chouteau, 

and his wife, Clemence Georgine Coursault. 

This was probably taken shortly before 

November 1855, when Henri died in the 

Gasconade Train Disaster. His death 

set in motion the transfer of his father’s 

manuscript, “Narrative of the Founding of 

St. Louis,” to his younger brother, Gabriel, 

who donated it to the Mercantile Library, 

which published the first translation 

in 1858. 


ST. LOUIS (40532). 


6 1

Detail of panoramic river lithograph, 

“View of St. Louis, Missouri”—“Our City,” 

by A. Janicke & Co., published by Hagen 

and Pfau at the Anzeiger des Westens 

newspaper office, 1859. 

REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF THE 


By 1850 rapid transformations in all 

aspects of urban living made St. Louis the 

“American Seville”—a bustling port of a huge 

inland empire, where grassy prairies substituted 

for ocean waves, and furs were the profitable 

equivalents of Spain’s bullion from the 

New World. Like the original Seville, St. Louis 

looked westward for its fortune, and increasing 

numbers of European nobles toured the 

“Grand Emporium of the Great West” to experience 

the allure of exotic Indians and majestic 

landscapes. A “Who’s Who” of foreign dignitaries 

drawn to the capital of frontier America 

included Prince Paul of Wurttemberg, Prince 

Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, Duke Bernard 

of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Albert Edward, 

Prince of Wales, the Hungarian freedomfighter, 

Louis Kossuth, and Prince Napoleon, 

nephew of the famous French emperor. 

Many of those elite tourists sponsored 

early western artists to capture the grandeur 

of incomparable scenery before the days of 

photography. “Painting, mapping, sketching, 

and photographing the West were among the 

great accomplishments in nineteenth-century 

America,” observed historian Howard Lamar, 

and St. Louis hosted some of the greatest 

western artists, including: John J. Audubon, 

George Caleb Bingham, Karl Bodmer, George 

Catlin, Charles Deas, Chester Harding, Henry 

Lewis, John Casper Wild, and Carl Wimar. The 

paintings of Charles Russell, born in St. Louis 

in 1865, stimulated a revival of romantic 

depictions of the so-called “Wild West” after 

it no longer existed. 

With an annual economy worth millions, 

St. Louis soon resembled old Seville as a 

progressive center of cultural refinement, 

when successful capitalists became avid 

philanthropists of intellectual institutions. 

They founded the St. Louis Academy of 

Sciences, which had already published thirty 

volumes of research by 1856. Businessmen 

also endowed the Mercantile Library in 1846 

as the first circulating library, documentary 

archive, and art gallery in the American West. 

For decades, it hosted lectures by eminent 

international literati—celebrity writers such 

as Louis Agassiz, Henry Ward Beecher, 

Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 


62

Washington Irving, Francis Parkman, Harriet 

Beecher Stowe, William Thackeray, Mark 

Twain, Daniel Webster, and Oscar Wilde, 

who came to inspire a growing group of 

local intellectuals. 

In 1853, St. Louis opened the first public, 

tax-supported high school west of the 

Mississippi, fifteen years after the city provided 

free elementary education. Two decades 

later, Susan Blow became a national pioneer 

in establishing kindergartens. She joined 

William Torrey Harris, the much-praised 

superintendent of schools, and other members 

of the German-influenced “St. Louis Movement” 

and St. Louis Philosophical Society to make 

the city “a national cultural center” committed 

to educational progress. A growing number 

of St. Louisans considered free public education 

to be the “basis of a republic’s prosperity 

and the handmaid of virtue.” The highlyregarded 

private Seminary founded by Eliot 

was dedicated to a well-educated citizenry, 

and it spawned nonsectarian Washington 

University in 1857 and Mary Institute two 

years later. That gave the city four colleges by 

mid-century, following Saint Louis University 

in 1832; Kemper College, the first Protestant 

institution for training physicians, in 1838; 

and Concordia Seminary of the Lutheran 

Church-Missouri Synod, which had relocated 

to the city in 1849. 

Churches also played increasing roles in 

promoting the civility of urban life in the 

frontier West. Catholic congregations expanded 

from two in 1841 to eight by 1850, while 

Presbyterian churches increased from three 

to ten in those years. In 1850 there were 

two Baptist churches, five Episcopalian 

congregations, and seven Methodist chapels, 

plus two African-Methodist churches. In a 

single decade, German immigrants opened 

nine diverse Protestant churches, in addition 

to the sole Lutheran congregation of 1841. 

German residents also dominated the 

musical culture of St. Louis. In the 1840s, the 

talented Charles Balmer formed the Oratorio 

Society (the city’s first male chorus), the 

Left: View of Lucas Place, a fashionable 

neighborhood in the mid-nineteenth 

century made famous by Robert Campbell’s 

Victorian mansion (now the Campbell 

House Museum). Campbell defied the 

stereotype of mountain men who died 

violently, young and poor. Engraving from 

[Richard] Edwards’s Great West…and 

History of St. Louis (St. Louis, 1860). 

FRONTISPIECE COURTESY OF THE 


Below: Portraits of Charles and Jacob 

Kunkel, German pianists and composers 

in St. Louis, from the title page of their 

“Triumphal March” (St. Louis, 1868). 



6 3

R E M E M B E R I N G T H E F O U N D E R S 

Opposite: A St. Louis city parade from an 

1874 illustration in Harper’s Weekly that 

closely matches the description of the 

1847 celebration. 


According to the Missouri Republican, residents had “never witnessed such a turnout” for the 

1847 celebration of the city’s founding. Amid flowers and flags hanging from every window 

and a military band playing the Marseillaise, the “Most Honored Guest of the Day”—Pierre 

Chouteau—arrived in a fancy carriage guarded by four mounted Indians, “dressed in the full 

costume” of the Plains tribes. That honor guard symbolized “the presence of friendly Indians” 

who had protected and partnered with Laclede. 

Passing by the reviewing stand, fronting the courthouse on Fourth Street, were representatives 

from every public and private, corporate and civic, organization, from firemen to school children, 

marching in a huge parade. Making a grand spectacle was a twenty-foot-long replica of the 

General Pike (the first steamboat to visit St. Louis in 1817). It was mounted on wheels and 

pulled by eight white horses. Following that was a replica of an eighteenth-century keelboat, 

named the Laclede. 

The Hibernian Charitable Society marched under a “Harp of Erin” banner. Its members all 

wore green sashes and played Irish tunes. Keeping with the theme of immigration, many other 

residents—“male and female, white and black, old and young”—wore costumes reflecting their 

diverse native cultures. When the Hunting Club marched by, the crowd cheered a horse with 

deer horns mounted on its head! 

The most popular floats were the five huge brewery wagons, each pulled by four horses of 

varying colors and hauling “mammoth casks” containing 18 barrels of beer. Riding on the 

Lemp Brewery float was a man dressed as the King of Flanders, “inventor of beer,” while the 

other breweries featured “a good, round, portly representation of a hearty, jolly beer drinker.” 

Not to be outdone, the Barrel-Makers Society wagon carried the largest cask of all—holding 

25 barrels of beer that coopers had constructed in only seven hours! 

The “Parade of Schools” featured students carrying a large banner depicting Minerva, Goddess 

of Wisdom, with the mottos: “Knowledge is Power” and “Intelligence, Industry and Enterprise.” 

After a long parade and an even longer historical oration by the scholarly Wilson Primm, 

prominent citizens conducted Pierre Chouteau to a Grand Banquet in the State Tobacco 

Warehouse. Tables were set for 1,200 diners, but only 400 showed up, since many thought 

the dinner would be too crowded. But there was no lack of enthusiasm among attendees, 

who drank over twenty toasts, including: 

To the Founders of St. Louis, for their wisdom in settling the site that was now “the seat 

of empire!” 

To Missouri, “the largest of the American states in territory and the richest in natural resources.” 

To the City of St. Louis—“What it shall become, may be conjectured from what it is.” 

Those heavy-drinking diners who were still able to stand attended a Grand Ball at the 

Planters’ House Hotel. Its “spacious ball room” was filled to capacity, and “happiness ran riot 

in the mazes of the dance, and thus the night was passed.” 

Philharmonic Society, and the Polyhymnia 

Society—all antecedent elements of the later 

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, founded in 

1880 as only the second one in an American 

city. In 1837, Meriwether Lewis Clark designed 

the New St. Louis Theater—the first in the 

country to have individual seats and a removable 

floor. Wyman’s Hall, Bates’s Theater, and 

“The Olympic” also became favorite venues 

for visiting entertainers. In 1835 the opera 

composer, John Howard Payne, drew large 

crowds; violinist Norwegian Old Bull came in 

1845; and many St. Louisans attended the 1861 

performances of African American pianist, 

“Blind Tom,” a ten-year-old prodigy. But few 

attractions could match the popular appeal 

of Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” 

whom P. T. Barnum brought to town in 1851. 

Offering less high-brow entertainment was 

“Captain Jack’s Floating Palace,” with its large 


64

steamboat theater and a museum packed 

with ancient artifacts and intriguing relics. 

The largest crowd ever assembled in 

St. Louis up to that point celebrated the first 

public anniversary of the city’s founding on 

Monday, February 15, 1847. Such attention 

for an eighty-third city birthday seemed odd. 

But the thousands of citizens who thronged 

into streets and saloons, banquet halls and 

formal balls, to honor the French founders 

hoped to recapture some of the community 

cohesiveness of the colonial town that 

had faded with the huge migrations of 

diverse “foreigners.” 

Seeking a tangible reminder of 1764, revelers 

honored eighty-nine-year-old (Jean) Pierre 

Chouteau—“the last of St. Louis’s original settlers” 

(as a young child) and “the only” living 

resident “whose eyes have looked upon the 

face of Laclede.” Speaking in French, Chouteau 

recalled “the purity, simplicity, and honesty” of 

the original town. While Laclede was regarded 

as a “common sire” of all St. Louisans, no one 

publicly acknowledged that Pierre Chouteau 

was actually Laclede’s only son, despite the 

widespread knowledge of that blood bond. 

Pierre, himself, said only that he had been 

“acquainted” with “Monsieur Laclede.” 


6 5

C H A R N E L H O U S E O F C H O L E R A 

After witnessing that grievous loss of life, St. Louis poet, Ethel Grey, wrote: 

“Muffled and slowly the footsteps fall, 

With a dull and laboring tramp’ 

They carry the dead to the Charnel House, 

So cold and dark and damp. 

In single rows they lay the dead, 

Long files of corpses grim, 

Each ghostly face upturned is seen 

By the light of the torches dim.” 

The “Charnal House,” in Sunset Gleams from the City of the Mounds (New York, 1852). 

Above: Mid-nineteenth-century bottle of 

“Wm. Hall’s Cholera Cure”. 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR’S ARTIFACT COLLECTION. 

Opposite, top: “Great Fire of the City on 

the 17th and 18th May 1849,” lithograph 

by Julius Hutawa (1849), showing the 

downtown areas destroyed. 


ST. LOUIS (888). 

Opposite, bottom: A “Laclede Brick,” 

of St. Louis, age unknown, one of several 

companies that made the city’s clay 

pits, busy brickyards, and decorative 

architectural details famous for more than a 

century following the Great Fire of 1849. 



66 

That grand spectacle of parades and 

patriotic speeches would not be repeated 

anytime soon, because, only two years later, 

St. Louisans were preoccupied with present 

tragedies that took precedence over past 

triumphs. In 1849 the city endured simultaneous 

catastrophes that left residents more 

mournful than celebratory. A major epidemic 

of Asiatic Cholera raged for nine months, 

beginning slowly in January and peaking in 

July—when 639 people died of that disease 

in a single week, 145 in one day—including 

most likely old Pierre Chouteau. Semi-official 

death tolls ranged from 4,283 to 4,547, but 

some residents claimed that the “Board of 

Health doesn’t report one half of the cases.” 

Large numbers of dead children may have 

been undercounted in the traumatic confusion 

to collect and dump corpses in “a common 

trench” as quickly as possible. Many 

would be reburied in the new Bellefontaine 

Cemetery, with little effort for a more 

accurate accounting. Since 3,268 Catholics, 

alone, were buried in 1849, a total minimum 

death toll of 5,500 (almost 8 percent of the 

population) was most likely. Some estimates 

of mortality range as high as 10 percent, but 

whatever the headcount, most historians 

agree that St. Louis suffered a greater mortality 

in 1849 than any other city in the nation. 

May 1849 would claim 431 cholera victims, 

but that tragic news was eclipsed in the middle 

of the month when a huge, devastating fire 

erupted among dozens of densely-packed 

steamboats along the levee, destroying 23 of 

them and 9 other vessels. High winds drove 

the flames into city streets, and over ten 

hours consumed 430 buildings in a fifteenblock 

area of the downtown core, from the 

Levee to Second Street, between Spruce and 

Locust. The central post office was lost, but 

the cathedral was spared by brave citizens 

who blew up nearby buildings to create 

firebreaks before the flames reached that 

sacred site. The heroic Irish fireman, Thomas 

Targee, died doing so—one of only three 

fatalities. Total property losses amounted to 

$6,000,000—$502,000 for buildings, $600,000 

for boats and cargoes, and $5,000,000 for 

merchandise in warehouses. The fire exacerbated 

the perennial lack of housing for the 

88 percent of residents who rented in a tiny 

city of only 4.78 square miles (3,060 acres). 

The eminent German immigrant, Henry 

Boernstein, observed that the “Great Fire” 

had left the “richest and busiest part [of 

St. Louis] in ashes and ruins, considerably 

outbidding the cholera in horror.” 

Both the contagion and the conflagration 

left the “unhappy city” in grief and disbelief, 

with fewer citizens to recall now-obliterated 

old landmarks and dear friends. 

But residents rebounded with resilience 

from those twin tragedies with a progressive 

spirit and aggressive action. They constructed 

new buildings with fire-resistant cast iron 

exteriors and locally-made bricks, and 

increasing numbers of new structures—such

as the six-story Barnum’s Hotel in 1854— 

rose higher than ever to make more efficient 

use of restricted space. Officials drained 

the polluted Chouteau’s Pond; improved 

sanitation and water quality; and created new 

medical facilities, fire-fighting capabilities, 

and quarantine policies. According to the noted 

German scientist, Dr. George Engelmann, his 

adopted city was “the center of North America, 

if not the world…. We burn one third of our 

steamboats, destroy one tenth of the wealth 

of our citizens in one night, kill one tenth by 

cholera…only to show how much we can 

stand without succumbing.” 

St. Louis survived those natural disasters, 

but human prejudices and political divisions 

over race relations drove it to the brink of 

“succumbing” in the next two decades. At 

mid-century, St. Louis had 2,636 African 

American slaves (3.4 percent of the city’s population) 

and 1,400 free blacks (1.8 percent). 

The latter included a thriving middle class 

of African American entrepreneurs, such as 

Elizabeth Keckley (later dressmaker for Mrs. 

Lincoln), who operated successful businesses, 

owned property, and collected rents from 

blacks and whites alike. Cyprian Clamorgan, 

from an old mixed-race family of French 


6 7

Selling people at the courthouse, as depicted 

in the oil painting, The Last Sale of Slaves 

(c. 1880), by Thomas S. Noble. 


ST. LOUIS (1939 003 001). 


68 

Caribbean Creoles, introduced those startling 

revelations to the public in his 1858 book, 

The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. 

The relatively “mild” type of “householdservant 

slavery” that had existed under the 

colonial French and Spanish became a more 

severe form of chattel slavery under the 

Americans. In his famous 1847 autobiography, 

William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave 

from St. Louis, wrote that the “city did not 

look or function like a plantation,” but “the 

same omnipresent, oppressive social system 

prevailed.” The city shared the prejudices 

of its Deep South trading partners and 

auctioned slaves on the courthouse steps. 

Evidence of the infamous “slave pens” that 

held such human inventory remained until 

1963, when construction of Busch Stadium 

finally obliterated that scar on the downtown 

landscape. St. Louis slaves were prohibited 

from assembling in public, meeting at night, 

or drinking alcohol and received ten lashes 

on the bare back for each offense. White 

males over the age of eighteen were required 

to serve on community “patrols” to enforce 

those regulations. 

Fearing that slaves “would be rebellious” 

was an admission that African Americans and 

whites shared the same rational human desire 

for freedom, opportunity, and respect. In 1847 

a wealthy St. Louis businessman offered a $200 

reward for the capture and return of a slave 

couple he had owned for fifteen years. He 

seemed shocked that they were so discontented 

as to escape with their three children, 

aged 4, 6, and 12. The husband was “of good 

address,” carried “an ivory headed cane,” and 

probably arranged to reach Chicago by 

“covered wagon.” His wife and most of the 

children were described as “bright” and 

wearing some new clothing. Blacks, both 

slave and free, received assistance and

encouragement from Baptist minister John 

Berry Meachum, a former slave who founded 

St. Louis’s first African American church in 

1822. He operated a secret school for blacks, 

while his wife, Mary Meachum, was a conductor 

on the Underground Railroad, helping 

escaped slaves cross the Mississippi River to 

reach freedom in Illinois. 

The free blacks in St. Louis were “only 

half-free.” After being incorporated as a town 

in 1809, some of the earliest ordinances 

dealt with keeping blacks “in line.” State law 

prohibited free blacks from coming to settle 

in Missouri; learning to read and write; and 

assembling in groups. Due to their mobility 

and wider range of experiences, African 

Americans who had never been slaves were 

a greater concern for the white majority 

than slaves. German and Irish immigrants 

resented them as competitors for jobs, since 

they often worked for lower wages. But 

prominent citizens were more concerned 

with security issues. In March 1835 the 

state legislature required all free blacks in and 

surrounding St. Louis to obtain a license 

from the county court, and 145 did so fairly 

quickly, according to Christine Human 

Hughes. But on Halloween night of that year, 

Robert Wilkinson, a free black barber, who, 

ironically, worked at the Southern Hotel. 

Daguerreotype portrait by Thomas M. 

Easterly, c. 1860. In the decades following 

McIntosh’s murder, such middle-class 

African Americans had more to fear 

than most slaves because their economic 

independence and freedom of movement 

threatened rabid racists. 


ST. LOUIS (17221). 


6 9

leading residents from diverse cultural 

backgrounds met to discuss more stringent 

controls over free blacks. William Clark, 

Pierre Chouteau, Sr., Pierre Chouteau, Jr., 

Sylvestre Labbadie, Henry Von Puhl, Dr. 

Samuel Wherry, William Ashley, and riflemaker 

Samuel Hawkins sought to expel free 

blacks who had not been born in St. Louis or 

no longer had family ties here. 

Just a few months later, on April 28, 1836, 

such seething prejudices erupted most 

publicly when a large white mob, including 

two mayors and other prominent politicians, 

participated in the “revolting spectacle” of 

a “human bonfire.” The victim was Francis 

McIntosh, a free mulatto steamboat steward, 

who, being threatened with death during 

an arbitrary arrest, had killed one constable 

and severely slashed another. Outraged 

citizens grabbed McIntosh from jail, chained 

him to a downtown tree, and burned him 

alive, cheering and jeering at his agony. The 

“disfigured” and “roasted” corpse remained as 

a gruesome warning to all blacks who dared 

to assault whites, and tourists for many years 

cut off slivers of the charred execution tree as 

grisly souvenirs. 

Most newspapers feared that such repulsive 

violence had “damaged the fair fame of 

our town,” but defended the lynch mob for 

preserving the peace amid the growing 

paranoia about Nat Turner’s 1831 Virginia 

massacre of whites and northern abolitionist 

condemnations of slavery. Judge Luke 

Lawless (well named) found no individual 

guilty of murdering McIntosh, because so 

many people had participated. Community 

consensus against black violence seemed to 

justify even the most horrific white vigilantism. 

Elijah Lovejoy’s St. Louis Observer joined 

the northern press in condemning the judge’s 

“monstrous” leniency of a public atrocity. 

Hateful residents attacked the messenger 

who reminded them of their shame in a 

not-so-civilized city. Lovejoy moved to Alton 

for his own safety, but he was repeatedly 

attacked there, too, for his growing antislavery 

opinions. A mob murdered him in 

November 1837. Following those bloody 

tragedies, new Missouri laws prohibited the 

circulation of abolitionist publications and 

required black steamboat crews to be jailed 

until their vessels departed. 

Because St. Louis “had earned a national 

reputation for barbarism” and judicial 

malfeasance, city officials strictly adhered to 

due process in 1841, ensuring that a slave 

and three free blacks accused of murder 

received a competent defense in a fair trial. 

But after their convictions, a huge crowd, 

exaggerated as “75 percent of St. Louisans,” 

thronged to witness their executions. A boat 

company advertised tickets for a passage 

to Duncan’s Island to see the spectacle of 

“Four Negroes Executed.” The need for white 

citizens “to instill fear and obedience in 

blacks” then prompted a “macabre display, 

for several days, of the heads of the four men 

in the front window of Corse’s Drug Store at 

69 North First Street.” 

Historian Julie Winch wrote that city 

“authorities were far from happy that a free 

community of color existed at all,” and a 

St. Louis Anti-Abolition Society was founded 

in 1846. According to Adam Arenson, “as a 

booming metropolis in a border state, St. Louis’s 

demographic stew mirrored the nation’s 

regional, political, and ethnic diversity as no 

other city did,” making it “a place of lively 

contradictions.” Even the complex and 

divisive issue of race, however, had to 

have an unequivocal, eventual resolution. 

Otherwise, how could St. Louis, the cultured 

and affluent “great heart of the Republic,” 

claim to be a civilized city while treating its 

African American residents so brutally? 

In 1847, St. Louis was illuminated by 

gaslights for the first time, but that year was 

a dark one for the married city slaves, Dred 

and Harriet Scott, and their two daughters. 

They were suing for their freedom, since 

they had been taken from Missouri to live in 

Illinois and other free states where slavery 

was illegal. They were very brave to take on 

a racist system, especially considering the 

public violence of the previous decade. 

Entering a courtroom just a few steps from 

where slave sales were held symbolized the 

great odds against them. The Scotts lost their 

suit on a legal technicality, but a retrial freed 

them on January 12, 1850, only to have 

the Missouri Supreme Court overturn that 


70

verdict two years later. The U.S. Supreme 

Court made its famous ruling on March 6, 

1857, denying freedom for the Scotts and 

declaring that all African Americans, even if 

free, did not have the rights of U.S. citizens. 

Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision also 

nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820 

by ruling that Congress never had the 

authority to exclude slavery from any state or 

territory. Dred Scott and his family would 

be freed by a new owner two months later, 

but in the years ahead, racial politics heated 

up, since all of the West was now open to 

the legal, and virtually unlimited, spread 

of slavery. 

The Dred Scott Case focused national 

attention on St. Louis, where polarizing 

ideologies clashed in efforts to dominate city 

Oil portrait of Dred Scott by Louis Schultze 

(1888), based on the famous print published 

in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 

June 27, 1857. 


ST. LOUIS (1897 009 0001). 


7 1

Abolitionist map of Free and Slave states— 

with Missouri in the middle—revealing 

nineteenth-century propaganda in an 

old school textbook. 



72 

politics. On the eve of the Civil War, St. Louis 

was a populous metropolis of 160,000 people—the 

sixth largest city in the United 

States, with annual manufactures worth 

$27 million, seventh highest in the nation. 

But St. Louis’s central location, which had 

long given it an economic advantage, now 

became a political liability, as northern and 

southern, eastern and western, interests 

clashed there. As prolonged violence erupted 

in nearby “Bleeding Kansas,” and threats of 

secession grew, St. Louis’s profitable river trade 

with the slave South seemed increasingly 

“disreputable” to the city’s Yankee businessmen. 

Many moved their money and often 

their residences to the slave-free city of 

Chicago, which also offered new investment 

opportunities in railroad routes to northeastern 

states. By 1860 only 24 percent of 

entrepreneurs from New York and New 

England remained in St. Louis, and their 

investments in the city plummeted to a mere 

13 percent. Liberal antislavery sentiments, 

however, continued to thrive among Eliot’s 

abolitionist Unitarians and well-educated 

German radicals, who published 40 percent 

of the city’s newspapers. 

Anti-secessionist St. Louisans embraced 

eastern influences that increasingly linked them 

to Illinois and other free states—challenging 

Missouri’s rural “Little Dixie” counties with 

slave populations of at least 25 percent. 

In 1861 the city’s mayor was a “Union, 

Anti-Black Republican,” and while leading 

St. Louisans supported a variety of national 

political parties, most were moderates who 

wanted to expand economic opportunities 

for whites without promoting freedom for 

slaves. But they certainly did not want slavery 

to spread. As early as 1857, Benton disciples 

Gratz Brown and his cousin, Francis Preston 

(“Frank”) Blair, Jr., supported a very gradual 

emancipation of Missouri slaves, but above 

all, they wanted to keep the state in the 

Union. When they and Virginia-born Mayor 

John Wimer won elections that year, Brown 

proclaimed that St. Louis was now “The Free 

City of the Valley of the Mississippi.” 

In the 1860 presidential election, even 

supporters of Abraham Lincoln were divided 

into conservative and radical factions over 

racial issues. He won the city—9,483 votes 

to 8,538 for the moderate Illinois Democrat, 

Stephen Douglas. But St. Louis voters overwhelmingly 

rejected Southern extremism, 

casting only 544 votes for the pro-slavery 

Southern Democrat, John C. Breckinridge of 

Kentucky. Arenson observed that “St. Louis… 

[was] the largest city in a slave state to vote 

for” Lincoln, and its citizens also reelected

President Lincoln’s Cabinet in early 1861, 

with Postmaster-General Montgomery Blair 

(top left), and Attorney General Edward 

Bates (top center) representing twenty 

percent with St. Louis connections. 

Engraving from Horace Greeley, 

The American Conflict: A History of 

the Great Rebellion…(Hartford, 1866). 


7 3

A Confederate envelope retrieved after the 

capture of Camp Jackson on May 10, 1861. 

The letter inside was dated the day before 

and included secessionist sentiments of the 

writer, perhaps Captain George West, 

a “Minute Man” of the Missouri Guard, 

to his brother. 


ST. LOUIS (D4592). 


74 

him in 1864 with support comparable to 

that of Philadelphia. Blair’s older brother, 

Montgomery, had been one of Dred Scott’s 

lawyers and would soon join Lincoln’s 

cabinet, while Brown became a U.S. senator 

in 1863. St. Louisan Edward Bates served as 

Lincoln’s attorney general in his first term, 

while his brother-in-law, Hamilton Gamble, 

helped keep Missouri in the Union as acting 

governor from 1861 to 1864. 

When Lincoln took office in March 1861, 

seven Southern states had already seceded, 

and a special state convention met at the 

Mercantile Library to determine whether 

Missouri should stay in the Union. It would 

for now, by a vote of 70 to 23, because 

secession was considered too radical a choice 

to make that early. However, Missouri’s 

new Southern-leaning, pro-slavery governor, 

Claiborne Fox Jackson, rejected President 

Lincoln’s call for state troops to defend the 

Union, and Jefferson City took control of the 

police in St. Louis City to block antislavery 

activity. St. Louisans were hardly united, 

however, and they organized rival pro- and 

anti-slavery militias that reflected their 

cultural diversity. 

Rich French families, lower-class Irishmen, 

and farmers from Little Dixie organized as a 

state militia of “Minute Men” to oppose a 

“tyrannical” federal government and raised 

secessionist flags above the courthouse and 

the old Berthold Mansion of “plantation 

architecture.” Frank Blair countered those 

pro-Southern forces by recruiting large numbers 

of German St. Louisans into the “Blair 

Rangers,” the “Black Rifles,” and especially 

the “Wide Awakes”—free-soil militiamen 

increasingly on the lookout for secessionists. 

With his Washington connections, Blair’s 

4,000 militiamen, almost all Germans, had 

been mustered in as U.S. soldiers under a 

new commander of the St. Louis Arsenal, 

Colonel Nathaniel Lyon. Supported by 

Lincoln, Lyon circumvented the authority 

of General William S. Harney, who had 

whipped one of his female slaves to death 

and was considered too sympathetic to the 

Confederacy’s need for armaments. 

As tensions mounted, both pro- and antisecessionists 

focused on the St. Louis 

Arsenal. Founded in 1827, it was the “largest 

military storehouse in the slave states” by 

1860, with many cannons, 60,000 muskets, 

1.5 million cartridges, and 90,000 pounds of 

gunpowder that would be invaluable for 

starting or thwarting rebellion. In March 

1861, the Missouri Militia under General 

Daniel M. Frost of St. Louis established 

“Camp Jackson” at the intersection of Grand 

Boulevard and Olive Street, where heavy 

cannons could bombard the Arsenal. He had 

an estimated force of 1,000 men, including 

300 strongly secessionist “Minute Men.” 

When a steamboat arrived with howitzers 

and siege cannons captured by Confederates 

from the federal arsenal at Baton Rouge, 

few doubts remained that “se-cesh” officials 

in Jefferson City intended to seize 

the St. Louis Arsenal. But Colonel 

Lyon was prepared. In late April, 

he secretly shipped most of his 

munitions across the river to 

Alton, in pro-Union Illinois. And 

in early May, he disguised himself 

as a woman, using a thick veil 

to hide his heavy beard, to spy on 

Camp Jackson. 

On Friday, May 10, 1861, Lyon 

successfully attacked Frost’s garrison 

with 6,000 troops—the vast 

majority being German “Home 

Guard” volunteers led by Blair, 

Henry Boernstein, Franz Sigel, and 

others. Surprised and overwhelmed

y superior numbers, General Frost surrendered 

Camp Jackson without a fight or a single 

casualty. But as Lyon marched hundreds of 

prisoners into crowded city streets, a huge, 

angry mob jeered the “Damned Dutch,” pelted 

them with rocks, and fired pistols into their 

ranks. Lyon’s men suffered four killed and ten 

wounded, while three of the secessionists 

they were guarding also died. His troops 

responded with random gunfire that killed 

30 civilians—including one woman and five 

children—while as many as 50 other citizens 

suffered wounds. That civil(ian) war in the 

streets of St. Louis “cast a dark veil over an 

otherwise glorious day” for the Union cause. 

The carnage on what pro-Southerners called 

“Black Friday” was witnessed by future 

Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and William 

Tecumseh Sherman, who would see far worse 

atrocities to come. 

The “Camp Jackson Affair” was the only 

“battle” fought in St. Louis during the Civil 

War, while the rest of Missouri experienced 

another 1,161 engagements. Lyon, promoted 

to general, captured Jefferson City and 

Boonville, driving the secessionist state 

government into exile before he was killed at 

the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in August 1861. 

The support he had received from Free Soil 

Germans, Yankee abolitionists, and other 

anti-Confederate citizens gave credit to 

St. Louis as a liberal Union stronghold. Lyon’s 

initiative prevented Camp Jackson troops 

from expelling all free blacks from St. Louis, 

as intended by the governor’s racist police 

board. Instead, Major-General John C. Frémont, 

Senator Benton’s son-in-law, took command 

of the city and quickly issued an August 1861 

proclamation freeing its slaves. Although that 

emancipation was short-lived, given Lincoln’s 

priority to keep the key border state of 

Missouri in the Union, Fremont successfully 

imposed martial law in the city. That quelled 

most Confederate sympathizers by incarcerating 

“traitors” and spies in the Gratiot Street 

Prison, however unjustly. 

As Lincoln’s city on the Mississippi, St. Louis 

was invaluable to the northern cause in the 

West. It became the “Arsenal of the Union,” 

supplying 40 percent of all bullets to federal 

troops. At nearby Carondelet (soon to be 

annexed), the talented, self-taught engineer, 

James B. Eads, constructed the iron-clad gunboats 

Carondelet, St. Louis, Louisville, Pittsburg, 

and the larger, better-armed Benton. Those 

innovative vessels played prominent roles in 

General Grant’s attacks on rebel river forts, 

eventually leading to the fall of Vicksburg. 

Dividing the Confederacy ultimately made that 

former St. Louis resident the most successful 

Union commander in the East, as well as 

the West. 

The Eads Boatyard in Carondelet, 

showing the construction of Union gunboats; 

from a nineteenth-century publication, 

The Soldier in Our Civil War. 



7 5

On top is an amputation saw, with razorsharp 

edge on one side for cutting flesh and 

a serrated edge for cutting bone. Below are 

small, portable surgical instruments made 

by A. M. Leslie & Company, St. Louis, 

and owned by Dr. O. D. Fitzgerald of 

Ozark County, Missouri. 

CIVIL WAR MEDICAL EQUIPMENT FROM THE 


Four thousand soldiers from St. Louis died 

on both sides in the Civil War, but their city 

achieved great fame and a lasting legacy as a 

humane refuge free of the chaos and cruelty 

that gripped the rest of the state. Confederate 

guerrilla cavalrymen under William Quantrill 

and “Bloody Bill” Anderson shot, and sometimes 

scalped, unarmed Union soldiers. In 

retaliation, federal troops attacked civilians 

merely suspected of Southern sympathies 

and expelled some 20,000 residents from 

“Little Dixie” counties. Many ragged refugees 

found their way to St. Louis—homeless slaveowners, 

a thousand or so German farmers 

whom General Sigel saved from death by 

ruthless outlaws, and African Americans, 

slave and free, from every location. 

St. Louis was the most compassionate 

and accommodating of all slave cities in 

the wartime treatment of blacks. By 1863, 

the number of Missouri slaves had declined 

35 percent, to about 74,000, since a large 

number had escaped to the “promised land” 

of Lincoln’s capital in the West. St. Louis’s 

African American population tripled during 

the Civil War, approaching 10,000 by 1865. 

The city provided farm plots for ex-slaves 

to grow crops and generously funded the 

Freedmen’s Relief Society. African American 

refugees were housed, fed, and even schooled 

at Benton Barracks, along Natural Bridge 

Road, which was also a recruitment and 

training center for “Colored Infantry.” Before 

the war’s end, some 8,000 Missouri blacks 

enlisted in the Union Army to fight for the 

liberation of other African Americans. 

Freedom truly triumphed when Missouri 

became the first slave state to abolish slavery. 

It passed an emancipation act in St. Louis on 

January 11, 1865, by a vote of 65-4, almost a 

year before the Thirteenth Amendment was 

ratified. To impart lasting value to that freedom, 

St. Louis created five “Colored Schools” for 

1,600 students, naming them for famous black 

heroes—including Haitian slave revolutionaries, 

Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques 

Dessalines, and American astronomer Benjamin 

Banneker. Sumner High School, honoring the 

notable abolitionist politician, opened in 1875 

as the first public secondary school for African 

Americans in the West. By 1900, Missouri had 

the largest percentage of black elementary 

school students in the South—a hopeful sign 

that a formerly enslaved population would 

enjoy unprecedented opportunities for equality 

in the new century. 


76

Another humanitarian contribution of 

St. Louis was providing medical treatment 

to wounded soldiers of both sides during 

the Civil War. Eliot joined businessman 

James G. Yeatman and many others in founding 

the Western Sanitary Commission. Staffing 

a 2,500-bed hospital at Jefferson Barracks and 

funding fourteen other medical facilities, the 

Commission had treated over 60,000 soldiers 

by May 1864, with an admirable mortality 

rate lower than 10 percent. St. Louisans were 

truly concerned about hospitalized soldiers, 

and city newspapers published weekly lists 

of those who had died. Typical was the first 

week of November 1862, in which 73 of the 

74 deaths among 25 Confederate and 49 

Union troops occurred from disease (measles, 

dysentery, typhoid fever, and pneumonia), 

rather than wounds. 

Venerable Jefferson Barracks, which will 

turn 200 in 2026, is the place from the Civil 

War that best symbolizes St. Louis’s special 

role in that conflict. Some 200 senior officers 

who had been stationed there fought in the 

war, and its national cemetery that opened in 

Above: “An Ordinance Abolishing Slavery 

in Missouri,” lithograph by 

Theodore Schrader, 1865. 


ST. LOUIS (21818). 

Left: “Jefferson Barracks,” an 1866 

lithograph by Gast, Moeller and Company. 

COURTESY OF MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS (24694). 


7 7

Right: Title page of Our Nation’s Hero, 

a song honoring Ulysses S. Grant, with 

lyrics by Miss Ida Schott Taylor and music 

by Henry M. Butler, published by Balmer 

and Weber in St. Louis, 1885. 


Opposite: Pottery Booth at the Mississippi 

Valley Sanitary Fair at St. Louis, 1864. 

Stereographic photograph (half view) by 

J. A. Scholten. Shown next to the man 

with his back to the camera is Mrs. Adaline 

Couzins, an early local leader for female 

political equality. 

COURTESY OF MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS (51041). 


78 

1863 reunited many of them from among the 

16,000 burials. While the base hospital offered 

help and hope for wounded troops, former 

St. Louis army officers, Grant and Lee, also 

chose compassion over carnage by negotiating 

an end to the horrific slaughter. 

St. Louis philanthropists expanded the 

reach of their generosity by distributing more 

than $4.5 million outside of the city to care 

for soldiers and needy civilians throughout 

the nation. Residents raised about $600,000 

alone at the city’s Mississippi Valley Sanitary 

Fair of 1864. That unprecedented three-week 

exposition attracted thousands of attendees—including 

many African Americans— 

who, in a notable departure from segregationist 

traditions, were served refreshments 

without prejudice. 

St. Louis women who had been inspired 

by work in Western Sanitary Commission 

hospitals emerged as political activists for 

female rights in the postwar period. 

According to historian Lee Ann White, in 

1867 Virginia Minor was “the first person to 

take a public stand for woman suffrage in 

the state,” becoming a leading advocate in 

St. Louis from 1879 to 1892. Equally passionate 

was Mrs. Adaline Couzins, who served 

as a Civil War nurse for the Ladies’ 

Union Aid Society of St. Louis and was 

wounded at the siege of Vicksburg. She 

founded the Female Guardian Home of 

St. Louis while campaigning for female 

suffrage. Her precocious daughter, 

Phoebe Couzins, was a Civil War nurse, 

the second American woman to earn a 

law degree in the nation, and the first 

female to serve as a U.S. marshal. At the 

American Equal Rights Association convention 

in May 1869, she delivered a 

rousing speech advocating the vote for 

white and black women, because they 

were as deserving of legal equality as 

black men. Couzins remained an outspoken 

suffragist until her death in 1913. 

Following the Civil War, St. Louis’s 

humanitarian citizens continued to 

resolve social crises without governmental 

assistance. In 1879 the St. Louis 

riverfront became the temporary home 

to more than 6,000 ex-slaves, known 

as “Exodusters,” who fled the South 

to begin new lives as free farmers in 

Kansas. Black churches provided them 

with shelter and charitable assistance. 

Lincoln’s city on the Mississippi also 

played prominent roles in national 

politics in the postwar period. Grant, the 

hometown hero, served two terms as the 

Republican president from 1869 to 1877, 

while another St. Louis resident, Carl 

Schurz—the first German immigrant to 

serve in the U.S. Senate—opposed his 

Radical Reconstruction policies as leader of 

the new Liberal Republican movement. 

Several St. Louisans also advocated sweeping 

reforms of the state constitution, highlighting 

the traditional tensions between urban 

intellectuals and rural conservatives. As 

Wendell Phillips wrote in 1870, “if Missouri 

would back up St. Louis with a liberal 

policy…[it] would soon become…one of the 

great cities of the world.”


7 9

“One asked one’s self whether this extravagance [the World’s Fair] reflected the Past or imagined the Future; 

whether it was a creation of the old America or a promise of the new one…. 

[O]ne seemed to see almost an adequate motive for power; 

almost a scheme for progress.” 

–Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907 


EXPLORING THE WORLD’S FAIR CITY 

IN A RAILROAD ERA 

Train print from a nineteenthcentury 

newspaper. 


Between 1870 and 1920, St. Louis became a modern industrial metropolis—a rapidly 

expanding, technologically-sophisticated large city increasingly defined by its railroads, rather 

than its steamboats. River traffic did not end immediately or completely, however. St. Louis 

quickly restored its disrupted commerce with the Deep South soon after the Civil War, and in 

1878, the steamer Charles P. Chouteau set a Mississippi River record by transporting 7,818 bales 

of cotton, weighing some 2.5 million pounds, in a single trip. 

But the 737,000 tons of goods that reached the city by water in 1874 dropped to only 629,000 

tons in less than a decade. Twelve city companies owned 155 steamboats that continued to call at 

St. Louis after 1884, but the trend was to build bloated floating palaces for entertainment, rather 

than sleek, efficient commercial craft. One giant boat was 350 feet long and 101 feet wide, while 

a rival steamer had smokestacks 75 feet tall and side-wheels four stories high. Ironically the need 

for speed on the water, symbolized by the Robert E. Lee’s 1870 record-setting time of three days, 

eighteen hours, and fourteen minutes to cover the 1,200 miles from New Orleans, hastened the 

evolution of ever-faster trains. 


80

Once the Civil War ended, the energy of 

the nation was unleashed on westward 

expansion, thanks to congressional legislation 

that encouraged homesteading and the 

construction of railroads. The new Age of 

Locomotives transformed western landscapes 

with unbelievable speed; the first transcontinental 

railroad was completed in 1869— 

while the last surviving member of the Lewis 

and Clark Expedition was still alive! St. Louis 

had to act quickly to join that fast-moving 

transportation revolution or be left behind. 

Adventurous city entrepreneurs had 

invested in early railroads since the 1830s, 

and they were not long deterred by the 

shocking Gasconade Train Disaster of 1855. 

The renamed Missouri Pacific Railroad 

stretched to Sedalia by 1860, and it soon 

had tracks running to Pilot Knob, Macon, 

Hannibal, and St. Joseph. But the most lucrative 

routes had to connect to major eastern 

cities, and that required a bridge across the 

Mississippi—a daunting economic and 

engineering challenge for a city that still 

loved its steamboats. The St. Louis and 

Illinois Bridge Company was incorporated 

in 1864 with $1,000,000 in initial funding, 

but it was already too late. Chicago trains 

had been crossing the Mississippi River at 

Rock Island, Illinois, since the mid-1850s. 

Secure from the slavery controversies that 

“southern” St. Louis faced, Chicago benefited 

from a farming boom in northern Illinois 

and nearby Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. 

Train tycoons in New York and Boston 

assisted those farmers in reaching lucrative 

eastern markets by funding rail lines to 

Chicago. No matter what St. Louis’s capitalists 

did, they could not overcome the 

insurmountable geographical reality that 

had created an increasingly dominant rival 

“gateway to the West.” 

Nineteenth-century photograph of an overloaded 

cotton steamer. 



8 1

“Pont de Saint-Louis by H. Clerget and 

M. McAllister,” a nineteenth-century print 

of the Eads Bridge circulated in France. 



82 

Not even the big, beautiful, and brilliantlydesigned 

bridge of James Eads, which cost 

$10,000,000 and opened on July 4, 1874, 

could slow Chicago’s momentum. That 

formidable steel and iron structure stretched 

2,000 feet across the Mississippi, 55 feet 

above the high-water mark at mid-channel, 

and fourteen workers had died from decompression 

anchoring it into bedrock below 

25 feet of water and 80 feet of sand. That 

marvel of technological innovation achieved 

worldwide fame and has been an iconic 

St. Louis landmark ever since. But decades 

of delaying lawsuits between competing 

riverboat and railroad investors diminished 

its commercial impact at the time, leading to 

almost immediate bankruptcy. Bridge traffic 

increased St. Louis’s rail freight from 3,000,000 

tons in 1874 to almost 7,000,000 just nine 

years later. But Chicago had a large lead it 

never relinquished. 

That Midwestern urban competition has 

remained a distracting obsession in St. Louis 

ever since, but it was most intense in the half 

century after 1870. Among city leaders, the 

rivalry with Chicago led to both an excessive 

sense of inferiority and overly-exuberant 

expressions of superiority to compensate, 

often simultaneously! “In two decades,” 

wrote historian and shameless booster, 

Walter Stevens, “no other American city… 

adapt[ed] itself so quickly to such radical 

changes,” as St. Louis moved forward “with no 

loss of prestige to grasp new opportunities.” 

But there was lost prestige—and revenue— 

and to cure their city’s damaged pride, some 

St. Louis officials resorted to cheating. 

The Census of 1870 showed that Chicago’s 

population had increased 166 percent in one 

decade, but St. Louis waited to see the total 

for its rival and then topped it by 12,000 

fictitious people. St. Louis boosters trumpeted 

the news that their city of 312,963 was now 

the “fourth largest” in the United States, but 

an official investigation found those manipulated 

headcounts to be a “worthless fraud.” 

It was impossible to have gained 150,000 

new residents in a single decade, and 

St. Louis had a “nasty shock” in the Census 

of 1880, which added only 40,000 people—

dropping it to an accurate sixth place among 

American cities. “Such fraud and deception,” 

observed Arenson, “made St. Louis the butt of 

Gilded Age humor” and led some prominent 

residents to disassociate themselves from the 

embarrassed city. 

Despite, or because of, that scandal, a 

growing number of vocal locals initiated 

decades of exaggerated boasts about 

St. Louis. In 1870, the bombastic Logan 

Reavis published St. Louis: The Future Great 

City of the World, in which he argued that 

the national capital should be a dynamic 

commercial city at an ideal latitude in 

the center of America. In repeated editions 

over many years, he continued to argue 

that St. Louis was already the “undisputed 

metropolis of the Mississippi Valley,” having 

“grown from small beginnings to gigantic 

proportions” and was certainly capitalworthy 

as “one of the greatest, wealthiest, 

and most prosperous cities in the country.” 

Other St. Louisans promoted a “Million 

Population Club,” which projected a city 

population of at least 2,000,000 residents 

by 1890 and up to 12,000,000 by 1930! 

Not even the lowest estimate ever came close 

to being reached, but the city’s population 

did increase 29 percent between 1880-1890 

and by an additional 27 percent in 1900. 

Detail of the illustration, “Some Citizens 

of the ‘Future Great City’ of St. Louis,” 

published in the Every Saturday issue of 

October 28, 1871. Reavis appears at the 

top right margin. 


8 3

Below: Diagram of St. Louis City Limit 

Extensions and Population Growth, from 

Official Program of the Centennial 

of the Incorporation of St. Louis, 

October 3-9, 1909 (St. Louis, 1909). 

Opposite: Final stages in the destruction of 

the Great Mound. Daguerreotype, c. 1869, 

by Thomas M. Easterly. Giddy with a 

building boom that required the extension 

of downtown streets, St. Louisans destroyed 

the largest Indian mound, rendering that 

marvelous ancient landmark into fill dirt for 

the sake of “progress”—erecting equally 

expendable modern buildings. 


ST. LOUIS (17087). 

The 1880 Census was the first to separate 

St. Louis City’s population of 350,518 

from St. Louis County’s 31,888. The Missouri 

Constitution of 1875 authorized a division 

that would establish separate governments 

for each entity and define their boundaries. 

The controversial split with the county in 

1876 tripled the area of the city to 61.37 

square miles (39,276 acres), with 19 miles 

of north-south river frontage but less than 

seven miles stretching to the west. Those tiny 

boundaries have long been considered 

“a crippling deterrent to development.” But 

in 1876 residents were optimistic about 

how much larger their city was than before. It 

had annexed the Village of North St. Louis in 

1844 and experienced a growing population 

and booming prosperity in a mere 4.5 square 

miles until 1856. Even with the 1871 annexation 

of Carondelet, St. Louis occupied only 

17 square miles by 1875, so increasing its 

size 3.5 times in a single year seemed like a 

very generous windfall, giving the city plenty 

of room for expansion. 

Moreover, many St. Louisans relished the 

distinction of being one of a very few 

completely independent cities, free from 

county legislation, in the entire nation. 

Because those living outside the city had 

increased 410 percent from 1840 to 1850, 

St. Louisans wished to avoid the expense 

of administering a huge, rural county of 

558 square miles, which would dilute tax 

revenues for urban needs. By separating, 

proponents expected a lower tax rate, 

improved city services, and the acquisition 

of valuable county properties within the 

new city limits—especially the magnificent 

courthouse. There were risks either way, and 

the difficult task of composing ballot language 

required fifty-two planning meetings. Close 

election results led to charges of voter fraud, 

until a special commission finally ruled 

(some said arbitrarily) that the city-county 

divorce had passed by 1,253 votes and a 

home-rule city charter by 3,221 ballots. 

In a Gilded Age enamored of the 

Quantitative Ethic, in which bigger was 

better and more was better, St. Louisans 

invested heavily in a late nineteenth-century 

building boom worthy of a national capital, 

even if the prospects for that ambitious 

move were fading fast. St. Louis promoters 

forged ahead with internal optimism and 

external publicity to compensate for their 

wounded pride in not even being the 

economic and population capital of the 

Midwest. The city had not constructed a 


84


8 5

Above: The Exposition Building, from 

James Cox, St. Louis Through a Camera 

(St. Louis, 1893). 


Below: View of the Chamber of Commerce 

Building, from the New York Daily 

Graphic, January 21, 1880. 


major public building since the U.S. Custom 

House and Main Post Office opened in 1859, 

so the end of the Civil War provided an unrivaled 

opportunity to splurge on architectural 

and technological gems that expanded the 

city upward and outward. 

The 1871 Four Courts Building and City 

Jail was “one of the handsomest pieces of 

architecture in the West,” made of cream 

sandstone and “modeled after the Palace of 

the Louvre.” Occupying an entire city block 

bounded by Spruce and Clark and Eleventh 

and Twelfth Streets, it contained several criminal 

courtrooms, a grand jury chamber, and 

offices of the circuit attorney, chief of police, 

city marshal, and sheriff. That building also 


86

housed the Central Police Station, a gallows, 

a jail with a modern “shell of iron” (where 

visitors could gawk at the inmates), and the 

City Morgue (where “bodies of unidentified 

dead persons are exposed for three days”). 

The basement had a “Calaboose” for offenders 

rounded up in the “Hoodlum Wagon” for 

minor offenses: fast driving of carriages; 

placing bells or anything else on horses that 

could frighten them; public drunkenness; 

swimming in the river; serenading in the 

street; prostitution; indecent behavior near a 

church; or possession of deadly weapons, 

including slingshots. 

In 1874, the Merchants Exchange/Chamber 

of Commerce Building opened on Third Street 

and was immediately touted as “the finest 

structure in the world devoted to business.” 

Costing $1.5 million, that six-story edifice 

housed the Merchants Exchange Hall, a 

beautiful 221 foot by 62 foot room with a 

60 foot high ceiling, trimmed with walnut 

and mahogany. It was a popular location 

for many public events, including the Veiled 

Prophet’s Ball. Another business building— 

the Cotton Exchange Building on Main 

and Walnut—opened nine years later. 

Constructed of stone and pressed brick, that 

five-story structure cost $150,000 and was 

considered the “finest” such exchange in 

the country. 

In September 1884, the city opened the 

St. Louis Exposition Building and Music Hall, 

“one of the largest” such structures in the 

United States. Constructed of stone, 600 tons 

of iron, and 9,000,000 pressed bricks at 

a cost of $750,000, it occupied two city 

blocks between Olive and St. Charles along 

Thirteen and Fourteenth Streets. The building 

provided 280,000 square feet of exhibit 

space and had nine entrances to handle large 

crowds. Its Music Hall of 5,000 seats was 

cooled by “fresh air sent into the building 

by…an immense fan in the basement.” 

View of the Post-Office and Custom House 

Building, from the New York Daily 

Graphic, January 21, 1880. 



8 7


88

In 1890, the $3,000,000 Merchants Terminal 

Bridge became the city’s second railroad 

bridge, with a center span of 523 feet. By then, 

no steamboats could compete with St. Louis’s 

“18 railroads running an average of 200 passenger 

trains, carrying over 20,000 people—plus 

184 freight trains—daily,” with links to 25,000 

miles of tracks in all directions. The 1875 

Railroad Depot at Poplar and Twelfth—rendered 

obsolete in only fifteen years—was replaced in 

1894 by the massive Union Station, where 

32 rail lines converged. Modeled after a castle 

in southern France, the masterpiece of architect 

Theodore C. Link cost $6.5 million and was the 

largest and most modern such facility in the 

world, twice the size of Boston’s main railroad 

terminal. Farther down Market Street, the massive 

City Hall—in French Revival Renaissance style 

“similar to the Hotel de Ville of Paris”—opened 

in 1904 (not in time for the World’s Fair). 

Private entrepreneurs also constructed 

fourteen major buildings, costing $8,000,000, 

by 1892. The Security Building and the 

Equitable Building each reached heights 

of ten stories. But the most innovative 

“skyscraper” was Louis Sullivan’s gorgeous 

Wainwright Building of 1891, still regarded 

as an architectural masterpiece. The Chamber 

of Commerce claimed that St. Louis had 

“erected more buildings in 1891 than any 

other city on the continent and offers the 

safest and best investment to be found in any 

other large city in the world.” The number of 

building permits issued by the city revealed 

both quantitative and qualitative progress in 

only fifteen years: 

Opposite: Union Station as it appeared in a 

1904 photograph by A. W. Sanders. 

REPRODUCTION FROM THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 

Above: Skyscrapers, from Cox, St. Louis 

Through a Camera (1893). 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION 

Total Built Cost Brick or Stone Frame 

1876 1,825 $3.5 million 1,361 464 

1884 2,609 7.3 million 1,989 620 

1891 4,435 13.3 million 2,976 1,459 


8 9

Newspaper boy and businessman; print 

of early twentieth-century St. Louis 

street scene. 



90

W H O A C T U A L L Y B U I L T S T . L O U I S ? 

St. Louis in the late nineteenth century was praised as a “vast and busy workshop,” where the “products of industry are not only 

bought, sold and handled,” but were actually “made here.” Business tycoons and political leaders receive all of the credit for the 

productivity of industrialization, overshadowing the indispensable contributions of the men, women—and child—laborers of every age 

and race who actually performed the dirty, dangerous tasks that created modern cities. The success of steamboat commerce over many 

generations depended upon thousands of black “roustabouts” who did the heavy lifting along the St. Louis levee. Praise for the 

renowned Eads Bridge obscures the many workers who died in building it. In the early twentieth century, the United States had the 

highest rate of industrial accidents on the planet, with workplaces killing 11,000 employees and injuring (often maiming) another 

1.4 million in 1917 alone. 

In the Gilded Age of rapid industrial expansion, the richest one percent of Americans owned fifty percent of the nation’s wealth. 

In contrast, St. Louis’s 70,000 adult male factory workers earned an average annual wage of only $635, compared to the yearly salary 

of $1,000 for the policemen who arrested strikers. The 13,500 women older than fifteen who worked in manufacturing were only paid 

an annual average wage of $268, while 2,300 child factory workers averaged a meager $168 for twelve months of work. 

Like other large industrial cities, St. Louis “had not served the poor well” for decades, amid “wage cuts, chronic hunger and 

unemployment.” In contrast to the mansions of economic elites situated far from the inner city, unskilled workers lived in overcrowded, 

unhealthy, and crime-ridden tenements or “shanties” in “Clabber Alley,” “Wildcat Chute,” “Happy Hollow,” and other blighted 

neighborhoods, where smoky air, impure water, poor sanitation, and deficient diets shortened lives. 

Black levee workers portrayed in a late 

nineteenth-century Scribner’s Magazine 

article on St. Louis steamboats; from the 



9 1

F A S H I O N A B L E 

M A N S I O N S 

This page and opposite: Author’s composite of fashionable mansions, 

from James Cox, “St. Louis the Carnival City of America,” in 

Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, XXXIII No. 6 (June 1892).. 


92


9 3

T H E P L E A S A N T D I S T R A C T I O N S O F S P O R T S 

In the early twentieth century, most Americans associated the popular ditty, “First in Shoes, First in Booze, but Last in the American 

League,” with St. Louis’s famous beer, its world-leading manufacture of footwear, and the hapless “St. Louis Browns” baseball team, 

which finished at or near the bottom of the American League twenty-six times in fifty years. But as the previous “Brown Stockings,” 

under the ownership of beer baron Chris Von der Ahe, the original team won four successive pennants from 1885 to 1888. St. Louis 

was the center of the baseball world in 1886, when the Spink brothers founded The Sporting News here, the “Brown Stockings” won the 

pennant, and the “St. Louis Stars” were champions of the Negro League. 

“First in Shoes, First in Booze, and Last in 

the American League”—visualizing that 

famous slogan with early twentieth-century 

items photographed by the author from his 

collection: a woman’s high-top boot from the 

famous Brown Shoe Company, a bottle of 

“Columbia Weiss Beer,” with ceramic 

stopper, and a replica cap of the old 

St. Louis Browns Baseball Team. 

St. Louis’s population in 1890 reached 

451,770—an increase of 100,000 in a single 

decade to make it the fifth ranking U.S. city. 

It was now 3.5 times larger than any other 

Missouri municipality and had eclipsed the 

populations of much older cities, such as 

Boston and Baltimore; bested its Ohio River 

rival, Cincinnati; and dwarfed its “mother city” 

of New Orleans. St. Louis now had 250,000 

more residents than Washington, D.C., which 

defiant boosters loved to advertise. But with 

severely constricted boundaries, St. Louis 

would never catch Chicago, now the second 

largest city in America. It had recovered 

remarkably quickly from the devastating 

fire of 1871, which had destroyed 13,500 

buildings, worth $186,000,000, and left 

about 100,000 citizens homeless. By 1890, 

however, St. Louis’s northern rival had over 

1,000,000 residents living in 182 square 

miles—120 of them recently annexed from 

surrounding suburbs. 

Nonetheless, St. Louis was doing quite 

well in a much smaller space. By 1892, it 

had become a “vigorous and progressive 

modern city”—“cosmopolitan in every sense 

of the word,” according to contemporaries. 

Boosters claimed that in only three decades, 

its “manufacturing output showed a greater 

increase than any other city in America”: 

Year Factories Capital Invested Workers Value of Products 

(millions) 

(millions) 

1860 1,126 $12.7 11,737 $27 

1880 2,984 $50.8 41,825 $114.3 

1890 6,148 $141 82,911 $229 


94

But the desperate discontent of industrial 

laborers became evident in the Great Railroad 

Strike of 1877, as some 40,000 workers across 

the country protested layoffs and drastic 

wage reductions. According to Primm, “for 

four days in late July, St. Louis was the scene 

of the first true general strike in the nation’s 

history.” Some 5,000 workers seized railroad 

facilities and stopped all freight traffic; 

pledged solidarity with black levee workers; 

and marched through a downtown of 

shuttered stores as a brass band played the 

Marseillaise, evoking haunting memories of 

the bloody French Revolution. The strikers 

“ruled the city” temporarily, forcing the closure 

of “nearly every manufacturing plant, large or 

small.” But wishing to avoid the fatalities 

that had occurred in Chicago and other cities, 

73 strikers surrendered peacefully to a large 

police force on July 26, thus ending the strike 

without realizing their goals. 

Despite its problems of class inequality, 

St. Louis’s commercial expansion made contributions, 

literally and figuratively, to a sophisticated 

civic culture. Pierre Laclede would have 

marveled at the intellectual achievements of 

his city in 1890. Having pioneered public 

secondary education west of the Mississippi, 

the city four decades later was “acknowledged 

to have the best public-school system in the 

United States,” as readers across the country 

learned in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. 

St. Louis operated 106 public schools, employing 

1,254 teachers, who instructed 60,000 students. 

There were also 85 parochial schools, 

35 academies and colleges, 15 libraries, a new 

art museum, 61 artists, 225 music teachers, 

and 150 book printers. Residents kept abreast 

of current affairs in the city’s 37 newspapers, 

and alert, humane citizens supported a wide 

variety of public facilities to care for orphans, 

the poor, the blind, the elderly, and the insane 

in 47 different “asylums,” plus two “female 

night refuges” for abused or abandoned 

women. St. Louis was also home to 800 

physicians serving in 23 hospitals. 

Citizens supported charities as members 

of 850 civic organizations and fraternal 

societies. In 1892, St. Louisans worshipped 

in 51 Roman Catholic churches (up eight 

since 1884), as well as in 33 Presbyterian 

churches, 23 Congregational, 23 Methodist, 

22 African American, 18 “miscellaneous” 

(including a “Chinese Sunday School”), 17 

Baptist, 15 German Evangelical, 14 German 

Lutheran, 13 Episcopalian, three Unitarian, 

and two Mormon, plus 9 Hebrew synagogues 

(up four since 1884). 

Residents who liked sweets patronized 

325 bakeries and 165 confectioners, while 

smokers had 442 different cigar makers to 

choose from. There were over 1,400 clothiers 

of all types, from tailors and dressmakers 

to wholesale merchants and retail stores. The 

city could accommodate 16,000 visitors a 

day in 60 hotels and 166 boarding houses, 

and meals were served in 70 restaurants, 

7 beer gardens, and 1,333 saloons. St. Louis’s 

27 breweries produced 56 million gallons of 

beer in 1891, up from only 14 million in 1871, 

with the total volume over those fifteen years 

exceeding 587,000,000 gallons. 

Business and political leaders before 1900 

enhanced the urban experience with environmental 

and cultural improvements that are 

still beloved by St. Louisans. Joining earlier 

recreational areas—Lafayette Park (1851), 

Missouri Botanical Garden (1859), and Tower 

Grove Park (1868)—on June 24, 1876, the 

1,380-acre Forest Park opened one day before 

Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little 

“Custer’s Last Fight,” an 1896 

chromolithograph, forty-two inches by 

thirty-six inches, by F. Otto Becker. 

Copyright @ Anheuser-Busch, LLC. 

Used with permission of Anheuser-Busch, 

LLC. All rights reserved. Adolphus Busch 

distributed this wildly inaccurate view of 

the 1876 “Battle of the Little Bighorn” 

to advertise the Budweiser brand, which 

was introduced the same year. This popular 

illustration represented masterful marketing 

and was reputedly displayed in thousands 

of taverns nationwide. 


9 5

H E N R Y S H A W : P L A N T I N G A L I V I N G L E G A C Y 

Henry Shaw Mausoleum in the Missouri 

Botanical Garden, from the Library of 

Congress online collection. Free use through 

Wikimedia Commons as the work product 

of a federal employee. 

Like Robert Campbell, Henry Shaw (1800-1889) was born in the British Isles, emigrated to 

St. Louis as a teenager, made a fortune in the western fur trade, and invested heavily in his 

adopted city to make it a more beautiful and cultured place for generations. Born in Sheffield, 

the English city renowned for its cutlery, Shaw partnered with his father and factory-owning 

uncle to import the knives and axes that were indispensable to Indians and mountain men. 

Not surprisingly, he also invested in a steamboat named Thames to remind him of his birth 

country. But Shaw became an American citizen on July 4, 1843, and soon after enhanced Tower 

Grove Park, surrounding his impressive Italianate country house with fountains, statuary, and 

gardens. A generous philanthropist, he consulted with the famous Royal Kew Gardens of 

London, botany professor Asa Gray of Harvard, and Dr. George Engelmann, a noted German 

scientist in St. Louis, to create the incomparable Missouri Botanical Garden and to endow plant 

research in the School of Botany at Washington University. 

Bighorn. Ironically, the city most famous for 

daring adventures in the western wilderness 

provided residents with a tamer taste of natural 

beauty—free of attacks from Indians or grizzly 

bears—in a public space larger than New York’s 

Central Park. “On the first summer day,” wrote 

James Cox in 1893, “the luxurious electric and 

cable street cars running to Forest Park carried 

no less than 105,000 passengers, while the 

cars running to Tower Grove, Lafayette and 

other parks were all over-crowded.” 

Long before Lindbergh’s flight, the “Spirit 

of St. Louis” was best reflected in the city’s 

superb historic hospitality—from hosting 

Indians in the colonial era to entertaining 

masses of affluent tourists in the railroad age. 

By 1892, St. Louis was nationally known as 

a prominent and popular “Carnival City,” 

offering many year-round attractions to 

visitors from near and far. While some 

committed boosters still believed that 

“St. Louis will one day become the greatest 


96

commercial center on the face of the earth,” 

most residents thought that being the 

undisputed industrial, financial, commercial, 

and population capital of the “Show Me State” 

was good enough to generate some “Come 

See Us” publicity throughout the Midwest. 

A broad appeal was made to “seeker(s) after 

pleasure”—temporary tourists—rather than 

corporate tycoons wanting to buy buildings. 

St. Louis offered “fine hotels and theaters, 

elegant public and private edifices, fairs 

and expositions, festivals and pageants, 

picturesque parks, well-paved, tree-shaded 

streets,” a transit system that was “the best 

in the world,” and “a thousand other 

advantages” that will “draw to the city such 

crowds of visitors as will in time repay the 

cost of the embellishments.” 

As booster James Cox observed in 1892, the 

city “has for many years been famous for its 

Annual Fair, for its Exposition, for its brilliant 

street illuminations, and for its magnificent 

Veiled Prophet parade. Those attractions have 

drawn hundreds of thousands of people to 

visit every fall, and its progressive citizens 

have decided for 1893 to eclipse every former 

effort in the annual festivities, and will 

illuminate the streets with electricity and 

miles of gas lit arches and pyramids.” The 

first Veiled Prophet Pageant debuted in 1878, 

and only six years later, was attracting 

500,000 people, who attended a massive 

public parade with elaborate floats and fireworks, 

while sponsors and local elites held a 

formal ball, where one of their debutante 

daughters was crowned queen. In 1884, 

the city began sponsoring a more public 

“St. Louis Exposition” each September, which 

featured a “grand street pageant” and a massive 

trade association display of local products. 

Above: Fairgrounds Park during the annual 

fair in 1871, from Every Saturday issue of 

October 14, 1871; print in the author’s 

collection. The Agricultural and Mechanical 

Fair, which St. Louisans held annually from 

1856 to 1902, “gained a worldwide 

reputation as…the greatest exhibition of its 

character on the continent” and convinced 

city leaders that they could pull off a world’s 

fair. After all, the Prince of Wales in 1860 

was impressed when he visited, and 

Fairgrounds Park at Grand Avenue and 

Natural Bridge Road only grew grander in 

future years—eventually encompassing 143 

acres, with a mile-long race track and an 

amphitheater that seated 100,000 people. 

Left: Veiled Prophet Poster of 1883. 



9 7

Washington Avenue, c. 1917. 

ORIGINAL PRINT COURTESY OF THE 



98 

St. Louis also built several large facilities for 

hosting major conventions, which became 

popular with national political parties for 

nominating presidential candidates. In 1876, 

Democrats met at the Merchants’ Exchange 

Building to choose Samuel J. Tilden; in 1888, 

Democrats returned, meeting this time at the 

new Exposition Hall, selecting Grover Cleveland 

for reelection; in 1904, Democrats came to the 

Coliseum to pick Alton B. Parker; and in 1916, 

that building again hosted the Democratic 

Party, which nominated Woodrow Wilson, 

amid protests by women seeking the vote. In 

the summer of 1896, the city established a 

precedent by accommodating conventions 

that chose both the winning nominee 

(Republican William McKinley) and the losing 

one (William Jennings Bryan), who ran for the 

People’s Party as well as the Bi-Metallic Party. 

At the end of 1892, James Cox published 

a nationally syndicated article and a wellillustrated 

photo album promoting the 

superior attractions of St. Louis. And at the 

same time, Sylvester Waterhouse, a Washington 

University history professor, published a 

short pamphlet that predicted a great future 

for the city. Their timing was impeccable, 

coming just before the onset of the 

Depression of 1893-1897 and at the beginning 

of the campaign by local boosters to 

have St. Louis host a world’s fair. 

More than a decade of planning was 

required to make the 1904 Louisiana 

Purchase Exposition and Olympic Games a 

reality. A decade before, at the peak of their 

civic enthusiasm, St. Louis officials had 

applied to host the “Columbian Exposition” in 

1892 to commemorate the 400th anniversary 

of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to 

the Western Hemisphere. Italian St. Louisans 

from “La Montagna” (“The Hill”) had been 

celebrating their national hero annually since 

1886. But Chicagoans began lobbying for 

the 1892 fair in 1885, and they became 

so obnoxiously boastful that a New York 

journalist called Chicago the “windy city” 

(as in “hot air”), which had nothing to 

do with breezes from Lake Michigan. 

Congressional approval and federal funding 

were granted to Chicago in 1890, but soon 

after, St. Louis became the leading candidate 

to host a world’s fair commemorating the 

Louisiana Purchase—beating out New Orleans 

for that honor. (St. Louis also got later 

revenge against Chicago when Olympic 

officials cancelled the Games there and 

moved them to the Gateway City.) 

At the forefront of St. Louis’s fair planners 

and promoters was Charles Pierre Chouteau, 

great-grandson of Pierre Laclede. He helped 

former St. Louis mayor and Missouri governor, 

David R. Francis, and other civic leaders

to raise $10,000,000 locally and $15,000,000 

altogether—the latter being the exact amount 

paid to Napoleon in 1803 for the Louisiana 

Purchase Territory. 

Even before the Columbian Exposition 

opened in 1893 (a year late), Horace H. 

Morgan published a book in St. Louis that 

provided a detailed preview of the Chicago 

fair. That served as a template of sorts for the 

1904 fair, and it was no accident that both 

global expositions had similar ornate architecture, 

temporary plaster construction, and 

a fascination with fountains, basins, electric 

lights, popular carnival entertainments, and a 

huge Ferris Wheel. And during the Columbian 

Exposition, the Autumnal Festivities Association 

of St. Louis did some crowd-poaching. In 

widely-circulated ads, “those attending the 

World’s Fair…[were invited] to secure 

transportation reading ‘via St. Louis,’ in order 

that a few days may be spent here either 

going to, or returning from, the Fair” in 

Chicago. St. Louis enticed prospective tourists 

by appealing to “all seekers after the new, the 

beautiful, the grand, and the picturesque.” 

From May to December 1904, St. Louis’s 

Louisiana Purchase Exposition and Olympic 

Games received the national and international 

attention that the city had long craved— 

being the ultimate tourist attraction before 

the Gateway Arch was built. And some 

620,000 St. Louisans did not squander the 

opportunity to showcase “a most inviting 

city.” They were willing and able to welcome 

P R O G R E S S C A M E A T A P R I C E 

St. Louisans were shocked and ashamed in 1904 when Lincoln Steffens, 

the famous “muckraking” journalist, published his expose, The Shame of the Cities. 

Not since the negative publicity of the “Whiskey Ring” crooks in the 1870s had city 

residents faced such sobering revelations. According to Steffens, “the corruption of 

St. Louis came from the top”—the “best citizens”—whose appetite for “boodle” 

(bribes) and the “Big Cinch” (illegal collusion of power-brokers) had made city 

and state politics dishonest and incompetent over several decades. “Public 

spirit became private spirit, public enterprise became private greed,” he wrote, 

and “everything the city owned was for sale by the officers elected by the people.” 

Traitors to the trust of citizens had done more damage to the prestige and 

progress of St. Louis than the Depression of 1893-1897, which the city had 

survived as the fourth largest industrial center in the U.S. But public utilities and 

construction projects all cost more due to expensive kick-backs and bribes— 

which tore at the urban core just when the World’s Fair City was advertising 

its beauty and efficiency. The “Big Cinch” was evident in the 1900 transit strike, 

as angry, poorly-paid workers assaulted scab trolley drivers, cut electric wires, 

and even dynamited tracks, while clashes with armed company goons left three 

dead and fourteen wounded citizens. 

Tackling rampant corruption was “Holy Joe” Folk, the Democrat circuit attorney, 

whose reform agenda was supported by Mayor Rolla Wells and newspaper editors, 

Joseph Pulitzer and W. M. Reedy. Folk’s aggressive attacks on corrupt politicians 

and their business cronies produced thirty-nine indictments, many convictions, 

and positive publicity in addressing Steffens’s criticisms. As governor from 1904- 

1908, Folk promoted modern regulations that made Missourians safer, better 

educated, and empowered to keep politics honest and more responsive, while 

Mayor Wells created a “New St. Louis” that was finally worthy of being a fair city. 

the world because St. Louis had welcomed 

them from every corner of the globe. Twenty 

percent of St. Louisans were foreign born, 

and another 42 percent had foreign-born 

parents, while only 32 percent of residents 

The Grand Cascade of the 1904 

World’s Fair. 

ORIGINAL PRINT COURTESY OF THE 



9 9

Map of the 1904 fairgrounds of the 

Louisiana Purchase Exposition. 



100


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102

were native Caucasians with U.S.-born parents 

and only 6.4 percent native African Americans 

with U.S.-born parents. Germans led the 

category of “second generation ethnics” with 

53 percent (fourth highest in the U.S.), 

while those of Irish descent represented 17.5 

percent of city residents (fifth nationally). 

Since 1870, 6,000 English, 5,000 Russian Jews, 

3,000 Poles, 2,700 Swiss, 2,600 Bohemians, 

1,800 Austrians, and 1,300 Canadians (more 

than at any time since the eighteenth century) 

had moved into the city. More recent immigrants 

had come from Sweden, France, Italy, 

and Scotland (at least 1,000 each), as well as 

former residents of Africa, Australia, Central 

America, Finland, India, and the Atlantic and 

Pacific islands. 

The 1904 World’s Fair was an incomparably 

massive, magical, and memorable celebration, 

with something to appeal to everyone. Its 1,270 

acres were fifty-nine times larger than London’s 

famous Crystal Palace Exposition of 1851; 

five times more extensive than Philadelphia’s 

Centennial Exposition of 1876; and exceeded 

the size of Chicago’s fair by 233 acres. Fortyfive 

states and U.S. territories, plus 43 foreign 

nations, constructed exhibit “pavilions.” The 

twelve huge themed “palaces” had 5,000,000 

square feet of interior space, while outside 

exhibits totaled over 6,000,000 square feet. 

The Fair also featured the “Inside Inn,” the 

first hotel operated by the famous Statler 

chain; an on-site hospital; a restaurant that 

could seat 5,000 people at a time; 1,200 

statues; 15 miles of track in a scenic railroad; 

448 concessionaires in the mile-long entertainment 

area known as the “Ten Million 

Dollar Pike;” and 70 miles of paved walkways 

connecting everything. Education was a 

major theme, which attracted 10,000 teachers 

from around the world. 

Like other expositions of the era, St. Louis 

celebrated the Progress, Power, Prosperity, and 

Prominence of sophisticated, industrialized 

Europeans and Americans when compared 

to the world’s “primitive dark-hued peoples.” 

St. Louisans had long forgotten their ancestors’ 

original opposition to the Louisiana 

Purchase, as they praised the benefits of 

“Manifest Destiny” from U.S. territorial 

expansion in the mid-nineteenth century to 

the current passion for international imperialism. 

The Fair appealed to self-confident, 

affluent whites who accepted the racial 

inequality inherent in Jefferson’s “Empire of 

Liberty” and embraced the more recent myth 

of Anglo-Saxon superiority then in vogue. As 

the Reverend Josiah Strong stated in his 1890 

book, Our Country, the “genius” of “superior 

Aryans,” who now dominated one-third of 

the Earth, was based on their Christianity; 

constitutional democracy; capitalism, and 

admirable aggression in “pushing into new 

countries.” That Methodist minister justified 

imperialistic conquests in Asia and Africa by 

assuming that it was “God’s plan to people 

the world with better material.” 

Given that ideology, Fair-goers were 

surprised to see the Apache war-chief, 

Geronimo, the indomitable guerrilla who had 

reluctantly surrendered his last thirty-six 

followers in 1886 even when surrounded by 

5,000 U.S. troops. He was temporarily 

released from prison to attend the Exposition 

because he now symbolized the “pacified 

Indian” and “behaved” accordingly. Whether 

he was sincere or not, the old and infirm 

“celebrity” Geronimo seemingly embraced 

capitalism by selling autographs and photographs, 

posing in an automobile, and even 

riding the huge Ferris Wheel. After viewing 

the “anthropological zoo” of so-called “savage” 

native peoples with “primitive” lifeways, 

the aged Apache rebel allegedly declared that 

many of them needed to learn “how to dress 

and how to behave.” 

Only about one percent of Exposition 

attendees were African Americans. The 

prevalence of segregated restaurants and the 

absence of exhibits about black progress 

made them feel unwelcome. A “Negro Day” 

or “Emancipation Day,” scheduled for 

August 1, 1904, when Booker T. Washington 

was to deliver an address, was canceled to 

placate white exhibiters and attendees from 

the Deep South. The Fair did employ large 

numbers of African Americans, and some 

black St. Louisans were pleasantly surprised 

that racial discrimination was not worse. 

The first Olympic Games held in the 

United States (only the third of the modern 

era) attracted 651 athletes—645 men and six 

Opposite: French Poster Advertising 

the St. Louis 1904 Exposition, 

1903 color lithograph by Czech artist, 

Alphonse Mucha. Circulated in France, 

this poster stimulated tourism by focusing 

on French St. Louis’s historic association 

with Indians. 

COURTESY OF THE SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM; GIFT OF 

ALICE P. FRANCIS IN MEMORY OF HER GRANDFATHER, 

DAVID R. FRANCIS, PRESIDENT OF THE LOUISIANA 

PURCHASE EXPOSITION (40:1969). 

Below: Silver Olympic medal from 1904. 

REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF THE 



1 0 3

women (all archers) from 12 nations. They 

competed in 18 sports between August 29 

and September 3. Americans comprised 523 

of the competitors and won 239 of the 

medals (78 gold, 82 silver, and 79 bronze); 

Germans won 13 medals, the second largest 

number. The St. Louis Olympics is most 

remembered for its oddities: a talented 

gymnast with a wooden leg, who won 6 

medals (3 golds) in one day; an all-Mohawk 

Indian lacrosse team; and a marathon won 

by a runner who received two doses of rat 

poison, brandy, and raw eggs during the 

race and beat a disqualified cheat who rode 

in a car for ten miles! More significantly, the 

St. Louis Games featured the first African 

Americans—hurdler George Poage and highjumper 

Joseph Stadler—ever to compete, and 

win medals, in any Olympics. 

Hosting a World’s Fair and the Olympic 

Games simultaneously was an unprecedented 

achievement for any city and has never happened 

since. Together, those events drew an 

official total of 19.7 million attendees, but 

that figure included only 12.8 million “paid 

admissions” and did not exclude employees 

who re-entered the fairgrounds each day. 

After exhaustive research, however, historian 

James Gilbert recently concluded that only 

4,000,000 “one-time different patrons” 

attended the St. Louis Exposition. (He also 

reduced the totals for the 1893 Chicago Fair 

from a claimed 27 million attendees to only 

5.5 million). While historians must challenge 

the self-serving totals supplied by sponsors 

(the man in charge of Fair publicity was 

called the “Director of Exploitation”), repeat 

visitors who were not employees or even 

St. Louis residents should be counted, since 

there were far too many attractions to see 

and things to do in a single day. 

Although critical about details, Gilbert’s 

book, Whose Fair?, concluded that the Louisiana 

Purchase Exposition was “the largest world’s 

fair ever held” and provided an “an immense 

and exhilarating experience for the city of 

St. Louis.” The patrician New England historian, 

Henry Adams, was less complimentary. He 

came to the Fair ten years after his last visit 

to St. Louis and found “everything new” in the 

city—except its “reeking smoke.” He thought 

the Exposition to be an “acutely interesting” 

creation of “a third-rate town” that lacked 

“history, education, unity, or art,” but “doing 

what London, Paris, or New York would have 

shrunk from attempting.” St. Louis “threw away 

thirty or forty million dollars on a pageant 

as ephemeral as a stage flat,” he wrote, and 

by holding that extravaganza in Forest Park, 

“the city had turned its back on the noblest 

work of nature”—the Mississippi River. 

Investments were far from wasted, however, 

since the Fair produced a profit of $600,000 

that the city used to construct the Jefferson 


104

Memorial Building as the home of the Missouri 

Historical Society; transform the Palace of Fine 

Arts into the Saint Louis Art Museum; build 

the World’s Fair Pavilion where the State of 

Missouri Building had stood; and cast the 

bronze Statue of Saint Louis. After the Fair was 

dismantled, the city also planted 75,000 new 

trees and shrubs and made other improvements 

in Forest Park. In addition, the Exposition’s 

massive and much-admired birdcage was later 

purchased from the Smithsonian Institution 

and remains a distinctive feature of the Saint 

Louis Zoo. The Fair also pumped millions of 

dollars into the local economy through wages, 

sales, the construction of twelve new hotels, 

and investments in city infrastructure, such as 

making Lindell, Skinker, and Kingshighway wellpaved 

modern streets. St. Louis finally cleaned 

up its infamous brown, gritty water—which 

Mark Twain quipped was too thick to drink and 

too shallow to plow—not for the health of longsuffering 

residents but to make the many 

Exposition fountains and other water features 

look better! But of all the legacies of that special 

season in the sun, the most beloved and enduring 

was the popular song, Meet Me in St. Louis. 

View of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition 

Grounds from the Ferris Wheel, 1904. 

STEREOGRAPH PRINT IN THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 


1 0 5

Above: Line of automobiles along Chestnut 

Avenue near Ninth Street as photographed 

in 1914. 

COURTESY OF THE SWEKOSKY COLLECTION, 

MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS. 

Right: Vintage 1907 ad for the “St. Louis” 

brand automobile. 



106

“St. Louis is a city that outgrew its past, and added half a million to its population 

after its early reason for existence had almost vanished.” 

–WPA Guide to the Show Me State, 1941 


EXPLORING URBAN CHALLENGES 

IN AN AUTOMOBILE AGE 

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was a chronological mid-point between the optimism of 

booming growth in the 1800s and the pessimism of looming crises in the late twentieth century. 

In 1904 the automobile age had barely arrived, and the slow, primitive car that carried one 

runner around the Olympic marathon course could not compare with sophisticated vehicles 

transformed by transportation technology in the following decades. The increasing speeds of 

each new model symbolized the rapid pace of social changes, as traditional norms faded as 

fast as the mythical fantasies of the World’s Fair. 

St. Louisans created a monster in 1904, temporarily believing that their city was better than it 

was. But the World’s Fair represented only a brief compensatory overconfidence of citizens with 

a prolonged inferiority complex. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition overshadowed almost 

everything that followed it—and those shadows were dark, indeed, making each new urban 

initiative seem puny and petty by comparison. Memories of the 1904 Exposition grew more 

grandiose and misleading over time, as the city’s future crises prompted comforting nostalgia 

for the good old days, increasing exasperation with the present. Politicians and city planners 

committed to the “City Beautiful Movement” and subsequent “Model City” initiatives soon 

realized that a few fake plaster buildings on a mere 1,200-acre fairground could not be translated 

into realistic, sustainable solutions to the complex problems of a large modern metropolis. 


1 0 7

Opposite: Poster (printed broadside) 

advertising the Pageant and Masque of 

St. Louis in Forest Park, May 28-31, 1914. 


ST. LOUIS (AO 181-7060). 

S T . L O U I S A N S O N T H E T I T A N I C 

The shocking reports of the Titanic disaster on April 15, 1912 had many 

Americans searching newspapers for information on local deaths among the 

1,500 victims. Fortunately, no St. Lousians were among the fatalities, although a 

Daniel Keane of Limerick, Ireland, drowned on his way to visit the city. Residents 

who survived that harrowing ordeal included these passengers, all traveling in 

first class: 

Mr. Spencer Victor Silverthorne, aged 35 

Miss Georgette Alexandra Madill, 16 

Miss Elizabeth Walton Allen, 29 

Mrs. Elisabeth Walton Robert (nee McMillan), 43 

Miss Emilie Kreuchen, 29, maid of Mrs. Robert 

Smitten by spectacle, St. Louisans hosted 

other celebratory events related to the city’s 

history in the decade after 1904, often as 

an antidote of fantasy to harsh realities. 

In October 1909, the city commemorated 

the centennial of its incorporation as a 

town, presenting multiple events during 

“One Hundred Years in a Week.” More than 

$85,000 in private donations funded parades, 

a grand illumination, a multicultural ball, 

children’s activities on Art Hill, the public 

dedication of the new Municipal Courts 

Building, plane flights by Glenn Curtiss, 

balloon ascensions, a water pageant featuring 

several U.S. Navy torpedo boats, and a 

huge banquet for four hundred mayors from 

thirty states. Organizers hoped “to use the 

Centennial cerebration as a lever for the 

extension of the city’s reputation,” and by 

displaying over 1,000 cars—the most ever 

assembled in the Mississippi Valley—that 

reputation was now focused on modernity 

as much as history. 

Only five years later, St. Louisans in 1914 

celebrated the city’s 150th anniversary. There 

had been no recognition of the St. Louis 

Centennial in 1864, due to the Civil War, so 

boosters sought to throw the biggest birthday 

bash ever. They had much to celebrate. 

The 1910 census confirmed that St. Louis 

remained the nation’s fourth largest city, 

having increased its population over 19 

percent for a total of 687,029. Some 590,000 

residents were gainfully employed, and every 

category of workers had risen dramatically 

(31 percent for children, 42 percent for 

women, and 24 percent for adult males). 

In a single decade, industrial investments 

had increased 15 percent to $269 million, 

and the value of manufactured products 

($430 million) had grown by 79 percent. 

Such prosperity contributed to the success 

of several expensive and grandiose events in 

the 1914 commemoration. Nearly 8,000 

residents performed in two huge dramatic 

productions on Art Hill for audiences that 

totaled 455,000 in only five May evenings. 

A Pageant, written by Thomas Wood Stevens, 

was a historical play that chronicled the area’s 

evolution from ancient Cahokia to the Civil 

War. In a more mystical Masque by east coast 

playwright Percy MacKaye, poetic dialogue 

between Louis IX, a character called “Cahokia,” 

and other cast members focused more on 

the city’s recent history and future prospects. 

The script emphasized how a new “League 

of Cities” in the Progressive Era could overcome 

the evil influence of “Gold” if citizens 

cooperated in promoting beauty and order, 

democratic reforms and humane institutions. 

But that play also recognized the inevitability 

of urban decline: “We, too, like Cahokia, shall 

lie down, /And this our city be a silent mound.” 

While some St. Louisans were optimistic 

about transforming “the sordid world” into 

delightful “dreams,” the absence of blacks in 

speaking parts and promotional materials 

undermined “Brother with Brother” idealism. 

The only lasting impact of those sesquicentennial 

dramas was the creation of the 

Municipal Opera (MUNY) in 1919 as a 

permanent, popular outdoor theater experience 

on summer evenings in the park. 

However, racism lasted far longer. African 

Americans were not welcome at MUNY 

performances until 1954 and the recentlydeceased 

Pelagie Green Wren, a descendant 

of Jacques Clamorgan, became the first black 

dancer at the MUNY only in 1962. 

The years that followed the idealistic 

public performances in 1914 tested the 

private prejudices of St. Louisans with regard 

to a revolution in race relations. Economic 

depression and Jim Crow oppression in 

the Deep South created the “Great Black 

Migration” in the early twentieth century. 

St. Louis was a favorite destination of fleeing 


108


1 0 9

Above: Team photograph of the St. Louis 

Stars, 1928 World Champions of the 

National Negro Baseball League. 

Photograph by L. H. Beckman, 1928. 


ST. LOUIS (22514). 

Opposite: Cover of sheet music for the 

Tuskegee March, 1906, by Professor 

William Blue, whose fifty-piece Shrine Band 

performed concerts in the St. Louis area. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DR. JOHN A. WRIGHT 

AND USED WITH HIS PERMISSION. 

African Americans, because it was the first 

major industrial metropolis they encountered 

traveling up the Mississippi, midway between 

the farms of the Deep South and the factories 

of the Far North. As the historic “Union city” 

located closest to Dixie, as well as a “Jim 

Crow” region farthest from the “real” South, 

St. Louis represented an agonizing disparity 

between its idealistic aspirations of the Civil 

War and pessimistic realities as of World War I. 

The city’s “polite racism” avoided the worst 

white supremacist violence and allowed 

integrated libraries and streetcars, but few 

other places, including schools. African 

Americans could vote for city officeholders, 

but not marry whites. 

Black St. Louisans increased from 35,000 

in 1900 to 80,000 by 1920, as African 

Americans doubled their percentage of the 

population to 9 percent by that latter date. 

In 1920, St. Louis had the eighth largest 

black population in the nation, and a decade 

later, the percentage of African Americans in 

the city reached 11.5—outnumbering foreignborn 

Caucasians for the first time. Increasing 

numbers of black migrants from different 

areas enriched St. Louis culture with new 

musical traditions, such as ragtime, jazz, 

blues, and later swing, that made the city 

famous. Old slave rhythms from cotton fields 

mingled with steamboat songs and creative 

piano playing to showcase the talents of Scott 

Joplin, Tom Turpin, Blind Boone, Joe Jordan, 

Louis Chauvin, Charlie Warfield, Roosevelt 

Sykes, Henry Townsend, and other entertainers. 

W. C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues and 

Bill Dooley’s Frankie Killed Johnnie were early 

musical “hits” nationwide. Charles Turpin’s 

Booker T. Washington Theater on Market 

Street featured famous performances by 

Eubie Blake, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and 

young St. Louisan, Josephine Baker, before 

she became a leading act at Les Folies Bergere 

in Paris. In James Weldon Johnson’s 1908 

song, Lift Every Voice and Sing, he expressed 

the optimism of fellow African Americans 

in the early stages of the Black Migration: 

“Sing a song full of the faith that the dark 

Past has taught us;/Sing a song full of the 

hope that the Present has brought us.” 

Such optimistic sentiments, however, did 

not reflect the despair of unfulfilled equality 

for blacks over the next century. The severe 

lack of available, affordable, and adequate 

housing, exacerbated by institutionalized racial 

segregation, became a perennial problem for 


110


1 1 1

Anti-Segregationist Voting Flyer, 1916. 



112 

throngs of African Americans over many generations. 

As early as 1911 white responses to 

the “negro invasion” led to zoning ordinances 

and collusions of exclusion by realtors and 

landlords. Historian Clarence Lang wrote that 

artificially restrictive housing patterns created 

a “Black Archipelago”—“islands of vibrant 

black social life surrounded by seas of white 

racism and hostility.” The situation worsened 

in 1916, when St. Louis became the first city 

in the nation “to pass a housing segregation 

ordnance through initiative petition and 

direct vote.” The segregationists won 52,220 

to 17,877 to further restrict blacks to only 

three areas of the city’s worst housing, even 

though 23 of 28 aldermen opposed the law. 

The U.S. Supreme Court struck it down, but 

restrictive covenants and private prejudices 

continued, leading to the creation of the 

Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis. 

Housing restrictions paled in comparison 

to the headline-grabbing massacre in East 

St. Louis. In 1917 that nearby Illinois 

community experienced “the most serious 

race riot of the century”—worse than 17 

other acts of wholesale violence in the U.S. 

from 1915 to 1919. White mobs slaughtered 

at least 100 people, almost all African 

Americans, and injured another 500 victims, 

young and old alike. Entire neighborhoods 

were ravaged, with 312 buildings destroyed. 

According to Ann Morris, “fires lit the 

night sky with a terrible glow as thousands 

[of black survivors] fled across the bridges 

to St. Louis, where city officials and the 

Red Cross provided help.”

World War I Red Cross Poster, 1917. 


While Americans had failed to solve 

interracial violence at home, they joined an 

overseas war in 1917 to curtail international 

violence abroad. Just as they had helped 

relieve the suffering of East St. Louis refugees, 

St. Louisans revealed their compassion in 

record-setting World War I food drives to 

help save starving Europeans. City residents 

managed to channel their patriotism in 

constructive ways, although there were some 

incidents of non-lethal hostility against 

citizens of German heritage. St. Louisans lost 

1,075 of their sons in the “Great War,” and 

city officials quickly planned to honor them 

with a permanent monument. But it took 

funding by the New Deal before the Soldiers’ 

Memorial on Chestnut Street finally opened 

in 1938. A monument across the street marks 


1 1 3

T H E H E A L T H O F T H E C I T Y 

Boosters in 1893 had declared that St. Louis was the “healthiest large city in America,” citing a below-average death rate of 21 people 

per thousand. But by 1900 fewer than 23 percent of St. Louisans owned their own residences, and the poorest households averaged 

seven people crammed into ramshackle, squalid tenements. They suffered disproportionately from tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other lung 

diseases exacerbated by the city’s perpetually smoky air from burning high-sulfur coal. According to historian Robbi Courtaway, in 1924 a 

new smoke detector at Shaw’s Garden revealed that “each St. Louisan inhaled fifteen table-spoons of soot every five days as a result of 

the soft coal used in most home furnaces” and factories. “After smoke killed off…the finest collection of evergreens in the United States 

[1923], Garden officials…[bought] land in Gray’s Summit on which they built eight greenhouses…for the garden’s precious orchids.” 

Citizens had to wait longer than those flowers, and downtown smoke worsened every year until it was abated by law in 1942. 

Right: “Black Tuesday,” November 11, 1939, 

when air pollution obscured the Civil Courts 

Building at mid-day. 



Opposite: In troubled times, St. Louisans 

opened the massive and magnificent 

Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis in 1917, 

after seven years of construction. As the 

mother church of the archdiocese, the 

“New Cathedral” occupied an entire city 

block on Lindell Boulevard, far from the 

riverfront, and broke with both French 

and American architectural traditions. 

Its 83,000 square feet of world-class 

mosaics made the cathedral a virtual art 

museum for non-believers and Catholics 

alike. Before the Gateway Arch became 

the world’s fourth most visited tourist site, 

souvenir pennants advertised the cathedral, 

the Central Branch of the Public Library, 

and the Nathan Frank Band Stand in 

Forest Park as the three “must see” 

attractions in St. Louis. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE FAUSZ FAMILY. 


114

the site where St. Louis veterans founded the 

American Legion on May 8, 1919, and a nearby 

wall honors the city’s dead from several wars. 

The war was barely over when the devastating 

Spanish Influenza Epidemic struck the 

city in 1918. It killed 40,000,000 people 

worldwide and 675,000 in America, but 

because “St. Louis was the only city to institute 

community-wide business closures” 

quickly enough, the city enjoyed an enviably 

small death toll. Of the 32,000 residents who 

caught the flu, only 2,000 died, thanks to 

city-wide quarantines initiated by the talented 

health commissioner, Dr. Max C. Starkloff, 

with strong support from Mayor Henry Kiel. 

Significant changes came fast in postwar 

St. Louis. The many local women who had 

staged demonstrations for female voting 

rights from the post-Civil War era to the 

1916 Democratic convention here finally 

achieved their goal. After seventy years of 

struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment was 


1 1 5

atified in 1920. Building upon that victory 

for the full rights of citizenship, local 

women’s organizations became more 

politically influential, in the tradition of 

St. Louis’s pioneering female activists. A 

pamphlet, entitled An Aid to the Woman Voter 

in Missouri, was co-sponsored by the Missouri 

Federation of Women’s Clubs, Women’s 

Christian Temperance Union, Missouri Women’s 

Council of Defense, the Lady Maccabees, 

P.E.O., Missouri Equal Suffrage Association, 

the St. Louis Equal Suffrage Association, the 

St. Louis Equal Suffrage League, and the 

St. Louis Business Women’s Suffrage League. 

There was barely time to celebrate the 

female franchise, however, when Prohibition 

cast a dark shadow over the region. The 

Missouri Temperance Society had been headquartered 

in St. Louis for many decades, but 

neither pro- nor anti-alcohol supporters were 

prepared for the massive socio-economic 

changes that accompanied the enforcement of 

the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920. 

The immediate impact of outlawing the manufacture, 

sale, and distribution of alcoholic 

beverages was devastating in St. Louis, which 

ranked fourth nationally in beer sales. The 

Anheuser-Busch Brewery occupied 150 buildings 

over seventy blocks in St. Louis prior to 

Prohibition, but the annual loss of $140 million 

to the local economy put 55,000 brewery 

and saloon jobs in jeopardy—causing a 


116

egional recession a decade before the Great 

Depression. Robbi Courtaway estimated that 

in 1919, local brewery workers received total 

wages in excess of $4 million, which a decade 

later, had fallen to less than $900,000. 

While a thousand beer companies went 

bankrupt (and some brewery owners killed 

themselves), Anheuser-Busch downsized and 

diversified to remain open and keep some 

2,000 workers on its payroll. For thirteen 

years, wrote William Knoedelseder, the iconic 

brewery “survived by making…rail cars, 

truck bodies, refrigeration cabinets, ice 

cream, a nonalcoholic form of Budweiser, a 

malt-based soft drink called Bevo, barley malt 

syrup, and baker’s yeast.” 

Equally disruptive was the related rise 

in crime, as citizens from every class sought 

to skirt the law in order to enjoy—or manufacture—illegal 

alcoholic beverages. On 

New Year’s Eve, 1922, over 2,000 wealthy 

St. Louisans were enjoying an expensive 

evening at the new Chase Hotel, when police 

burst into the ballroom searching for liquor 

violations. The genteel crowd of prominent 

citizens assaulted the officers with a variety 

of projectiles, and police gunfire wounded 

three patrons. National notoriety followed, as 

a front page headline in the New York Times 

on January 2, 1923 reported that “Bullets, 

Chairs and Tableware Fly in Riot As 

St. Louisans Run Dry Squad Out of Hotel!” 

Detail of a Charleston Dance Competition 

in front of City Hall, November 13, 1925, 

before they were banned as a health risk. 

FILE PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE ST. LOUIS 

POST-DISPATCH AND THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS (1603). 


1 1 7

Violent criminal bootleggers in area gangs, 

such as “Egan’s Rats,” the “Cuckoos,” and 

at least four others, made that incident 

pale in comparison, while the alwaysvicious 

Ku Klux Klan eagerly exploited 

anti-alcohol laws as an excuse to increase 

their traditional prejudicial attacks on blacks, 

Jews, and Catholics. 


118

Temporarily distracting St. Louisans from 

rampant crime, police raids, payroll reductions, 

and other problems with Prohibition was the 

world-famous 1927 flight of Charles Lindbergh 

in a plane named The Spirit of St. Louis. He 

was the first solo pilot to cross the Atlantic 

in a nonstop flight, covering the 3,614 miles 

between New York City and Paris in 33 hours, 

30 minutes, and 30 seconds. But his journey 

really started here. Lindbergh grew up in 

Minnesota, within the limits of Laclede’s 

original fur trade grant, and the twenty-five 

year-old flier reversed the itinerary of our city 

founder, who had traveled from France to 

America at the same age. Lindbergh honed 

his talents at Lambert Field—the 170-acre 

cornfield that Major Albert Bond Lambert 

purchased in 1920 with profits from his 

Listerine mouthwash. Due to its central 

location, Lambert Field quickly became, 

in the words of Lindbergh’s biographer, 

A. Scott Berg, “the logical intersection for the 

nation’s air traffic” in “the most exciting age 

of exploration in four hundred years.” 

Opposite, clockwise starting from the top: 

Anheuser-Busch Brewery in 1909, 

from the Official Program of the 

Centennial of the Incorporation of 

St. Louis Celebration, October 3-9, 1909, 

compiled by Walter B. Stevens 

(St. Louis, 1909). 

Federal agents conduct a Prohibition raid 

on December 6, 1922, on South Third 

Street, destroying two stills in an apartment 

building capable of producing 500 gallons 

of whiskey per day. 

FILE PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE 

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. 

Prescription for “Medicinal Alcohol” during 

Prohibition; from the author’s collection. 

Physicians were legally allowed to prescribe 

alcoholic beverages for over thirty ailments, 

including poisoning, post-operative pain, 

senility, insomnia, and even baldness! 

Left: Charles Lindbergh beside his famous 

plane at Lambert Field on May 11, 1927, 

after arriving from San Diego and before 

flying to New York to begin his historic 

flight across the Atlantic. 




1 1 9

F O U L 

W I N D S 

Lindbergh exploited favorable winds in his famous flight, but foul winds ravaged St. Louis 

four months after he had safely landed at Paris. A massive tornado on September 29, 1927, 

cut a wide swath through the central city, killing 76 and injuring more than 1,500, while 

destroying or damaging many buildings in 300 blocks. It was the sixth tornado to hit St. Louis 

since 1852, but was not as severe as the May 1896 “cyclone” that claimed 306 lives in 

South City and destroyed the main hospital. Another tornado on February 10, 1959, followed 

the path of the 1927 one, killing 21, injuring over 200, and displacing more than 3,000 families. 

February 1917 price list for raw furs 

issued by the United States Fur Company, 

210 North First Street, St. Louis. 

Note values of house cats at the bottom. 

ORIGINAL DOCUMENT IN THE FAUSZ FAMILY COLLECTION 

OF FUR TRADE MEMORABILIA. 

Lindbergh solidified St. Louis’s reputation 

as the “City of Flight.” Its citizens had been 

fascinated by balloon races in 1836, 1859, 

and 1907, and Glenn Curtiss chose St. Louis 

to fly the first airplane west of the Mississippi 

in 1909. The next year, Teddy Roosevelt 

became the first president to take an airplane 

ride when he visited the city. St. Louis’s 

International Air Race in 1923 drew over 

100,000 spectators to see Curtiss set a world 

speed record of 243 miles per hour to win the 

Pulitzer Trophy. The true “Spirit of St. Louis” 

behind the painted letters was reflected in 

the nine local entrepreneurs who risked their 

resources to purchase a plane for the ultimate 

explorer of the early twentieth century. 


120

T H E P A S T W A S P R E S E N T F O R T H E F U T U R E O F F U R S 

The fur trade was one industry that actually prospered during the Great Depression, as millions 

of small mammal pelts trapped by rural families were mailed to St. Louis for much-needed 

cash. Long after generations of St. Louis traders and trappers left their names on maps 

throughout the Fur West, the city’s oldest industry continued to contribute to the local and 

national economy well into the mid-twentieth century. 

By leveraging Laclede’s ideal central location, city caves used for cold storage, and new 

transportation links by rail and air, St. Louis ranked with London and New York as the top 

three world market centers for fur sales. Under the leadership of Philip Bond Fouke III and 

experienced fur processors from the Fouke Company of London, St. Louis’s International Fur 

Exchange (IFE) dominated the grading, dressing, dyeing, and marketing of Alaskan sealskins 

for decades. Annual auctions of all mammal species produced sales of $5.3 million in 1916, 

rising to $35 million only four years later. 

The New International Fur Exchange Building, constructed in 1920 at Fourth and Market 

(now the Drury Plaza Hotel), further enhanced St. Louis’s reputation as a global fur capital— 

which now marketed skins from Russia, China, Canada, India, Persia, Australia, and New 

Zealand, as well as the U.S. Until the late 1950s, 75 companies in the Gateway City controlled 

65 percent of the American market, receiving more furs from a 600-mile radius “than all other 

cities in the United States combined.” 

When Lindbergh rewarded their faith so 

spectacularly, the city became “more than a 

gateway to the west. It came to symbolize 

the portal to the future,” wrote Berg. 

Lindbergh made a triumphant return to 

St. Louis on June 17, 1927. Half a million 

residents cheered him in a 7-mile downtown 

parade. He was honored at a banquet for 

1,300 people and performed aerial 

stunts over Forest Park for 100,000 

cheering fans before placing a wreath 

on the statue of Saint Louis. Lindbergh 

donated many artifacts associated with 

his famous flight to the Missouri History 

Museum, while city officials agreed to 

build a municipal airport at Lambert 

Field, which he visited in April 1933. 

Not even Lindbergh’s popular 

appearances, however, could solve 

the severe problems associated with 

Prohibition and the Great Depression. 

Between 1929 and 1933, the value 

of manufactured goods in St. Louis fell 

56 percent, and in the latter year, 30 percent 

of all residents (some 116,000 people) were 

unemployed. Blacks suffered more, with a 

jobless rate that reached 80 percent. Those 

figures were worse than the national average, 

refuting the myth that St. Louis suffered less 

than other cities in the Depression. Some 

5,000 homeless St. Louisans lived in the 

nation’s largest “Hooverville”—a “town” of 

driftwood and scrap lumber shacks located 

between the river and the railroad tracks— 

while the city fed 10 percent of the population 

in soup kitchens, preparing 36,000 

meals in August 1932 alone. 

Happy days returned in early 1933, when 

the taps reopened. The master of marketing, 

Anheuser-Busch publicly paraded its stunning 

new Clydesdales for the first time, as 

they pulled an old beer wagon that delivered 

Budweiser to President Roosevelt in the 

A “Hooverville” shack at river’s edge, 

November 1932. 




1 2 1

White House. By 1938 St. Louis’s premier 

brewery was producing 2,000,000 barrels a 

year, exceeding its pre-Prohibition volume, 

and sales had increased 173 percent. 

But that temporary return of prosperity 

in one industry could not begin to address 

more deeply-rooted socio-economic problems 

associated with racial prejudice. Deliberate 

racist decisions, rather than accidental 

circumstances, confined blacks to a few 

restricted neighborhoods and prevented 

their migration to white communities. In the 

Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the 

United States, historian Kenneth T. Jackson 

revealed that local realtors and federal 

mortgage agencies in the 1930s considered 


122

ace a major factor in ranking residential 

areas. Ladue received the highest rating 

because it was “highly restricted,” occupied 

by “capitalists and other wealthy families,” 

without “a single foreigner or negro.” The 

lowest-ranked areas consisted of overcrowded 

working-class white tenements, 60 percent of 

which did not have indoor toilets—and the 

best black homes in segregated neighborhoods. 

Prejudiced inspectors regarded even 

new and well-maintained houses of African 

Americans as having “little or no value…due 

to the colored element now controlling the 

district.” The FHA granted 500 percent more 

mortgages to new county residences than 

older city properties from 1934 to 1960. 

Most African American residences were 

concentrated in a few segregated areas, most 

notably in Elleardsville—“The Ville” north of 

the Central West End. That self-sufficient 

community contained all classes and every 

type of black-owned businesses, such as the 

very successful Poro College of Annie Malone, 

a millionaire entrepreneur who marketed 

hair care products throughout the nation, 

trained and hired many African 

Americans, and funded several 

charities. Also critical to the success 

of Ville residents was the 

venerable and valuable Sumner 

High School, which educated 

notable leaders, both local and 

national. Henry Givens, Jr., 

former president of Harris-Stowe 

University, wrote that “Sumner 

was one of the greatest high 

schools in the nation! The school 

had black teachers who had 

graduated from Harvard, Yale, 

and Princeton,” some with Ph.D. 

degrees. But because segregation 

blocked them from becoming college 

instructors, “we had scholars 

teaching us in high school!” 

In her 2011 book, Groping 

for Democracy: African American 

Social Welfare Reform in St. Louis, 

UMSL history professor Priscilla 

Dowden-White emphasized the 

dynamic black leaders from 

1910 to 1949 who promoted the 

“common good” of the “community as a whole” 

by advocating “justice, neighborliness, and 

fair play” for residents from all classes. 

They used the Urban League, the Community 

Council, and the League of Women Voters 

to secure reforms in public policy that 

promoted social welfare before the more 

politically-focused national Civil Rights 

Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Pragmatic black activists accepted the 

location of Homer G. Phillips Hospital, 

which operated in The Ville from 1937 to 

1979, rather than to oppose that placement 

for its segregationist symbolism, because 

medical services and physician training were 

desperately needed by black residents. But 

Clarence Lang’s Grassroots at the Gateway 

found that African American politicians later 

pursued competing agendas based on class 

differences, as “the politics of black middleclass 

‘respectability,’ often contingent on the 

white gaze, collided with a black workingclass 

politics of ‘self-respect’ autonomous 

from both white approval and black middleclass 

assent.” 

Opposite, top: Budweiser beer wagon pulled 

by Clydesdales for the first time in public 

on the way to the White House in 1933, 

symbolizing the end of Prohibition. 

COPYRIGHT @ ANHEUSER-BUSCH, LLC. 

USED WITH PERMISSION OF ANHEUSER-BUSCH, LLC. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

Opposite, bottom: Famous entrepreneur 

Annie Malone (tenth from right) and friends 

in front of Poro College on April 25, 1927. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY W. C. PERSONS; COURTESY OF 

THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (21271). 

Below: Homer Phillips Hospital 

(now apartments for retirees) in The Ville. 

FAUSZ FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH, 2013. 


1 2 3


124

World War II brought massive, urgent 

changes to St. Louis. The “new normal” in 

everyday life included overcrowded housing, 

frequent blackouts and curfews, food 

rationing, war-bond sales, rubber- and scrapmetal 

collections, factories operating twentyfour 

hours a day, trains and river craft 

running at full capacity, and packed schools 

holding double shifts of teaching. The 

community pulled together, with citizens 

volunteering as 5,300 air-raid wardens, 5,500 

auxiliary firemen and policemen, and 3,373 

first aid workers, while another 32,000 

served in other roles, according to historian 

Betty Burnet. 

The city’s admirable array of heavy industries 

was indispensable in the global crusade 

to combat fascism, with 296 companies—a 

record 75 percent of all St. Louis manufacturers—engaged 

in defense work, which far 

exceeded the national average. The McDonnell 

Corporation, based in St. Louis since 1939, 

contributed excellent war planes; the 

International Shoe Company produced 35,000 

pairs of boots per day; and the St. Louis 

Ordnance District manufactured more medium-sized 

bombs than any other city. Five thousand 

St. Louisans worked on the Manhattan 

Project that created the atom bombs, including 

Dr. Arthur Holly Compton and other scientists 

from Mallinckrodt and Monsanto. The cyclotron 

at Washington University was essential for 

nuclear research, while the John Nooter Boiler 

Works made the huge tanks that produced 

life-saving penicillin B, developed by 

Dr. Edward A. Doisy of Saint Louis University. 

Opposite: Woman machinist at the Curtiss- 

Wright aircraft plant at Lambert Field. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY F. DALE SMITH, 1943-44; COURTESY OF 


Below: Navy Day Parade in downtown 

St. Louis on October 4, 1942. The U.S. 

only had a total of forty tanks in 1940, 

and several of St. Louis’s heavy industries 

worked overtime to make vehicles, 

munitions, and airplanes to achieve victory 

in WWII. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HANNGE COLLECTION 

AND THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (1151). 


1 2 5

Above: Doolittle Headline in the 

St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 20, 1942. 


Below: Huge rally of some 9,000 African 

Americans at Kiel Auditorium in August 

1942 to protest the lack of defense jobs for 

blacks (only one in forty-five hires). 



Ironically, many St. Louis companies did 

not take full advantage of even more talented 

employees anxious to contribute to the war 

effort. The 8,000 local African Americans 

who worked in defense industries represented 

only a tiny fraction of all positions available. 

In August 1942 some 9,000 blacks held 

a massive meeting to lobby for more warrelated 

employment, declaring that “Winning 

Democracy for the Negro Is Winning the War 

for Democracy.” Federal policies eventually 

alleviated segregated hiring, which helped 

advance civil rights in postwar America. 

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, almost 

81,000 St. Louis men, aged 18 to 44, registered 

for the draft. Too many St. Louisans 

never returned. The nearest thing to an 

official tally of city residents killed in World 

War II are the 2,753 names inscribed at the 

“Court of Honor” across from the Soldiers’ 

Memorial Building. A genealogy website 

lists 1,636 deaths (911 killed in action) of 

city residents who served only in the army 

and air force. Several noted pilots from the 

“City of Flight” died in the war, including 

Lieutenant Commander Edward H. “Butch” 

O’Hare, a Medal of Honor recipient for 

whom Chicago’s major airport is named; 

Captain Eliott Vandeventer, winner of the 

Distinguished Flying Cross; and Captain 

Wendell Oliver Pruitt, a much-decorated ace 

of the Tuskegee Airmen. They were inspired 


126

T R I U M P H A N T 

C A R D I N A L S 

As another welcome distraction from the grim news of war, the St. Louis Cardinals and 

the St. Louis Browns, which shared Sportsman’s Park as their home field, battled for 

baseball supremacy in the “Trolley” World Series of 1944. The Cardinals won in six games, 

adding to their championships with the popular “Gas House Gang” in 1931 and 1934. 

The Cardinals also won the Series in 1942 and 1946. By 1953 both the Browns and the 

Cardinals came to a critical crossroads. The Browns were sold to Baltimore, becoming 

the Orioles, while beer baron August A. “Gussie” Busch, Jr., purchased the Cardinals and 

stabilized the franchise. 

For many decades, three iconic organizations—the Cardinals, Anheuser-Busch Brewery, 

and KMOX radio station—made the “redbirds” a local treasure and a national “brand.” KMOX 

auspiciously began its baseball broadcasts with the Cardinals’ victory in the 1926 World 

Series—the city’s first championship since 1888. The hero was an aging, hard-drinking pitcher, 

Grover Cleveland Alexander, who won two games and saved a third. KMOX’s 50,000-watt 

signal reached most of the continent at night, making the Cardinals the broadcasting Gateway 

to West (and South), with legions of fans in distant states. 

Opening game of the 1944 all-St. Louis World Series at Sportsman’s Park, home field for both the Cardinals and the Browns. 

COURTESY OF THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH; FILE PHOTOGRAPH, OCTOBER 8, 1944. 

by the daring 1942 bomber raid on Japan 

by local hero, Colonel James Doolittle, who 

survived the war. St. Louis was perhaps 

the only U.S. city to lose its mayor 

(Republican William D. Becker) in a warrelated 

incident. On August 1, 1943, he and 

nine other civilians were killed at Lambert 

Field in the crash of a new glider they 

were testing. 

Returning veterans in 1945 encountered 

a rapidly changing city that would never be 

the same. The G.I. Bill and new employment 

opportunities lured many city residents into 

the county, seeking large single-family 

homes, with lawns and garages, on onceremote 

farmlands. Suburbanization had begun 

two decades before, as Kenneth Jackson 

noted, “when automobile registrations rose 


1 2 7

y more than 150 percent,” and outlying 

areas “of the nation’s 96 largest cities grew 

twice as fast as the core communities.” That 

trickle of urban depopulation became a flood 

in the postwar period, as “White Flight” 

would cause St. Louis City to lose over half 

of its population and suffer a 60 percent 

decline in business between 1950 and 2000. 

St. Louis City had only 15,348 new housing 

starts between 1950 and 1970, while St. Louis 

County had 102,298. Jobs in the city 

declined from 366,524 to 231,765 in those 

decades, while the county enjoyed an 

increase from 156,526 to 384,409. 

Progress came at a price. The removal of “derelict” warehouses and other structures (some deemed “architecturally significant”) destroyed what remained of the original colonial French 

city after the Great Fire of 1849. Just as bad as bulldozing was burying irreplaceable and rare archaeological remains under tons of earth needed to support the 900-ton Gateway Arch. 

That emptiness left a vacancy of vibrancy before the soaring steel was in place. The completion of the Gateway Arch took three decades. Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann and the leading local 

booster, Luther Ely Smith, got a bond issue passed and secured federal New Deal funding to clear the riverfront, but WWII halted progress. The architectural competition of the 1950s 

selected Eero Saarinen’s daring modernist design, and unprecedentedly complex construction challenges delayed completion of the nation’s tallest monument until the mid-1960s. 

COURTESY, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE AT THE JEFFERSON NATIONAL EXPANSION MEMORIAL (V106-004838). 


128

Although African Americans comprised 

nearly 18 percent of the city’s population in 

1950, they were prevented from joining the 

migration to suburbia or even moving into 

St. Louis’s race-restricted neighborhoods. In 

the 1940s nearly 380 housing covenants still 

blocked blacks from living in most of the city, 

confining them to a ghettoized “donut hole” 

of escalating poverty and decaying property. 

Historian John A. Wright claimed that in 

1950, “the 95,000 blacks moving to St Louis 

would find only 100 new homes available for 

them.” The Shelley family at 4600 Labadie 

Avenue challenged restricted housing, and 

when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled favorably 

on Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, it ended 

segregationist covenants in nineteen states. 

Missouri, however, did not enact a fair 

housing law until 1972, and some prejudicial 

policies continued. 

According to Colin Gordon’s Mapping 

Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American 

City, restricted housing made St. Louis 

“hyper-segregated.” It was ranked as the 

eighteenth most racially-segregated city in 

the U.S. by 1960 and became “the patron 

saint of the nation’s urban crisis” when it was 

declared the tenth worst racially-divided 

urban area in 1980. In 1970, African 

Americans comprised 40 percent of the 

city’s population, with average incomes 

that were only 60 percent as large as a 

typical white household. Thus, St. Louis 

remained one of the nation’s most segregated 

cities to the present, based on color and/or 

class prejudices. 

Meet Me in St Louis movie poster showing 

Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien; 

lithograph from Loew’s Incorporated, 1944. 

Near the end of World War II, many 

grieving local families took comfort in this 

nostalgic movie, based on Sally Benson’s 

1942 memoir of the same name. The film, 

like her book, evoked memories of the 

joyous World’s Fair in happier times. 


ST. LOUIS (21652). 


1 2 9

Above: Tenements in the Mill Creek Valley, 

near Leonard Avenue; 1948. 



Below: Black professionals protest at 

Jefferson Bank, October 10, 1963. 



Opposite: Black children peer from 

dilapidated public housing in the 

Mill Creek Valley, c. 1952. 



Black protesters from several civil rights 

organizations increasingly confronted those 

postwar crises with demonstrations in 

restaurants, department stores, theaters, and 

other businesses. As pressure and publicity 

increased, Saint Louis University in 1944 

became the first Missouri college to integrate 

its student body. Joseph Elmer Ritter, 

St. Louis’s dynamic Catholic Archbishop 

from 1946 to 1967 (elevated to 

Cardinal in 1961), enrolled black 

women at Webster University 

in 1946 and received national 

acclaim for desegregating all 

archdiocesan high schools and 

parish schools in 1947, seven 

years before the famous 

U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown 

decision. In 1952, Washington 

University admitted its first 

African American students. 

On August 30, 1963, local 

leaders of CORE (the Congress 

of Racial Equality) skipped the 

March on Washington and 

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 

“I Have a Dream Speech” to 

begin a seven-month protest at 

the Jefferson Bank and Trust 

Company on Washington Avenue. 

Seeking employment for blacks, 

nineteen protesters were arrested, 

receiving a combined sentence of 

over eight years in jail and $11,000 in fines. 

But their demonstrations produced results, 

and most of the protest leaders became 

celebrities and consultants for justice in a 

variety of professional positions. 

When the Gateway Arch was under construction, 

it came to symbolize not only the 

nineteenth-century homesteaders who passed 

through St. Louis on their way west, but also 

twentieth-century black pioneers 

for employment equality who were 

determined to stay in St. Louis 

and improve the city. In a daring 

and dramatic demonstration on 

July 14, 1964, Percy Green II and 

Richard Daly chained themselves 

to one of the high legs of the 

Arch to protest the lack of black 

contractors and union workers 

on the federally-funded project. 

They received national attention 

and achieved reforms that conformed 

to the civil rights acts of 

1964-1966. Six African American 

aldermen (out of twenty-nine) also 

achieved a city public accommodations 

law in 1961 that ended 


130

job discrimination on local projects four 

years before the state legislature acted. Other 

signs of progress included the election of 

Alderman William L. Clay as Missouri’s first 

black Congressman in 1968, and, after 1993, 

two consecutive electoral victories of African 

Americans as mayor of St. Louis. In addition, 

blacks have served the city as police chief, 

circuit court clerk, city comptroller, and 

chairman of the Democratic Committee. 


1 3 1

Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex after 

completion, February 8, 1955. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY TED MCCREA. COURTESY OF THE 

MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (22148). 


132 

But the contentious issue of segregated 

housing remained unsolved for several 

decades. Mayors Bernard Dickmann, Joseph 

Darst, and Raymond Tucker launched ambitious 

urban renewal projects in the 1940s and 

1950s, using generous federal funding to 

address neighborhood “blight.” The city 

cleared some 454 acres of slums in the Mill 

Creek Valley, creating a devastated area known 

as “Hiroshima Flats.” On that bombed-like 

landscape, some of the best architects in the 

country erected the Pruitt-Igoe Complex of 33

eleven-story buildings in 1954. Eleven years 

later, National Geographic author Robert Paul 

Jordan praised such destruction and construction 

for the “rejuvenation of a dying city.” He 

boasted that “by 1970 St. Louis will have torn 

down and rebuilt a fifth of its 61 square miles 

at a cost of more than a billion dollars.” Once 

regarded as “the best-designed” public housing 

project, Pruitt-Igoe was demolished in 

1976, after it had disillusioned residents by 

concentrating crime and poverty in rather 

drab concrete towers with no supportive community 

spirit or even adequate maintenance. 

According to Gordon, such massive, impersonal 

projects “almost always made things 

worse…. [B]oth the diagnosis (blight) and its 

prescription (urban renewal) were shaped 

by—and compromised by—the same… 

prejudices that had created the condition in 

the first place.” Bulldozing heavily populated 

neighborhoods to build commercial skyscrapers 

revealed that “racial segregation was 

a core goal from the outset…. Even the most 

progressive efforts destroyed more units than 

they created and displaced more families of 

ordinary means than they accommodated…. 

Over time, redevelopment trumped rehabilitation, 

and new housing…became less a goal 

of urban renewal.” 

Above: African American protester in front 

of the Dozier School, June 10, 1963. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY LESTER LINCK AND USED 



1 3 3

Busch Stadium II and the Gateway Arch, 

as photographed on September 21, 1967. 

A sense of excitement energized the 

entire metropolitan area, as those two 

monumental and long-anticipated projects 

were completed about the same time. 

Almost thirty years after a riverfront park 

was envisioned, the Gateway Arch was 

finished in October 1965, although the 

entire Jefferson National Expansion 

Memorial complex would not welcome 

tourists until 1967. The stadium, with 

architectural details inspired by the Arch, 

was ready for the 1966 baseball season. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY TED MCCREA. COURTESY OF 



134 

Living conditions for St. Louis City’s 

blacks would improve after the federal 

“Fair Housing Act” of 1968 prohibited 

discriminatory zoning based on race, color, 

religion, sex, or national origin. But that, 

too, had unintended consequences by eroding 

successful, traditional African American 

neighborhoods. Taking advantage of new, 

unrestricted housing options, many of the 

most affluent and accomplished black 

residents moved out of The Ville and other 

racially-cohesive communities. Left behind 

were disproportionally disadvantaged people 

with less support—political, economic, and 

even personal. Class divisions replaced 

monolithic racism, as concentrated poverty 

in selected areas resulted in decaying properties, 

declining schools, disappearing jobs, 

and increasing disillusionment. 

The principle of neighborhood schools 

lowered educational expectations and outcomes 

in areas with the worst incomes, 

and not even federal laws could compete 

with such territorial tyranny. Black-on-black 

crime further destabilized neighborhoods. 

As the Reverend Earl E. Nance, Sr., pastor 

of the Greater Mount Carmel Baptist Church, 

noted, African Americans were “not responsible 

for the way other folks treat us, but we 

are responsible for how we treat others.” 

In the midst of historic changes, the 

Bicentennial of the founding of St. Louis 

was officially celebrated over two years, 

1964 to 1966. It was the grandest commemoration 

ever, since St. Louisans had little 

to celebrate in 1939, when the city turned 

175 years old in the midst of the 

Great Depression. At that time, a local 

newspaper article proclaimed that the city’s 

founding date could not be determined 

and revealed the erroneous biases of the 

1930s: “In 1760 the wilderness stretched 

north from New Orleans to Canada, 

…[where] a few savages stamped around…. 

A French fort was built at Chartres to keep 

off the Spanish from Santa Fe,…[but] the 

rest of the Mississippi country was like the 

Congo in Africa”!

President Lyndon Johnson kicked off “the 

official birthday celebration on February 14, 

1964” (the wrong date) with an optimistic 

public address. “As the Gateway to the West,” 

he stated, “Saint Louis became one of the 

finest and most important cities in the 

world. But at the very summit of her glory, 

the blight that was to deface dozens of 

American cities struck Saint Louis. The 

incredible vitality of this proud queen of 

Mid-America began to erode.” In conclusion, 

the president declared to city residents: 

“You faced a hard choice and you made it. 

The people of Saint Louis chose progress— 

not decay. A new spirit of Saint Louis was 

born. And today you look forward to the 

future with new pride and new confidence.” 

Also making history was McDonnell Aircraft 

Corporation, Missouri’s largest employer, with 

35,000 workers constructing the world’s most 

sophisticated supersonic fighters that the military 

relied on in the Vietnam War. The engineering 

explorers at that corporation also made St. Louis 

the “gateway to the galaxy” by constructing the 

successful Mercury and Gemini space vehicles 

that propelled American astronauts into space 

and to ultimately land on the moon. 

Above: Official anniversary license plate. 

LICENSE PLATE IN AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 

Left: President John F. Kennedy viewing 

the Mercury space capsule in St. Louis on 

February 23, 1962. The McDonnell-Douglas 

Corporation, which made notable airplanes, 

also played a significant role in NASA’s 

space program to land Americans on 

the moon. 

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; PHOTOGRAPH IN THE PUBLIC 

DOMAIN AS A WORK PRODUCT OF A FEDERAL EMPLOYEE. 


1 3 5

“Gaslight Square” on the evening of July 29, 

1961. The three-block entertainment district 

lit by gas street lamps featured thirty-five 

music clubs, bars, and restaurants. Its 

equally rapid rise and fall symbolized the 

vulnerability of a new craze when beset by 

crime and changing generational trends in 

popular entertainment. 



Stars also appeared closer to home, as 

the Cardinals gave an additional boost to the 

confidence and pride of St. Louisans in the 

Bicentennial year by winning the 1964 World 

Series—their first championship in eighteen 

years. They added another one in 1967. 

Applauding the Bicentennial, 

the November 1965 issue of 

National Geographic Magazine 

published sixty-four pages on 

St. Louis, beginning with the 

headline: “New spirit soars in 

Mid-America’s proud old city.” 

Author Robert Paul Jordan 

praised the city’s “unique history” 

in “carving the trans-Mississippi 

West into 22 new states” and 

credited Joseph Pulitzer’s 1949 

“Progress or Decay” challenge 

for stimulating ambitious urban 

renewal. Jordan’s remarks, 

accompanied by superb photos, 

focused on new and future 

developments: the beautiful 

Aloe Plaza, slum removal, the $30,000,000 

Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, 

new interstate highways, and Saint Louis 

University’s $53,000,000 campus expansion 

that helped revitalize the city. Summarizing 

his positive impressions of the Bicentennial 

headed by “Gussie” Busch, Jordan observed 

that the city’s “birthday party really amounts 

to a family affair, with the whole metropolis 

participating” in “literally thousands of 

events, small and large.” 

Black members of the city “family,” however, 

did not share in such Bicentennial boosterism, 

being in no mood to “celebrate” racial prejudice 

and the other harsh realities of second-class 

citizenship. In 1964, St. Louis’s population 

stood at 711,000, down from almost 857,000 

in 1950, and the city would experience its 

greatest economic decline between 1970 and 

1990, when manufacturing jobs fell by 

82,000 and its poverty rate rose to 24 percent. 

Although suburbanization enticed residents 

to move out of St. Louis and cost the city 

its traditional stature as the engine of the 

regional economy, the explosive growth of 

the greater metropolitan area on former 

farmlands improved the lives of everyone. 

In Fall 1963, the University of Missouri- 

St. Louis (UMSL) greeted its first 673 

students, who crowded into the sole 

campus building—the old Bellerive Country 

Clubhouse. In only six years, with three 

new buildings, enrollment swelled to 10,000, 

with increasing numbers of African 

Americans, revealing that Saint Louis 

University and Washington University could 

not have accommodated so many students 

seeking an affordable education. Both UMSL, 

which now has over 62,000 alumni living in 

the metro area, and nearby Lambert 

International Airport demonstrated that their 

expansive growth in North St. Louis County 

could not have occurred in the spacestrapped 

city. 


136

S T . L O U I S ’ S L O N G E S T S E R V I N G M O D E R N M A Y O R S 

Not surprisingly, most of the mayors who served at least eight consecutive years brought 

the greatest changes to St. Louis, including: 

Rolla Wells Democrat (1901-1909) 

Henry Kiel Republican (1913-1925) 

Bernard F. Dickmann Democrat (1933-1941) 

Raymond Tucker Democrat (1953-1965) 

Alfonso Cervantes Democrat (1965-1973) 

Vincent C. Schoemehl Democrat (1981-1993) 

Francis G. Slay Democrat (2001-present), won record fourth election in 2013 

A decade ago, the Metrolink light rail 

system brought the inner city and the outer 

suburbs closer together with an efficient 

new transportation option. In its first two 

months, 1,000,000 passengers rode the 

initial 14 miles of track. Today, Metrolink has 

an annual ridership of 17,000,000 along 

46 miles of routes in two states. 

The Main Terminal Building 

at Lambert International Airport. 



1 3 7

The children of Dr. John A. Wright enjoy 

the combination of statuary, fountains, 

beautiful buildings, and surprisingly serene 

surroundings (at times) in a downtown 

plaza that is all too often taken for granted. 

In the 1980s, Mayor Vincent Schoemehl, an 

UMSL graduate, launched another building 

initiative to renew both the city’s infrastructure 

and the spirits of its citizens. He joined a long 

list of progressive Democratic politicians, 

allied with business leaders in Civic Progress 

since the 1950s, to realize the illusive World’s 

Fair dream of building a “Model City,” both 

beautiful and productive, that would stand 

the test of time. Bond issue after bond issue 

revealed the willingness of citizens to invest 

in a brighter future, but a repetitious pattern 

of destruction and construction in a nevercompleted 

cityscape eroded much of that 

confidence in addressing decline. 

City leaders sought bold solutions to stem 

urban blight and suburban flight, choosing 

activism over apathy. But not all such “explorations” 

succeed, and historians can provide 

20-20 hindsight to explain why. Too frequently, 

planners, politicians, and promoters proceeded 

without a complete or deep understanding 

of the city’s heritage. A case in point was the 

expensive relocation in 1969 of the “Spanish 

Pavilion”—and the replica ship, Santa Maria— 

from the 1964 New York World’s Fair. 

Although St. Louis was Spain’s eighteenthcentury 

capital of Upper Louisiana, that was 

250 years after Columbus sailed into the 

Caribbean, and few residents saw the 


138

elevance of having the Santa Maria docked 

along the Mississippi. Due to a lack of interest, 

the Pavilion went bankrupt in its first year. 

The creative re-use of the iconic Union 

Station as an indoor mall in 1985 was 

more successful—for a time. But like the 

architecturally-innovative St. Louis Centre 

(another indoor mall), shoppers proved to 

be fickle. Novelty, alone, attracts initial 

crowds, but long-term customer loyalty 

invariably declines among bargain-hunters, 

even in more conveniently-located suburban 

shopping malls with better parking facilities. 

Fickle owners, rather than indifferent fans, 

doomed several of the city’s professional 

sports franchises, such as the NBA Hawks, 

NFL Cardinals, and a variety of soccer teams. 

The St. Louis Hawks bolted to Atlanta in 

1968 after a dozen seasons, in which they 

won the NBA championship in 1958 and 

reached the finals three other years—including 

their last one here. From 1960 to 1988, 

the football Cardinals (“Big Red”) developed 

a fan following, despite mostly mediocre 

records and only one division title (in 1974). 

But ownership moved the team to Phoenix 

and renamed it the Arizona Cardinals, 

while negotiations were proceeding for a 

new stadium here. 

A dedicated football facility finally arrived 

to popular acclaim in 1993 to support the 

new St. Louis Rams franchise. Now known 

as the Edward Jones Dome, that indoor 

stadium became famous as the home of the 

“Greatest Show on Turf’ from 1999 to 2003. 

Quarterback Kurt Warner threw 41 touchdowns, 

and the team scored 526 points 

on the way to winning Super Bowl XXXIV 

in 1999. They lost the championship two 

years later on a late field goal by the New 

England Patriots and have never matched 

those successes. 

St. Louisans have had a love affair with 

amateur soccer since the 1880s. A Christian 

Brothers College High School team won 

the silver medal in the 1904 Olympic 

Games, and Saint Louis University is the 

national leader with 47 NCAA tournament 

appearances and 10 soccer championships. 

Six different amateur teams from St. Louis 

won the U.S. Open Cup between 1920 and 

1957, and five city players were on the 

American team that defeated England to win 

the 1950 World Cup. Twenty St. Louisans 

have been inducted into the National Soccer 

Hall of Fame, but a long list of professional 

soccer franchises—outdoor, indoor, and 

women’s—have come and gone without 

financial success. 

The St. Louis Blues was one of the National 

Hockey League expansion franchises in 1967, 

and the team has a secure, if not always abundant, 

fan base despite frequent changes in 

ownership and arena sites. The Blues reached 

the Stanley Cup Finals in each of their first 

three seasons (1968-1970), a spectacular 

debut, but remains the only expansion team 

not to have won the championship. A fan 

favorite, the Hall of Famer Brett Hull, recently 

rejoined the organization as a vice president. 

The unprecedented success and popularity 

of the St. Louis Cardinals make it hard 

for other professional teams to match the 

enthusiasm and loyalty of their fans. In 

general, St. Louis has better sports facilities 

than the quality of the teams that play 

in them. 

At the height of his success as the 

Rams Super Bowl quarterback, Kurt 

Warner marketed cereal to raise funds for 

his “First Things First Foundation,” 

as well as other charities. 

USED WITH PERMISSION, COURTESY OF THAT 

ORGANIZATION IN COOPERATION WITH PRIORITY SPORTS 

ENTERTAINMENT AND TY BALLOU OF PLB SPORTS, INC. 


1 3 9

Exhibition soccer match between 

Real Madrid and Inter Milan in the 

Edward Jones Dome, August 10, 2013. 

Such soccer matches, including one 

featuring the Bosnian national team, 

have become increasingly popular and 

attract large crowds. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE; 



140


1 4 1

“There is only one thing which St. Louis cannot do, and that is, fail.” 

–James Cox, St. Louis: The Carnival City, 1892 

E P I L O G U E 

INSPIRING COMMUNITY SPIRIT 

IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 

Photographic blow-up of 1907 

City medallions. 


When St Louis’s population plummeted to 450,000 in the 1980 census—the lowest since 

1890—America’s formerly fourth-ranked city had fallen over twenty places. In 1988, native 

St. Louis novelist, Jonathan Franzen, wrote in The Twenty-Seventh City that the “Era of the Parking 

Lot” typified a barren and desperate downtown. “The local prophets were defensive. Where once 

they’d expected supremacy, they now took heart at any sign of survival.” Franzen asked the key 

question: “What becomes of a city no living person can remember, of an age whose passing no 

one survives to regret?” 


142

The human life cycle typically lasts about 

eighty years, so studying history is the only 

means of appreciating a distant past that no 

one alive actually experienced. A knowledge 

of the good ideas or big mistakes from earlier 

eras provides context for the present and may 

help improve the future. Realizing who or 

what “came before” is an essential component 

of citizenship for each generation. Laclede’s 

only son, Pierre Chouteau, wrote in 1847, 

that “honors rendered to the dead…serve to 

excite the living to emulate their virtues and 

their worth.” A century later, native St. Louis 

poet, Loyd Haberly, expressed a similar sentiment 

in his book, The City of the Sainted King: 

“Though nothing lives forever 

And nothing lasts for long, 

Yet the eternal river 

Of life runs clear and strong. 

Within our loins are nations, 

What we sow, they will reap, 

Building on all foundations 

That we lay firm and deep.” 

“Each event in St. Louis history is part of a 

continuing saga, building on what has gone 

before,” local author Ann Morris observed in 

1999. “History can inspire us to undertake 

impossible dreams” by “passing on to future 

generations stories of heroes, great and 

small.” A 1909 Globe-Democrat editorial stated 

that “every generation is too prone to 

think that all wisdom will die with them.” 

But if future citizens “smile at our rude and 

crude ways of doing things,” they may also 

“wonder at our achievement.” 

That becomes impossible, however, if the 

deeds of past leaders, both noble and nefarious, 

are forgotten or fabricated. A readers’ 

poll conducted by the Post-Dispatch in 

January 2000 sought to identify the “Most 

Influential St. Louisans of the 20th Century,” 

decade by decade. Wealthy beer barons 

topped the list for two different decades— 

Adolphus Busch (for 1900-1910), long after 

his greatest contributions, and his grandson, 

August A. “Gussie” Busch, Jr., (for 1960-1970), 

whose service as the Cardinals’ owner paled 

in comparison to significant political leaders. 

Lindbergh was the top vote-getter for the 

1920-1930 decade, even though he was not a 

St. Louisan and remained in town to pick up 

a free plane. Stan Musial was not a native, 

either, and he seems an odd choice for 1940- 

1950—a decade that produced so many 

national military heroes in World War II. 

Voters deficient in chronology picked James 

Smith McDonnell as the most illustrious 

The 2011 World Series Victory Parade in 

front of the latest Busch Stadium on 

October 30, 2011. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY HUY MACH. 



1 4 3

In Loving Memory of All Young People 

Who Die from Violence, a bronze statue 

by sculptor Rudolph Torrini (1997), 

located on the grounds of SSM Cardinal 

Glennon Children’s Hospital. This is a 

moving tribute to nine-year-old Christopher 

Harris, who was murdered in a June 1991 

gun battle on a city street. The interior of 

the statue is filled with melted handguns. 


non-St. Louisan for the 1930s, even though 

he did not open his aircraft company here 

until 1939 and achieved his greatest acclaim 

years later. Zoo director and TV personality 

Marlin Perkins (for 1950-1960), Robert 

Hyland, general manager of radio station 

KMOX (1970-1980), real estate developer 

Leon Strauss (1980-1990), who renovated 

the “Fabulous Fox Theatre” in 1982, and 

the Reverend Lawrence Biondi, president of 

Saint Louis University (1990-2000), seem 

trivial choices of current celebrities whose 

name-recognition in recent newspaper headlines 

prevented an accurate assessment of 

broader historical significance. That poll 

was a popularity contest that reflected such 

ignorance of the past as to minimize 

St. Louis’s authentic historic stature. Without 

memory, there can be no history, which 

depends on accurate recollections passed 

down through successive generations. 

In recent years, St. Louisans with more 

historical perspective have reevaluated how 

“successful” the World’s Fair and the 

Bicentennial were, considering the failed 

projects and fading hopes that followed 

those celebrations. It would be hard to 

match the optimistic mood of the 1964 

celebration, when the Gateway Arch and a 

new baseball stadium with its own unique 

arches were nearing completion only a 

few blocks apart. Progress was a tangible 

reality, as a building boom transformed 

the downtown core of an old city. The 

optimism of 1964, however, did not survive 

a series of national crises to come. In the 

past fifty years, local confidence in a bright 

future was deflated by escalating carnage 

in Vietnam, destructive race riots in major 

cities, assassinations of prominent leaders, 

the Watergate scandal, Iranian hostagetaking, 

oil embargoes, the shocking attacks 

on 9/11, simultaneous wars in the Middle 

East, a rash of school shootings, increasing 

street violence, and several economic 

recessions, with the latest being the most 

severe. And, unlike 1964, today it is much 

more difficult and expensive to have all 

citizens share equally and equitably in 

progress and prosperity, including a quality 

public education. 

The Census results in 2010 revealed that 

St. Louis’s population had reached a new low 

of only 318,000, as America’s former 4th 

largest city fell to 58th place. Since St. Louis 

has lost half a million people in only sixty 

years, residents may be more subdued in celebrating 

the 250th anniversary. The current 


144

ecession has worsened racial disparities in 

St. Louis, lowering white household income 

by 7 percent, but black households by 

17 percent. In 2013 median income in white 

households exceeded the national average by 

$3,000 and was 110 percent higher than 

black households, which fell $5,000 short of 

the national average for African Americans. 

In July 2013, the city had a total unemployment 

rate of 10.8 percent (3.4 percent higher 

than the state’s)—but 13 percent of blacks 

were jobless, twice the figure for whites. 

Based on those statistics, St. Louis ranked 

among the twenty most segregated major 

U.S. cities and was the 9th lowest for black 

income mobility. 

Poverty and joblessness, personal disillusionment 

and social alienation, are wellknown 

preconditions for violent crime, 

but for decades St. Louis City has failed to 

correct those root causes of its major crisis, 

which continues to tarnish its national 

reputation. Problem-plagued schools of 

class and racial inequality remain a ticking 

“time bomb” as incubators of violence, 

because they inhibit realistic opportunities 

for new generations to enjoy a better life as 

contributing citizens. The proactive inspiration 

of students is far cheaper and more 

productive than reactive incarcerations, 

which only perpetuate and exacerbate 

violence. Creating great schools is far wiser 

and more humane than erecting glamorous 

skyscrapers and sports stadiums, since crime 

threatens expensive investments even in 

affluent neighborhoods. As George Bernard 

Shaw observed, “for though the rich end of 

town can avoid living with the poor, it cannot 

avoid dying with it when the plague comes.” 

Rather than enticing out-of-town sports 

fans to stay for a weekend, city leaders 

should redirect their priorities and rescue 

the neediest residents who spend their 

entire lives here. St. Louis could achieve 

international acclaim by revitalizing its oncefamous 

city school system, perhaps in 

new partnerships with the area’s creative 

companies and famous universities. 

A quality education has always been 

the antidote to alienation and animosity, 

as students gain a deeper appreciation of 

themselves in developing their talents. 

James H. Buford, former head of the local 

Urban League, advised young people to 

“live your life so that whatever you’ve done 

leaves an example and a legacy for others 

to follow.” The well-educated civil rights 

activist, Percy Green, urged students 

“to develop a thirst for knowledge,” in order 

“to be aware of what is happening around 

them…. And then, of course, they need to 

challenge authority…to gain insight” until 

civic leaders “earn the respect of those 

they are directing.” Such sentiments echo the 

thoughts of nineteenth-century St. Louisan, 

Carl Schurz, whose words were chiseled on 

the Kiel Opera House in 1934 and remain on 

the newly-renovated Peabody Opera House: 

“Democratic government will be the more 

successful the more the public opinion ruling 

it is enlightened and inspired by full and 

thorough discussion. The greatest danger 

threatening democratic institutions comes 

from those influences which tend to stifle or 

demoralize discussion.” 

The great diversity of St. Louisans could 

produce a great destiny with a promising 

future for the city—if people of varied backgrounds 

worked together to solve common 

problems through multiple perspectives. 

In 1991, Henry Louis Gates observed that 

“our society won’t survive without the values 

of tolerance…. The challenge facing America 

will be the shaping of a truly common public 

culture, one responsive to the long-silenced 

cultures of color. If we relinquish the ideal of 

America as a plural nation, we’ve abandoned 

the very experiment America represents.” 

St. Louisans of many hues and multiple 

heritages today can fully appreciate the 

enlightened leadership of Laclede and his 

colonists. The early French settlers are 

relevant again, because those entrepreneurial 

explorers of global commerce enjoyed financial 

success in complex dealings with people 

of different colors, cultures, and countries— 

and shared profits with Indians, who were 

the most alien of all. 

The celebration of ethnic diversity behind 

great deeds is ever present on Delmar 

Avenue—recently named “One of the 10 

Great Streets in America” by the American 


1 4 5

The star of Chuck Berry along the 

“Walk of Fame.” 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE FAUSZ FAMILY. 

Planning Association. There, the “St. Louis 

Walk of Fame” honors 140 creative “stars” 

who have enriched our lives in a variety of 

successful careers. Beginning in 1988 with 

legendary Chuck Berry as the first honoree, 

the “Walk of Fame” has highlighted the 

significant accomplishments of truly remarkable 

St. Louisans that should inspire future 

generations of “explorers” in every field. 

Among them are 45 entertainers, ranging 

from Josephine Baker to Kevin Kline, Scott 

Joplin to Nelly; ten noted architects; five 

favorite broadcasters; 22 sports heroes; scientific 

researchers and prominent educators; 

and nearly 20 legends of literature. St. Louis 

has an enviable heritage of world-famous 

authors who achieved renown elsewhere, 

such as Maya Angelou, William Burroughs, 

T. S. Eliot, and Tennessee Williams, but 

the future promises great works from local 

writers with no intention of leaving. 

Businessman Joe Edwards, proprietor of 

the famous Blueberry Hill since 1972 and 

founder of several other successful enterprises, 

created the Walk of Fame. He believed 

that a greater appreciation for local history 

and inspiring biographies would enhance 

community pride and generate profits in the 

celebrated Delmar Loop that he was most 

responsible for rejuvenating. He joins other 

entrepreneurial “explorers” who continue to 

improve St. Louis with their visions. Among 


146

them was the late Bob Cassilly, who built the 

innovative City Museum with discarded 

materials and artistic creativity and now 

attracts some 600,000 paying visitors a year. 

Demonstrating the remarkable revitalization 

of the old city on a much larger scale 

have been thousands of Bosnian immigrants 

who achieved prosperity and stability in 

the Bevo Mill neighborhood the past two 

decades. Now numbering 70,000 in the 

metro area—equivalent to one-fifth of the 

city’s population—the Bosnians are inspiring 

and successful “urban explorers” who have 

discovered ways to rebuild lives in restored 

The century-old Bevo Mill landmark. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ANDREW WEIL 

OF LANDMARKS ASSOCIATION AND USED WITH 

HIS PERMISSION. 


1 4 7

neighborhoods with flourishing enterprises, 

despite tragedies in their homeland and language 

barriers here. Their distinctive culture 

has provided the cohesion in a community 

that has transformed St. Louis since 1993. 

They publish the only Bosnian language 

newspaper in the United States; founded a 

Bosnian Chamber of Commerce in 2009 with 

65 member businesses (the first opened in 

1997); and even hosted the president of 

Bosnia in 2004. The historic Bevo Mill, erected 

during World War I to reflect the charm of 

Old Europe, is a fitting symbol of the many 

Bosnians who live around it—new immigrants 

from an ancient culture who blend 

modern lifestyles with traditional values. 

Even with the massive Bosnian migration, 

St. Louis still ranks a dismal 24th among 

the 25 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in the 

percentage of immigrants in the total population. 

The “St. Louis Mosaic Project,” however, 

is trying to recruit more foreign-born entrepreneurs, 

who will energize the region with 

creative ideas; establish businesses that hire 

residents, old and new; and help occupy 

some of the 35,000 vacant houses in the 

city—the second-highest percentage among 

81 U.S. cities with at least 100,000 people. 

A youthful generation of native-born urban 

homesteaders has also been exploring city life 

in recent years. Of the 88,000 people who 

work in the business district nearest the river, 

an increasing number—roughly 14,000—are 

also living there, giving the old city a new 

vibrancy in the evening hours. In 2010, the 

median age for St. Louis City residents was 34, 

with 24 percent being 19 or younger and 

40 percent aged 20-44. Many of the new 

downtown dwellers are environmentally 

progressive “anti-suburbanites” concerned with 

the carbon footprints of air-polluting cars, 

so they walk or bike to work and nearby 

entertainment venues. Loft-living St. Louisans 

in a flyover city are taking cues from innovative, 

upscale neighborhoods on both coasts. 

The Mercantile Exchange/Laurel Apartment 

complex on Washington Avenue, for example, 

integrates grand traditional architecture with 

ultra-modern amenities, including access to 

cars rented by the hour and a movie theater 

that serves gourmet meals. 

In a recent front-page story in the Post- 

Dispatch, entitled “Eight Miles of Progress,” 

reporter Tim Bryant found that the long 

central corridor stretching from the Arch to 

the Delmar Loop between Lindell Boulevard 

and Forest Park Avenue was “where St. Louis 

succeeds as a city.” Some 60,000 people 

reside there (a 10 percent increase since 

2000), who, like earlier generations, believe 

that “cities are good places to live.” One 

of the most prominent and prosperous 

companies in that corridor is Cortex, a 

technology and bioscience research “hub” 

founded in 2002 by a consortium of 

Washington University, UMSL, SLU, BJC 

Healthcare, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. 

It has invested $155 million in midtown 

infrastructure and plans another $186 million 

to create a total of 2,400 well-paying high 

tech jobs over the next five years. The Cortex 

Research Park became better known locally 

when IKEA announced that it would open 

one of its popular retail stores there by 2015. 

Even though St. Louis has retained 

only half of the 18 “Fortune 500” company 

headquarters that were here in 1980, Express 

Scripts Holding achieved the highest ranking 

for a local firm in two decades, moving from 

60th place to 24th in a single year. It will 

build a new $56,000,000 office complex 

and add 1,500 employees in the near 

future. Monsanto, ranked 206th, plans to add 

$400,000,000 worth of expanded research 

facilities and some 700 new hires. In 2011, 

the area’s Gross Metro Product (GMP) was 

$133 billion—21st highest in the United 

States—and St. Louis had the largest concentration 

of elite financial management companies 

of any U.S. city outside of New York. The 

busy barge traffic on the Mississippi River 

maintains St. Louis’s rank as the nation’s 

second largest inland port by tonnage. 

Currently, health care leads all area industries 

with 34,000 employees, compared with 

21,000 jobs in manufacturing. But in 2013, 

the Post-Dispatch reported that the “job 

search site Dice.com this year ranked 

St. Louis as the fastest-growing tech job market 

in the nation.” Native St. Louis entrepreneurs 

with international reputations—Jack 

Dorsey, creator of Twitter, and Jim McKelvey, 


148

co-developer with Dorsey of “Square” (which 

enables hand-held electronic devices to 

facilitate mobile payments)—are seeking 

ways to train more tech-savvy St. Louisans 

for employment in such growth industries. 

Already paying higher salaries in the information 

technology field than most other 

American cities, St. Louis has been recruiting 

future job-creators among innovative entrepreneurs. 

Some thirty-five startup companies 

in the last two years have received $50,000 

“Arch Grants” in a local initiative to attract 

new firms and high-paying jobs to the area. 

Occupying office space in the Railway 

Exchange Building and receiving advice 

from seasoned business professionals, such 

companies promise exciting collaborations 

that will bring the vitality of cutting-edge 

research to the St. Louis region. Similarly, 

“SixThirty,” a local accelerator program 

that provides $100,000 startup grants to 

technology companies, has attracted new 

entrepreneurs to the city. 

Many other attributes make St. Louis 

the vibrant, vital core of some three million 

people in the nation’s 19th largest metropolitan 

area, living among 79 city 

neighborhoods, a hundred municipalities, 

and several rural counties in two 

states. While a few suburbs may have 

better shopping and gaudier homes, 

none of them has the impressive history 

and multicultural heritage of “The City.” 

St. Louis is indispensable as the undisputed, 

centrally-located capital of 

the region, dominating the economy, 

professional sports, and every type of 

entertainment. Most of those who 

moved out of the city still remain in 

the region, enjoying the best of both 

worlds. Suburbs are places to sleep, 

while the city is the place to party with 

the most diverse and intriguing people 

in eastern Missouri. Former residents 

regularly return to experience everything 

the suburbs lack, including 

major league baseball, football, and 

hockey, superb restaurants, outstanding 

entertainers, holiday celebrations, 

historic neighborhoods, and free 

world-class cultural institutions in the 

Zoo-Museum District. Almost monthly, St. 

Louis City sponsors parades or festivals 

focused on the ethnic diversity of its citizens, 

48 percent of whom are African Americans, 

3.6 percent Hispanics, 2.3 percent Asians, 

and 43 percent Caucasians. Of the latter, 

15 percent have German ancestry, 9 percent 

Irish, 3.7 percent Italian, and 2.4 French. 

In 2013, the city offered these wide-ranging 

activities for Labor Day weekend alone: 

• “LouFest,” featuring thirty bands on three 

stages in Forest Park 

• “Big Muddy Blues Festival” on Laclede’s 

Landing 

• The annual Japanese Festival at the Missouri 

Botanical Garden 

• St. Nicholas Greek Festival, along Forest 

Park Boulevard 

• The annual Polish Festival on St. Louis 

Avenue 

• The Greater St. Louis Hispanic Festival at 

Kiener Plaza 

• Art fairs at the Schlafly micro-breweries 

• And the City’s annual Labor Day Parade 

along Market Street. 

Fifteenth annual Komen Race for the Cure 

of Breast Cancer, June 15, 2013. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE, 



1 4 9

Art Hill in Forest Park showing the huge crowd viewing a 

performance of the “Pageant and Masque of St. Louis,” 1914. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (29560). 


150


1 5 1

Gone but not forgotten, the popular 

S. S. Admiral excursion boat is moored 

in front of the old levee warehouses and 

railroad tracks prior to the demolition of 

486 buildings over thirty-nine city blocks 

that began on October 9, 1939. As the 

world’s largest inland excursion steamer, 

the five-deck Admiral was 375 feet long 

and 92 feet wide, drawing only eight feet 

of water when fully loaded with over 4,000 

passengers, but outlived its usefulness in the 

new millennium. 

COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 

AT THE JEFFERSON NATIONAL EXPANSION MEMORIAL 

(VPRI 004556). 


152 

Despite the variety of backgrounds and 

beliefs in the city’s population, there are 

certain traditions common to our civic culture. 

It is inconceivable that St. Louisans would 

celebrate Mardi Gras anywhere but in Soulard; 

take out-of-town visitors anywhere but 

the Gateway Arch, Old Courthouse, and 

Anheuser-Busch Brewery; or enjoy a wide 

range of recreational and cultural activities in 

Forest Park. That beautiful 138-year-old, 

1,293-acre park “is the heart of our city.” 

Attracting over 12,000,000 visitors a year 

since it was substantially revitalized in a 

$125 million makeover a decade ago, 

Forest Park was honored in 2013 as one of 

the nation’s “Top 10 Great Public Spaces” by 

the American Planning Association. A laudable 

partnership between the city and the 

supportive citizens of “Forest Park Forever” 

will establish a $10 million endowment to 

fund future maintenance. 

McCune Gill must have had Forest Park 

in mind when he wrote in his 1952 

book, The St. Louis Story, that “places have 

souls, the same as individuals,” and their 

legacies become virtually immortal if they 

represent “the spirit of the people.” Following 

are some of those special “spirited” locales 

that serve as the social glue binding our 

community together with shared traditions 

and cherished memories: 

R E M E M B E R I N G A 

V A N I S H E D S T . L O U I S 

Cities are always changing, but rarely as 

quickly, dramatically, or as intentionally as 

St. Louis did in the mid-twentieth century. In 

2002, architectural historian James Kornwolf 

observed that ”St. Louis achieved the unique, 

if dubious, status in North America of entirely 

obliterating its original urban core in one 

fell swoop” when it demolished old riverfront 

buildings to build the Gateway Arch. The 

“Laclede’s Landing” development saved a 

few old warehouses in better shape for more 

popular uses, while the Admiral survived as a 

symbol of waterfront fun into the new millennium. 

But willful demolition, as in the case 

of the beloved Arena, is often more regretted 

than accidental destruction, like the fire 

that burned down the Highlands amusement 

park. In 1957 the removal of the beautiful, 

venerable Merchants’ Exchange Building led 

to the creation of Landmarks Association to 

protect and preserve other historic structures.

A M O D E R N B U I L D I N G B O O M 

When Missouri became a state in 1821, St. Louis already had 651 homes—232 built of 

stone or brick—with 108 new dwellings constructed in the previous six years alone. Anyone 

who doubted its meteoric rise as a commercial and industrial metropolis for the rest of that 

century should remember Mark Twain’s observations. He first saw St. Louis in 1853, as a 

lad of seventeen, and recalled thirty years later that he “could have bought it [then] for six 

million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.” 

N O T A B L E T R E N D S I N D O W N T O W N A R C H I T E C T U R E 

O F T H E L A S T C E N T U R Y 

S Municipal Courts Building, completed in 1911, next to City Hall, an equally massive 

limestone Beaux-Arts creation of local architect Isaac Taylor reflective of the then-current 

“City Beautiful” Movement; 

S St. Louis Public Library, another masterpiece by Cass Gilbert (who also designed the 

Saint Louis Art Museum), was opened in 1912 at a cost of $2 million and renovated a 

century later after a two-year $70 million restoration. 

S Skyscrapers have dominated the cityscape beyond the riverfront since 1914, when 

230-foot-tall Union Station was eclipsed by the Railway Exchange Building, then the 

world’s largest office building at 277 feet. But only a dozen years later, the Southwestern 

Bell Building of 399 feet surpassed it and was St. Louis’s tallest office skyscraper until 

1969. Topping it by a mere two feet was the Laclede Gas Building, which dominated the 

skyline only briefly between 1969 and 1976. 

S Although no structure could or would have eclipsed the 630-foot tall Gateway Arch—the 

highest monument in the United States—its completion in 1965 inspired ever-higher 

buildings in the private sector. Historians Selwyn K. Troen and Glen E. Holt also noted 

that the Arch “stimulated almost $503,000,000 in construction” between 1965 and 1977. 

The era of the behemoth skyscrapers began in 1976, when One U.S. Bank Plaza reached 

484 feet, only to be surpassed by One AT&T Center within a decade. The height of 

that building remained supreme for thirteen years, until One Metropolitan Square opened 

at 593 feet in 2000 and remains the city’s tallest building. Far shorter is the beautiful 

Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse of 2000, which, at a height of 557 feet, is still the 

second tallest judicial building on earth. 

S Another distinction of recent St. Louis architecture was realized with the completion of 

the new National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Building in 2011. It is 

the largest governmental archive west of the District of Columbia and contains over 

600,000 cubic feet of fifty million U.S. military service records. 

Even though St. Louis City recently received a prestigious “World Leadership Award for 

Urban Renewal,” has all of that destruction and construction, both public and private, 

improved the lives of citizens? That continues to be debated. But no city can stand still or 

remain complacent, and St. Louis would not have a nationally recognizable media image 

without the Gateway Arch. Regarding the value of urban renewal for the poorest citizens, 

Mayor Schoemehl in 1985 said: “It was ‘cruel’ to pretend…that the construction boom would 

break the grip of poverty when it would not. All that the city could do was to try to leverage 

the opportunities…into further opportunities and try to skew some of those benefits toward 

some of the most needy.” 


1 5 3

Above: Some of the many beautifully 

restored homes in the Lafayette 

Square area. 


Opposite: Crown Candy Kitchen, founded in 

1913 by Harry Karandzieff, an immigrant 

from Macedonia, is now in the third 

generation of family ownership. Offering 

traditional food and soda fountain 

specialties, it is a popular anchor business 

in Old North St. Louis, the promising 

project of local preservationists since 1981. 



154 

P R E S E R V I N G T H E P A S T 

Having experienced such massive alterations 

of the cityscape, St. Louisans are now 

particularly protective of traditional neighborhoods. 

Spanning generations are the 

beautifully-restored residences in Lafayette 

Square, Soulard, and other locations with 

special character, unique features, and the 

added appeal of “walkability.” The eclectic 

variety of Cherokee Street shops and the 

creative re-use of buildings along Tower 

Grove Avenue—with the fashionable new 

wine bar, Olio, housed in a 1930s gas 

station—reveal ambitious entrepreneurs who 

see the advantages of entertaining customers. 

St. Louis needs to promote itself as a 

tourist mecca for architectural aficionados 

who would appreciate our many masterpieces 

from different eras: the Chatillon-DeMenil 

and Campbell House mansions of the 

nineteenth century; the Old Courthouse, 

recently restored; the massive Eads Bridge; 

Theodore Link’s incomparable Union Station; 

Louis Sullivan’s still-impressive Wainwright 

Building; Cass Gilbert’s beautiful Art Museum 

and Central Public Library, Eero Saarinen’s 

huge but graceful Gateway Arch; Minoru 

Yamasaki’s much-praised Main Terminal of 

Lambert International Airport; and Sir David 

Chipperfield’s innovative East Building of 

the Saint Louis Art Museum, opened in 2013. 

Another, even more delectable, means of 

appreciating the local past is to eat traditional 

specialty foods developed and devoured over 

many generations. Even though St. Louis offers

gourmet dining by noted chefs, natives still 

crave frozen custard “concretes” from Ted 

Drewes, wonderful Italian cuisine on The Hill, 

the weekly “Cocktail Museum” at The Royale, 

craft beers at Schlafly’s and newer neighborhood 

micro-breweries, Imo’s “St. Louis style” pizza, 

hamburgers at Blueberry Hill, toasted ravioli 

at Lombardo’s, and old-fashioned milkshakes 

and homemade Easter chocolates at Crown 

Candy Kitchen. 


1 5 5


156

Top, left: Balloon Glow in Forest Park, 

September 14, 2012, prior to the fortieth 

annual “Great Forest Park Balloon Race” 

the next day. That popular event regularly 

attracts crowds of 100,000 people. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIK M. LUNSFORD; 


Opposite, bottom left: Photograph of the 

“Spherical Balloon Races at Aero Club 

Grounds,” from Walter B. Stevens, ed., 

St. Louis: One Hundred Years in a 

Week—Celebration of the Centennial 

of Incorporation…(St. Louis Centennial 

Association, 1909). St. Louisans embrace 

selected elements of heritage that they 

personally remember but ignore a fuller and 

more meaningful history that requires some 

research to appreciate. Locals celebrated the 

“40th anniversary” of the St. Louis balloon 

race in 2012, without realizing that the 

city’s fascination with them began much 

earlier—in the mid-1800s—and had 

become a local tradition when this 

photograph was taken in 1909. 

H O N O R I N G 

T R A D I T I O N 

Left: The legacy of “the Rome of the West” 

remained strong when Pope John Paul II 

made a popular, thirty-one-hour visit to 

St. Louis in January 1999, during which 

he celebrated Mass for 104,000 people. 

SOUVENIR MEDALLION COURTESY OF LOGO-MASTERS, 

INC., OF ST. LOUIS. 


1 5 7

A P P R E C I A T I N G T H E A R T S 

St. Louisans also demonstrated their 

passion for living by strongly supporting 

artistic endeavors. Music of all kinds is 

still enjoyed in blues bistros, arena rock 

concerts, riverfront shows, and symphony 

halls. With the opening of the renovated 

and renamed Peabody Opera House, 

Market Street is again the site of worldclass 

stage shows for large audiences in 

sumptuous surroundings. All of the creative 

arts have been revitalized, as well, in the 

rejuvenated Grand Center Historic District 

in Midtown St. Louis, offering several 

popular institutions housed in architectural 

gems from every era of the twentieth 

century. They include the Fox Theatre, 


158

Powell Symphony Hall, The Contemporary 

Art Museum Saint Louis, Pulitzer 

Foundation for the Arts, Sheldon Concert 

Hall and Galleries, St. Louis Black Repertory 

Theater Company, Grand Center Arts 

Academy and its rehabbed Sun Theater, 

KETC—the PBS television station, and 

UMSL-owned KWMU, a National Public 

Radio station, which recently relocated 

from that campus. Opening at a different 

downtown location in 2014 will be the 

first National Blues Museum, thanks to 

$6 million from Pinnacle Entertainment, 

a casino operation that represents the 

region’s newest industry. Another enterprise 

that will enrich our cultural environment is 

the new International Photography Hall of 

Fame and Museum. 

Gala Opening Night of the new “Peabody 

Opera House” on September 19, 2011, 

following a $79 million renovation of the 

old Kiel Auditorium. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY EMILY RASINSKI; 



1 5 9

T H E M U S I A L M A G I C 

Stan Musial receiving the Medal of 

Freedom from President Barack Obama 

in the East Room of the White House on 

February 15, 2011. 

OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER SOUZA; 

FREE USE ALLOWED UNDER WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 

AS THE WORK PRODUCT OF A FEDERAL EMPLOYEE. 

“The greatest Cardinal ushered in an era of sustained 

success,” wrote the Post-Dispatch on January 20, 2013. 

“But it was his kindness and approachability that made 

him an enduring civic treasure.” 

The affable, unconceited Stan Musial was a perfect 

fit for an unpretentious, baseball-crazy city that 

appreciated natural talent and maximum effort. 

Although he was born elsewhere, he loved St. Louis and 

never left, preferring local affection over the national 

attention he would have received in a larger, more 

lucrative media market. Here, being “nice” was most 

appreciated as one of the traditional “hometown” values 

of the Midwest. 

St. Louisans embraced Musial as a humble hero—a 

person who inspired people to live better lives, or 

at least to make them feel better about their lives. While few mortals could match the incredible 

statistics he compiled between Pearl Harbor and President Kennedy’s assassination, all 

of us can follow his example of spreading some joy to others. The greatness and graciousness 

of Stan “the Man” Musial epitomized the best “Spirit of St. Louis.” Our city will remain a 

better place long into the future, if those who meet friends under the bronze Musial Statue 

remember that in life, too, he always brought us together. 

( R E ) S E A R C H I N G 

F O R A B E T T E R F U T U R E 

Laclede’s intellectual legacy remains 

stronger than ever in the twenty-first century. 

It is reflected in our major research universities 

and universally-respected medical facilities 

that have produced several Nobel 

Laureates, the Baby Tooth Research Project 

on Radioactivity, the Human Genome Project, 

and the Masters and Johnson studies on 

human sexuality, among other contributions. 

The Missouri History Museum Archives and 

Research Center, the Mercantile Library at the 

University of Missouri-St. Louis, and other 

public and private libraries in the area make 

our city the global center of research on the 

American West. In addition, Washington 

University owns several of Thomas Jefferson’s 

books, and Saint Louis University houses the 

largest collection of Vatican manuscripts in 

the Western Hemisphere. When the renovated 

Museum of Western Expansion at the 

Gateway Arch reopens in 2016, it will represent 

the most up-to-date educational exhibits 

on the American West. 

C O N T R I B U T I N G 

T O C I T I Z E N S H I P 

A N D C H A R I T I E S 

St. Louisans have long been described as 

compassionate and caring citizens with 

“old fashioned hometown” values, expressed 

by their generous support of many worthy 

causes. During the Great Depression in 1935, 

71 percent of voting St. Louisans approved 

a $7.5 million bond issue to support a 

national memorial along the riverfront. 

Again, in 2013, voters agreed to a 3/16 cent 

sales tax that will raise $780 million to 

fund parks and an extensive makeover of 

the Gateway Arch grounds. Statistics from 

2010 also revealed that St. Louisans’ per 

capita rate of online charitable contributions 

and volunteerism were among the highest 

of all major U.S. cities. In 2011, 60,000 

local runners set a national record for 

participation in the Komen Race for the Cure 

of breast cancer. St Louis City was also the 

“first U.S. community to honor returning 

vets of the Iraq War” on February 4, 2012, 

as reported by NBC Nightly News. The 


160

acclaimed humanitarianism of St. Louis 

native, Dr. Thomas Anthony Dooley III, in 

Southeast Asia has inspired his fellow 

citizens, such as the Reverend Larry Rice of 

the New Life Evangelistic Center, to help 

the disadvantaged here at home. Countless 

citizens worked for weeks to hold back 

the record-high flood waters in 1993 and 

assist the victims of that massive tragedy, as 

St. Louisans have always done for every 

tornado, earthquake, or other natural disaster. 

The same community-wide compassion 

resulted in a public outpouring of sympathy 

and respect when Stan Musial died in 

January 2013. 

Stan was the ultimate embodiment of the 

St. Louis Cardinals—the city’s most beloved 

institution. That franchise is the most 

successful in National League history, having 

won eleven World Series championships. 

But the Cardinals have lost eight other 

championships, and that, too, is worth 

remembering. Outspent by many other 

teams, the scrappy, underdog Cardinals have 

been the ultimate “explorers” in the search 

for success even with limited resources, and 

that resonates with a large fan-base that is not 

affluent. In a sort of apprentice system that 

recalls older mountain men training the 

younger in the keys to survival, the Cardinals 

recruit, train, and promote largely from 

within the organization, which places a 

premium on the special “redbird way,” referring 

to how players conduct themselves on 

and off the field to deserve the respect of 

passionate fans. 

All three “Busch Stadiums” have been 

places where warm people met on hot 

summer nights. In July 2013, Will Leitch 

ranked all of the major league baseball parks 

and declared that the current Busch Stadium 

was #7 due to its “general warm vibe.” He 

confessed that he would “rather be there than 

just about anywhere else in the world.” 

The 250th anniversary provides the best 

opportunity in the twenty-first century for 

the entire community to determine the 

identity and destiny of St. Louis. But we 

must first address the city’s long-standing 

inferiority complex, which began in the 

nineteenth-century competition with Chicago 

for railroad supremacy and continues today 

in using Tax Increment Funding as a 

defensive measure to keep lucrative local 

companies in town. St. Louis has the urban 

equivalent of low self-esteem, because 

officials have spent decades tearing down 

beloved buildings, while citizens have been 

tearing down the city’s reputation. Residents 

rarely boast but do bristle at every criticism 

from either coast and are amazed when a 

non-Midwesterner actually appreciates their 

politeness and friendliness. Aaron Perlut, who 

co-launched the “Rally St. Louis” website 

in 2012, reflected the low level of boosterism 

in his blog, “St. Louis Doesn’t Suck.” 

Borrowing the motto of Cahokia, Illinois, 

St. Louisans should have “Pride in the Past” 

and “Faith in the Future.” The two are linked, 

because a true appreciation of St. Louis as 

a special place worth praising must begin 

with a thorough, accurate knowledge of 

its history by enthusiastic residents who 

respect its achievements, while recognizing 

its deficiencies. In 2006, Richard Rosenfeld, 

UMSL criminology professor, wrote that 

“St. Louis’s best chance for a bright future 

depends on forging creative connections with 

the past.” In his 2010 book, Beyond Preservation, 

Andrew Hurley agreed that we must study 

history “to know what worked and what 

failed,…what was admirable and what was 

reprehensible” in the past, in order to “devise 

innovative ways of adapting existing infrastructures 

to new conditions so as not to 

create a rupture between past and present.” 

For two-and-a-half centuries, St. Louis 

has prospered from the confluence of rivers 

and the convergence of cultures, taking the 

lead in new commercial trends and always 

adapting to changing times. Ever since an 

exploring French businessman founded our 

city, a focus on transactions has helped our 

leaders adjust to transitions. Today, St. Louis 

is one of a very few premier “Legacy” cities, 

and is often compared to Boston for its significant 

contributions to American history 

across the centuries, as well as the current 

quality of life in its historic neighborhoods. 

“Few cities have had as colorful a history as 

St. Louis,” wrote three respected historians 

in Missouri: The Heart of the Nation (2004), 


1 6 1

Opposite: Fireworks from Fair St. Louis 

light up the night sky on July 3, 2010, above 

the iconic, popular Gateway Arch and 

Old Courthouse. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAWN MAJORS; 


and “today it remains one of the most 

interesting and distinctive of American 

cities.” The nationwide name-recognition of 

St. Louis is the main reason that suburban 

residents continue to use the city as their 

postal address. 

In 1909, the St. Louis Republic stated that 

“in the development of the United States, 

magnitude has been the dominant thought 

of its people.” But “Laclede pictured the city 

to grow on his selected site as something 

more and something better than merely big.” 

He “intended to ‘establish a settlement which 

might become thereafter one of the finest 

cities in America.’” By rejecting the old 

Quantitative Ethic, which has depressed 

St. Louisans with a drop in population nearly 

impossible to reverse in the era of interstate 

highways, residents should embrace a 

Qualitative Ethic represented by a smaller, 

less crowded, and more livable, city, with the 

room and resources to improve their lives. 

The city is definitely finer because it is not 

bigger. It has all the facilities of a major city— 

skyscrapers, international corporations, and 

a prestigious professional baseball team 

(fortunately founded when it was much 

larger)—but provides a moderately-sized 

population with rare opportunities for home 

ownership and one of the lowest costs of 

urban living in the nation. All St. Louisans 

are similar to a retired couple of “emptynesters,” 

living in a large comfortable “house” 

designed for many more people. Most city 

residents are spared the rat-race pace of daily 

living, as well as the hellish commutes found 

in major metropolises on both coasts and in 

Chicago, too. City dwellers regard St. Louis 

as half-full, rather than half-empty, with its 

greater livability contributing to its lovability. 

St. Louisans have the patience to practice 

their famous politeness and to laugh at 

things considered “silly” in less enjoyable 

cities—such as the 2011 World Series’ “rally 

squirrel” that scampered across home plate 

at Busch Stadium. 

At the end of his Lion of the Valley, James 

Neal Primm wrote that “St. Louisans could 

claim to have turned things around in the 

1980s, and they looked ahead to the 

next decade with more confidence than 

they had ten years earlier.” That proved to 

be too optimistic, of course, but now there 

is a growing momentum for a true renaissance—positive, 

progressive improvements 

embodied by the term “metromorphosis,” 

which was coined by UMSL professors 

Brady Baybeck and E. Terrence Jones in their 

2004 book. 

Currently, high-level discussions are taking 

place among city and county officials about a 

possible future “Great Reconciliation,” and 

two organizations—“STL: World Class City” 

and “Better Together”—see many positive 

developments from such a merger. With 

a substantial portion of the U.S. population 

living within a 500-mile radius of St. Louis, 

it can be America’s “Carnival City” again. 

It has the infrastructure and the attractions 

to please tourists, but the attitudes of 

residents must reflect a new optimism as they 

welcome visitors. 

As a city of explorers, St. Louis has always 

accepted the risks of searching for the new 

and different. Often such discoveries are not 

made or fully exploited, and the ways 

those disappointments are handled become 

discoveries themselves. Almost a century 

ago, Albert Ahern wrote a poem to honor 

The Trappers of North America, and this stanza 

seems most appropriate as an anniversary 

tribute for the old fur trade capital that 

has never stopped exploring for two-anda-half 

centuries: 

“It isn’t the size of the cabin you’ve built, 

Nor what you have won in pelts or fame, 

The thing that counts is the right to say: 

I have kept the faith—I have played the game.” 

For all you have been, and for all you can 

become, St. Louis—Happy 250th Birthday! 


162


1 6 3

City House and Jazz Bistro, among many 

venues in the popular Grand Center 

Entertainment District. 

OCTOBER 2010 PHOTOGRAPH BY OLIVER C. SLICER, 

WHO RELEASED IT INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN THROUGH 

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. 


164

SHARING THE HERITAGE 

H i s t o r i c p r o f i l e s o f b u s i n e s s e s , 

o r g a n i z a t i o n s , a n d f a m i l i e s t h a t h a v e 

c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h e d e v e l o p m e n t a n d 

e c o n o m i c b a s e o f S t . L o u i s 

Quality of Life ......................................................1 6 6 

The Marketplace ...................................................2 3 2 

Building a Greater St. Louis ...................................2 7 0 

S H A R I N G T H E H E R I T A G E 

1 6 5

The World Chess Hall of Fame, which relocated to the St. Louis area in 2011. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY SARAH CARMODY. PUBLISHED COURTESY OF THAT ORGANIZATION. 


166

QUALITY OF LIFE 

H e a l t h c a r e p r o v i d e r s , f o u n d a t i o n s , 

u n i v e r s i t i e s , a n d o t h e r i n s t i t u t i o n s t h a t 

c o n t r i b u t e t o t h e q u a l i t y o f l i f e i n S t . L o u i s 

Lindenwood University ...............................................................1 6 8 

Washington University in St. Louis ...............................................1 7 2 

SSM Health Care .......................................................................1 7 6 

The University of Missouri-St. Louis .............................................1 8 0 

St. Louis Mercantile Library and UMSL .....................................1 8 2 

Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center .............................1 8 3 

Bi-State Development Agency.......................................................1 8 4 

Archdiocese of St. Louis ..............................................................1 8 8 

St. Louis Community College .......................................................1 9 1 

Webster University ....................................................................1 9 2 

St. Luke’s Hospital .....................................................................1 9 5 

JCI ..........................................................................................1 9 6 

American Red Cross ...................................................................1 9 9 

The Muny .................................................................................2 0 0 

Fontbonne University .................................................................2 0 3 

World Affairs Council of St. Louis ................................................2 0 4 

BJC HealthCare .........................................................................2 0 6 

Delta Dental of Missouri ............................................................2 0 8 

Maryville University ..................................................................2 1 0 

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod ...........................................2 1 2 

Ascension .................................................................................2 1 4 

Missouri Botanical Garden ..........................................................2 1 6 

Saint Louis Science Center ..........................................................2 1 8 

Saint Louis Zoo .........................................................................2 2 0 

Mathews-Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club ............................................2 2 2 

Harris-Stowe State University .....................................................2 2 3 

Greater Saint Louis Community Foundation ...................................2 2 4 

St. Mary of Victories Church (1843) .............................................2 2 5 

Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet ................................................2 2 6 

Central Bureau of the Catholic Central Verein of America ................2 2 7 

Commemoration Committee for the Battle of Fort San Carlos ............2 2 8 

Mercy Health ............................................................................2 2 9 

Missouri Humanities Council .......................................................2 3 0 

St. Louis Public Library ..............................................................2 3 1 

SPECIAL 

THANKS TO 

Max Kaiser, Jr. 

St. Andrew’s Resources for 

Seniors System 

Webster University 

Q U A L I T Y O F L I F E 

1 6 7

LINDENWOOD 

UNIVERSITY 

Few schools anywhere have compiled 

a history as exciting—or inspiring—as 

Lindenwood University, a dynamic four-year 

liberal arts institution dedicated to excellence 

in higher education. Founded in 1827, 

Lindenwood took its name from the beautiful 

Linden trees that shade the historic 500-acre 

campus in St. Charles, a growing community 

just west of St. Louis. 

Lindenwood University offers more than 

120 undergraduate and graduate degree 

programs to more than 16,000 students from 

throughout the United States and ninety 

countries around the world. The faculty, 

staff and administration at Lindenwood are 

committed to an integrative liberal arts 

curriculum that focuses on the talents, 

interests and future of our students. 

In 1827, George and Mary moved to land 

he had purchased some years earlier near 

St. Charles in order to be near Mary’s family. 

Mary immediately began teaching the young 

women of St. Charles while George cleared 

the land and established a homestead. The 

Sibley’s property was named Linden Wood 

because of the many Linden (or basswood) 

trees that grew on the land. 

The Sibleys were strong supporters of 

education for women: they began their school 

at a time when formal education for women 

was uncommon in the United States. Mary 

commented that, “Our country will never 

prosper unless the people get knowledge.” 

In his writings, George said, “Woman is 

the most important sex; and if but half of 

our race can be educated, let it be woman 

instead of man. Woman forms our character: 

she is with us through life; she nurses us 

in infancy; she watches us in sickness, 

soothes us in distress, and cheers us in the 

melancholy of old age.” 

Left: George Sibley—Before moving to 

St. Charles with his wife, Sibley served as 

the head official that traded with Indians at 

Fort Osage near current day Kansas City, 

Missouri. His descriptions of the Indians 

in that region were among the first by an 

American. Later, Sibley led the group that 

surveyed the route that later became known 

as the Santa Fe Trail, c. 1830. 

PAINTING BY CHESTER HARDING. 

Right: Mary Easton Sibley—Mary Sibley 

built a lifelong reputation for caring 

about the education of women and the 

underprivileged. Throughout her life 

she was active in charitable activities in 

St. Louis and St. Charles. Sibley’s father 

was the second attorney general for the 

state of Missouri, as well as the first 

postmaster general for the city of 

St. Louis, c.1830. 

PAINTING BY CHESTER HARDING. 


168 

Lindenwood was conceived by the husband 

and wife team of George Sibley and Mary Easton 

Sibley, who were dedicated to improving the 

life of the underserved. Prior to founding 

Lindenwood, George ran a government trading 

post for the Native Americans who lived close 

to Fort Osage, near present day Kansas City, 

Missouri. Mary began teaching the children of 

those living at the post, as well as the area’s 

Native American children. After the fort closed 

around 1822, George headed the commission 

that surveyed what later became known as the 

Santa Fe Trail. 

The school was small, and the challenges 

were great during the early days, but a 

member of the board of directors during the 

1840s, Samuel Watson, generously supported 

Lindenwood by donating as much as $20,000 

and ninety-two acres of land, a tremendous 

contribution during that era. It was through 

Watson’s gifts that Lindenwood was able to

weather a period of political turmoil in the 

nation and low enrollment at the college. 

Because of her belief that all segments of 

society should be educated, Mary attempted 

to organize a school for local slave children 

in 1834. The attempt failed because slave 

owners feared that educated slaves might lead 

a rebellion. The famous abolitionist, Elijah 

Lovejoy, visited St. Charles often and would 

preach sermons at the local Presbyterian 

Church denouncing slavery. During one visit, 

Lovejoy infuriated local slave owners to the 

point that they threatened to lynch him. 

Lovejoy fled to Lindenwood, where the 

Sibleys lent him a horse on which he escaped 

the mob. 

George and Mary turned the school over 

to the Presbyterian Church in 1856, a year 

in which there was intense controversy over 

the issue of slavery. Shortly after the Civil 

War, Lindenwood went through a period 

of infighting among its board of directors. 

After the war had ended, the board was 

divided over its loyalty to the United States. 

The squabble ended up before the Missouri 

Supreme Court, which granted control of the 

college to the Northern Presbyterian Church, 

which supported the union. 

After the Presbyterian Church settled the 

issues dividing the board of directors, growth 

at Lindenwood proceeded at a much more 

orderly pace for the next six decades. During 

the period of 1914-1916, benefactors James 

and Margaret Butler gave much of their 

fortune to the college and significant changes 

began to occur. 

The Reverend John Roemer was persuaded 

to leave his congregation in St. Louis to 

head Lindenwood. Under Roemer’s guidance, 

Lindenwood became a four-year college, gained 

regional accreditation, began an extensive 

building program and quadrupled the student 

body. The school also enhanced its academic 

reputation during this period by attracting to 

its faculty a large number of graduates from 

Ivy League schools. As Lindenwood’s academic 

reputation grew, the school was promoted as 

the ‘Wellesley of the West.’ 

Franc McCluer became president of 

Lindenwood in 1947, and his leadership and 

amiable personality helped the college nearly 

double enrollment, increase classroom space 

and further enhance its reputation as a 

quality institution. Between Roemer and 

McCluer, Lindenwood enjoyed nearly fifty 

years of stable and wise leadership. 

Above: One of the earliest existing 

advertisements for Lindenwood is this 1839 

broadside. During the early history of the 

college, Lindenwood was known as a 

finishing school for women. By the late 

1800s, students had the option of 

participating in studies comparable to those 

of men; by 1914 Lindenwood was 

fully accredited. 

Left: Built in 1856, Sibley Hall was the first 

of many brick buildings constructed over 

the next 150+ years. As Lindenwood grew, 

Sibley Hall received additions in 1881 and 

1886 to accommodate the need for more 

space. The signature columns to the front 

of the building were added in 1927. 

Sibley Hall is still being used today. 


1 6 9

Top: Evans Commons—in 2011, 

Lindenwood opened its new 119,000 square 

foot student center. The building includes a 

food court, laundry facilities, student 

mailboxes, student government offices, 

basketball courts, an elevated track and 

an exercise facility. 

Center: Continuing a long tradition 

of promoting the arts, in 2008, 

The J. Scheidegger Center for Fine and 

Performing Arts was opened. Within the 

Scheidegger Center are found classrooms, 

a 1,200 seat Broadway style theater, 

the 200 seat Emerson Black Box Theater, 

the Boyle Family Gallery, and the Charter 

Communications HD Television Studio. 

Bottom: The 2012 LU footballhomecoming—Lindenwood’s 

football team 

is just one of the many successful sports 

programs that the university makes 

available to students. Half of Lindenwood’s 

sports, in 2013, will finish the transition 

into NCAA division II play. 

The nation was undergoing a tumultuous 

period of social change after McCluer left in 

1966. As baby-boomers neared college age, 

they were less inclined to attend private, 

single-sex institutions such as Lindenwood, 

thus creating a difficult transition period as 

enrollment declined sharply and the school’s 

endowment shrunk. 

To counter these problems, Lindenwood 

became a coeducational institution in 1969, a 

decision that was not immediately embraced 

by all the students. Many of the women who 

attended Lindenwood at the time, as well 

as many alumni, were upset by the decision 

and protested by burning an effigy of the 

president because they were not consulted 

about the change. In time, however, the 

students adjusted to the coed status, and 

campus life returned to normal. 

Under the leadership of President William 

C. Spencer, the college established one of 

the first accelerated learning programs in 

the United States in 1975. Called ‘The 

Lindenwood College of Individualized 

Education,’ the initiative helped stabilize 

student enrollment during the 1970s. 

The school’s endowment, which continued 

to diminish through the 1980s, began to 

change when President Dennis Spellmann 

took charge in 1990 and shifted the school’s 

direction. Spellmann realized he could turn 

around the institution’s financial situation by 

increasing revenue flow through building 

additional dormitories and filling them with 

students enticed by attractive financial aid 

packages. Spellmann also increased the 

emphasis on the school’s sports programs, 

feeling this would help boost Lindenwood’s 

appeal to students. 

Dr. James Evans became president in 2007 

and continued Lindenwood’s tradition of 

expansion and innovation. Through Evans’ 

leadership, the school has continued to grow 

in enrollment, campus improvements and 

endowment. Lindenwood has shifted its area 

of greatest growth from the original campus 

in St. Charles to a daughter campus 

in Belleville, Illinois. In addition, 

Lindenwood has continued to build 

on its fine academic reputation, 

instituted doctoral programs and 

increased the percentage of faculty 

with terminal degrees to eighty-one 

percent. Also, half of LU’s sports 

programs have moved to NCAA’s 

Division II. 

Lindenwood University is now 

involved in a bold campus expansion 

plan that blends old traditions 

with new and will provide the 

facilities to carry the school well 

into the future. 

This expansion has already produced 

the grand 138,000 square 

foot J. Scheidegger Center for the 

Arts; eight new 180 bed residence 


170

halls; the Evans’ Commons, a 119,000 

square foot student center that includes 

a second dining hall, multipurpose 

courts, a suspended jogging track, 

a workout facility, recreation rooms 

and plenty of room for student 

relaxation; the University Student- 

Athlete Center, a 43,000 square foot 

building with an academic success 

center, locker rooms for NCAA sports 

programs, athletic training facilities, 

coaches’ offices and a new Champion’s 

Room; and a new main entry gate 

near the southeast corner of the 

campus at the intersection of First 

Capitol Drive and Kingshighway. 

Additional growth has included 

the renovation and expansion of 

Harmon Hall, which now houses the 

university’s School of Business and 

Entrepreneurship. Nine classrooms 

and several seminar halls, breakout rooms, 

the Dunseth Auditorium and office space 

have been added. The existing interior was 

updated and remodeled, and a new facade 

was added to the entire building. 

In the immediate future, Lindenwood 

plans to continue developing its Belleville, 

Illinois, campus in a way that will establish 

it as one of the highest quality liberal arts 

colleges in the Midwest. 

In St. Charles County, the university plans 

to increase student and curricular growth 

by opening a new School of Nursing and 

Allied Health Services and offering a BSN 

completion program, an MSN in Nursing and 

various other allied health programs. 

Lindenwood plans to add to the attractiveness 

of college life by working with a 

commercial partner to create a new retail 

center—or campus town—in St. Charles. 

This center will include the city’s new post 

office, a supermarket, a hotel, restaurants and 

additional dormitories for students. 

Lindenwood strives to be the preeminent 

representative of a new category in higher 

education—the teaching university. A 

teaching university does not aspire to be 

the research university that populates the 

mainstream of higher education. Rather, it 

stands for teaching excellence and fiscal 

responsibility and seeks foremost to be accessible 

and affordable to students. 

Lindenwood University is known nationally 

and internationally for innovation, entrepreneurship 

and extraordinary dedication 

to students. It believes that education is a 

way to personal freedom and responsibility, 

which are the keystones of any democracy. 

Lindenwood’s liberal arts heritage dates back 

186 years, and in that time the university 

has learned how to educate in a way that 

helps each student become an enlightened, 

principled citizen of a global community. 

Lindenwood is an independent institution 

firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian values. 

Those values include belief in an ordered, 

purposeful universe, the dignity of work, the 

worth and integrity of the individual, the 

obligations and privileges of citizenship and 

the primacy of truth. 

George and Mary would hardly recognize 

the little women’s college they established 

in 1827 in the middle of the wilderness, 

but they would take pride in the way 

Lindenwood has grown by emphasizing its 

founding principles and developing valuescentered 

programs that meet the needs of 

today’s students. 

Additional information is available on the 

Internet at www.lindenwood.edu. 

Commencement ceremony in 2012—since 

its beginning, Lindenwood has produced 

more than 40,000 graduates. In recent 

years, nearly 2,500 well rounded, 

responsible citizens have annually 

graduated with degrees from 

Lindenwood University. 


1 7 1

WASHINGTON 

UNIVERSITY 

IN ST. LOUIS 

Above: In 1899, after holding a national 

design competition, Washington University 

selected the Philadelphia firm Cope & 

Stewardson to design a new Collegiate 

Gothic campus. The original concept was 

illustrated by Hughson Hawley. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE WUSTL ARCHIVES. 

Below: Washington University’s original 

campus was in downtown St. Louis. 

Academic Hall, the first building completed, 

opened for classes in 1856. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE WUSTL ARCHIVES. 


172 

Washington University in St. Louis was 

founded by St. Louisans to serve the educational 

needs of St. Louis. It began on February 

22, 1853, when Missouri Governor Sterling 

Price signed a charter into law establishing 

“Eliot Seminary.” The charter was the work of 

St. Louis merchant and State Senator Wayman 

Crow, who had named the new educational 

venture after his friend, cofounder and Pastor 

William Greenleaf Eliot, Jr. But Eliot declined 

to have the entity named for himself and 

insisted that the school be nonsectarian. After 

a series of early name changes, the name 

Washington University was settled on because 

the charter was signed on George Washington’s 

birthday. The charter was amended to reflect 

the name change in 1857. 

Initially, the university was located in 

downtown St. Louis and began offering a 

range of “academic, practical, and scientific” 

options. Its first academic building at 

Seventeenth and Washington was completed 

in 1856. The Collegiate Department, the forerunner 

of the College of Arts & Sciences 

opened in 1858 and graduated its first class of 

five students in 1862. Programs were added 

in engineering, law, fine arts, manual training, 

and medicine. Eliot, Jr., became the university’s 

third chancellor in 

1871. Campus life was 

thriving; Student Life, 

which is still publishing 

today, became the 

student-run publication 

in 1878. 

By the 1880s and 

1890s, the university 

occupied three city 

blocks as well as two 

buildings nearby. But 

smoke from burning coal cast a pall on the 

already-aged structures, and families of means 

had moved farther west for space and open 

air, signaling the need for a change. 

By 1894 the board of directors had acquired 

a 103 acre site on the western limits of the city, 

“beyond Tom Skinker’s Road.” (The board later 

added fifty acres, shifting the boundary south 

to Forsyth and west to Big Bend.) In 1895 the 

board employed Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot, 

the premier landscape architects in the country, 

to develop a preliminary plan for the site. The 

firm recommended a monumental main building, 

facing east toward Forest Park, with a series 

of quadrangles behind it for the new campus, 

which became known as the Hilltop Campus. 

Fortuitously, in 1895, the board of directors 

named St. Louis businessman Robert S. 

Brookings as its new president, a role he would 

serve in for the next thirty-three years, transforming 

the university. Brookings promptly 

raised funds for the first six buildings. In 1899 

the university launched a design competition 

with six prominent architecture firms submitting 

detailed block plans and elevations. A jury 

unanimously selected the plan of Philadelphia 

firm Cope and Stewardson, which proposed 

Collegiate Gothic-style buildings, cloistered 

quadrangles, and flexible spaces. 

The cornerstone for the first building, 

Busch Hall, was laid in 1900, quickly followed 

by the cornerstone laying for University (now 

Brookings) Hall and the other seven buildings 

in the “pioneer group.” Still, the university 

needed more funding. Ever resourceful, 

Brookings took advantage of the plans to hold 

the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair—officially the 

Louisiana Purchase Exposition—in adjacent 

Forest Park and leased the Hilltop Campus 

buildings to the Fair.

Left: Seigle Hall, an interdisciplinary 

learning center, houses the departments of 

Economics, Political Science, and Education, 

as well as additional space for the law 

school. The LEED-certified building was 

designed by Kallman, McKinnell and 

Wood Architects. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DAVID KILPER/ 

WUSTL PHOTOS. 

The university was the site for two other 

events in 1904: the Olympic Games, the third 

Olympiad held in the modern era and the first 

in the Western Hemisphere, and the Congress of 

Arts and Sciences, in which 500 scholars gathered 

to discuss human knowledge and progress. 

Finally, the university was able to move into 

its new quarters. A chapel service on January 

30, 1905, inaugurated the academic use of the 

new campus, and classes began that day. In 

1908, when David F. Houston arrived as the 

university’s fifth chancellor, he gave a key 

address before the Commercial Club of 

St. Louis. In his address, titled “A University 

for the Southwest,” Houston outlined his 

vision for Washington University—still largely 

a regional school—as a great national university 

with special ties to the South and West. 

In 1910, Brookings turned his attention 

to the Medical Department of Washington 

University, formed through the 1891 acquisition 

of St. Louis Medical College, which 

merged in 1899 with Missouri Medical 

College. Abraham Flexner, a Johns Hopkins 

graduate who had undertaken an independent 

quality assessment of 155 medical schools 

in the United States and Canada, wrote of 

his visit to Washington University that he 

“found the school a little better than the 

worst I had seen elsewhere, but absolutely 

inadequate in every essential respect.” 

Shocked, Brookings and Chancellor 

Houston asked the board of directors to 

appoint a reorganization committee. The committee 

recruited a stellar group of faculty, 

which formed a governing group known as the 

Executive Faculty. The university formed an 

affiliation with Barnes Hospital and St. Louis 

Children’s Hospital, which were relocating 

to Kingshighway, and promised to build a 

first-class medical school on property adjacent 

to the hospitals. In each hospital, the staff 

was to consist exclusively of medical school 

faculty. By the time of the medical school’s 

dedication in 1915, Brookings had established 

one of the best medical schools in the country. 

On the Hilltop Campus, the law school 

and the School of Fine Arts arrived from 

downtown in 1909; Architecture separated 

from Engineering in 1910; and the School 

of Commerce and Finance debuted in 1917. 

Academic programs grew and student life 

flourished until the arrival of World War I in 

1917. Students and faculty left for the front, and 

military trainees took their place on campus. 

The war’s end brought an era of prosperity 

and swelling student enrollment, in part 

because of returning veterans but also because 

a university education was within reach for 

more families. With this influx of students, the 

Hilltop Campus became overcrowded, signaling 

a need for new construction. In the 1920s, 

Arts and Sciences became the College of 

Liberal Arts; a School of Graduate Studies 

opened, as did the university’s first summer 

school, and in 1927, the George Warren 

Brown Department of Social Work. Also in 

Below: James D. Lightbody receives the 

trophy for winning the eighty-meter run 

at the 1904 Olympics. Track and field 

events for the 1904 Games were held on 

Washington University’s Francis Field. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE 

MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ST. LOUIS. 

Bottom: Brauer Hall and Green Hall, 

both LEED Gold certified, house a variety 

of engineering departments and programs. 

They also serve as home to the International 

Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and 

Sustainability (I-CARES), an organization 

promoting interdisciplinary research in the 

areas of renewable energy, biofuels, and 

environmental practices. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JOE ANGELES/ 

WUSTL PHOTOS. 


1 7 3

Above: Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton, 

center, announces that the 2008 vice 

presidential debate will be held at 

Washington University. The university has 

hosted three internationally televised 

presidential debates and one vice 

presidential debate since 1992. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JOE ANGELES/ 

WUSTL PHOTOS. 

Opposite, top: The Center for 

Advanced Medicine on the Washington 

University Medical Campus is home to the 

Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center, as well as 

more than 750 Washington University 

physicians and surgeons who provide 

multidisciplinary care. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ROBERT J. BOSTON/ 

WUSTL SCHOOL OF MEDICINE. 

Opposite, bottom: BJC Institute of Health on 

the Washington University Medical Campus 

houses laboratories and support facilities to 

rapidly translate research findings into 

advances in medical treatment. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ROBERT J. BOSTON/ 

WUSTL SCHOOL OF MEDICINE. 


174 

1927, Arthur Holly Compton was awarded the 

Nobel Prize in Physics for work done while at 

the university, the first of twenty-three Nobel 

laureates to date affiliated with the university. 

Brookings’ resignation as board president 

in 1928 marked the end of an era of vision 

and extraordinary service. It also brought a 

time of concern and financial difficulty in the 

wake of the 1929 stock-market crash. 

America entered World War II on 

December 7, 1941. The war again changed 

the university as students began to enlist. 

Army students in critical fields arrived for 

training, and Engineering signed up students 

in record numbers. Army contracts also 

improved the university’s finances. 

With the end of the war and the return of 

Compton as the university’s ninth chancellor in 

1946, student enrollment again began to grow 

and academic buildings began to rise. By 1952 

the College of Liberal Arts became the last academic 

unit to admit minorities, finally bringing 

segregation to an end at the university. 

In 1953, Ethan A. H. Shepley, a lawyer and 

well-respected St. Louisan, became chancellor 

and began strategic preparation for a three 

year, $20 million Second Century Campaign. 

Among the changes funded by the campaign 

were new residence halls on the south forty 

section of the Hilltop Campus, reflecting 

Shepley’s goal of transforming Washington 

University from a streetcar college to one with 

a national student body. 

In the 1960s, Chancellor Eliot oversaw 

expansion of faculty, students, and grant support 

and led efforts to offer interdisciplinary 

programs. However, under Eliot’s watch, 

protests over issues of civil rights and the 

Vietnam War that occurred nationwide—the 

time Eliot called “the troubles”—culminated 

with the burning of the Air Force ROTC 

building on the Hilltop Campus. Providing 

Eliot with counsel and support during the 

“troubles” was a young cardiologist and vice 

chancellor for medical affairs at the School of 

Medicine, William H. Danforth. 

When Eliot retired in 1971, Danforth was 

the universal choice as thirteenth chancellor. 

Like university cofounders Crow and Eliot 

and longtime board President Brookings, 

Danforth had a transformative influence. 

In his address on Founders Day 1972, 

the new chancellor conveyed a native son’s 

empathy for his city and said, “I believe 

that Washington University is one of this 

community’s contributions to mankind.” (In 

1976 the board of trustees made “Washington 

University in St. Louis” the school’s official 

name, distinguishing it from the other 

U.S. higher education institutions with 

“Washington” as part of their name.) 

During his twenty-four years as chancellor, 

Danforth—in partnership with his wife, 

Elizabeth “Ibby” Gray Danforth—built a 

student-centered culture, recruited outstanding 

faculty, brought in research grants that 

solidified the university’s stature as a national 

research university, and enhanced academic 

programs. A priority was stabilizing the 

university’s finances, often with challenge 

grants from the Danforth Foundation. In 

1978, he created the Commission on the 

Future of Washington University—ten task 

forces chaired by trustees, each assigned to 

a school or major unit—that came up with 

nearly 200 recommendations to strengthen 

the university. Their work led to the 1983–87 

Alliance for Washington University Campaign, 

which raised a then-record $630.5 million.

Accomplishments during Danforth’s chancellorship 

included 70 new faculty chairs; a 

$1.72 billion endowment; dozens of new 

buildings; triple the number of gift-supported 

scholarships; 60,000 students who graduated; 

and 11 Nobel Prizes, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, and 

2 Poets Laureate. He continued to serve the 

university as chairman of the board of trustees, 

then vice chair and now as chancellor emeritus. 

Today’s Washington University in St. Louis 

is both local and global under the leadership 

of Mark S. Wrighton, chancellor since 1995. 

In the 2012–13 academic year, the university 

had a $2.4 billion operating budget 

and a $5.7 billion endowment. It received 

$550.7 million in research support and awarded 

3,924 degrees. For the undergraduate class that 

entered the university in fall 2013, it received 

more than 30,000 applications for 1,600 

spots in the freshman class, and more than 

ninety percent of undergraduates were from 

outside the state of Missouri. It is increasingly 

diverse—about forty percent of the student 

body is nonwhite, multicultural or international. 

Nearly 14,000 students are enrolled, with about 

half of them pursuing graduate studies. 

Comprehensive undergraduate, graduate, 

and professional programs are offered through 

Arts & Sciences (the College of Arts & Sciences, 

the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and 

University College), George Warren Brown 

School of Social Work, School of Engineering & 

Applied Science, Sam Fox School of Design & 

Visual Arts (College of Architecture, Graduate 

School of Architecture & Urban Design, and 

College and Graduate School of Art), School 

of Law, School of Medicine, Olin Business 

School, and the Institute for Public Health. 

Through the McDonnell International 

Scholars Academy, Chancellor Wrighton has 

built signature academic and research programs 

with premier universities in Asia, Europe, the 

Middle East, South America, Australia, and 

Africa. Current students and faculty come 

from more than 100 countries of the world. 

In the Wrighton era, more than forty new 

buildings have risen on the Danforth and 

Medical campuses, and the university has 

added other properties, such as the North 

Campus in St. Louis City and the 560 Music 

Center in University City. 

In 2012, Chancellor Wrighton wrote: 

“A great university has great responsibilities— 

to its students and to the society it serves. 

Together, we will educate and inspire the 

next generation of leaders. Our faculty and 

students will make significant improvements 

to improving human health. We will help 

to overcome poverty and contribute to a 

sustainable environment. Together, the people 

of Washington University will provide leadership 

to enhance the quality of life for all.” 


1 7 5

Above: The founding sisters of the Sisters 

of St. Mary included, (clockwise, starting 

on lower left), Sister M. Elizabeth Becker, 

Sister M. Francis Reuter, Mother Mary 

Odilia Berger, Sister M. Magdalen Fuerst 

and Sister M. Odilia Schneider. 

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE FRANCISCAN SISTERS 

OF MARY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

Below: Mount St. Rose Throat and Chest 

Hospital, which was located in St. Louis 

County near the Mississippi River, opened in 

1900 to care for people with tuberculosis. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF © SSM HEALTH CARE. 


176 

SSM HEALTH CARE 

SSM Health Care began when five Catholic 

sisters traveled from Germany in November 

1872 to start a new life caring for the sick in 

America. Growing religious persecution in 

Europe influenced their choice to venture so 

far from home. When they arrived in St. Louis, 

Missouri, they could not speak a word of 

English and had only $5 among them. From 

this humble beginning, the sisters built an 

organization that has continued to provide for 

those in need and promote good health for 

more than 140 years. 

Today, SSM Health Care is a nationally 

recognized, Catholic not-for-profit health 

system serving four Midwestern states. A 

2013 merger with Dean Health Systems in 

Wisconsin transformed SSM Health Care into 

one of the largest integrated delivery networks 

in the country. An integrated delivery 

network includes many multidisciplinary 

providers along the full continuum of 

patient care who work together to deliver 

the specific care that a patient needs, 

when they need it, and in the most 

appropriate setting. 

Founded by the Franciscan Sisters of 

Mary, SSM Health Care continues to be a 

force for good in the communities it 

serves. The organization’s heritage of faith, 

compassion and healing began with the 

selfless devotion of the five founding 

sisters who weathered an arduous ocean 

crossing to New York City to meet the health 

care needs of those in a strange, new land. Upon 

arrival, they boarded a train for East St. Louis, 

crossed the frigid Mississippi River by ferry, 

and took shelter with the Ursuline Sisters. 

After a few weeks, they found an apartment 

in a tenement across the street from St. Mary 

of Victories Church, near the riverfront. By 

virtue of their proximity to and worship at the 

church, the young congregation of sisters 

became known as the Sisters of St. Mary. 

Living conditions were deplorable during 

the early days of the congregation. The 

tenements were overcrowded, food and 

water were often contaminated, raw sewage 

collected in open gutters, and carcasses from 

slaughterhouses rotted in the streets. Even the 

air was filled with soot, making it difficult 

to breathe. These conditions provided the 

perfect environment for breeding deadly 

diseases, such as cholera and diphtheria. 

Soon after their arrival, the sisters were 

faced with a challenge—caring for victims of a 

smallpox epidemic that swept across St. Louis 

and eventually claimed 1,500 lives. 

The sisters proved resilient. Led by Mother 

Mary Odilia Berger, the young congregation 

helped meet the tremendous health needs 

of those living in the nineteenth century 

tenements. While other sisters tended to the 

sick, Mother Odilia transported supplies to 

the sisters in a basket she carried. The basket 

was also used to gather donations of money, 

food or medicine along the way. When 

Mother Odilia came upon someone in need, 

she never hesitated to give that person 

something from her basket.

It is said that one day while the sisters were 

out, a man came to their apartment begging 

for something to eat. Although the only thing 

in the kitchen was a loaf of bread, Mother 

Odilia gave it to the man, firmly believing that 

God would provide food for the sisters. Later 

that day, a child knocked at the door bearing 

a pan of rolls freshly baked by her mother. 

In 1877, the sisters opened their first 

hospital—St. Mary’s Infirmary in St. Louis— 

one of the few hospitals offering care to the 

poor and to immigrants. For those who were 

unable to pay, the sisters simply registered the 

patient under the account “Our Dear Lord’s” 

in their early ledgers, signifying that the Lord 

would provide for their care. 

As the years passed, the sisters increased 

their knowledge and skills, adopted new 

technology and established additional 

hospitals. They believed their ministry was to 

bring the healing presence of God and the 

love revealed through Jesus Christ to their 

sisters and brothers, especially those most 

in need. 

In 1894, seven Sisters of St. Mary, who 

were committed to a Franciscan way of life 

and were guided by Mary Augustine Giesen, 

formed a new community named the Sisters 

of St. Francis of Maryville, Missouri. The 

Maryville sisters opened their first hospital, 

St. Francis Hospital, in 1895. 

Both congregations continued to 

distinguish themselves as gracious, hospitable 

and committed women. They met the needs 

of the times, especially the needs of those who 

could not afford the basic necessities of life. 

Toward the turn of the twentieth century, 

tuberculosis was increasingly common. Out 

of fear of infecting other patients with the 

debilitating, contagious and often deadly 

disease, doctors were reluctant to admit 

people with tuberculosis into hospitals. In 

1898, Sister Mary Helen Kyle convinced the 

St. Louis congregation to open a hospital 

specifically for those suffering from the feared 

disease. However, there was no money for the 

venture and Sister Mary Helen was told she 

would have to raise the funds herself. She and 

another sister took to the streets to beg for 

money. After their first day, they had raised a 

grand total of sixty-five cents. Undaunted, the 

sisters continued to beg, 

and slowly, the fund grew. 

After a year, a home 

located far from the dirty 

city air was purchased 

for $12,000. The money 

collected by Sister Mary 

Helen was used as a down 

payment on the purchase, 

and Mount St. Rose 

Throat and Chest Hospital 

opened in 1900. Sadly, 

one of the first patients in 

the new hospital was 

Sister Mary Helen, who 

would eventually die of 

tuberculosis in 1912. 

In 1933, the Sisters of St. Mary opened a 

nursing school for African Americans and 

converted St. Mary’s Infirmary into the first 

Catholic hospital for African Americans in 

the United States. The Infirmary also served 

as a place where African-American physicians 

and nurses could practice their profession. 

Throughout their histories, both the Sisters 

of St. Mary and Sisters of St. Francis became 

leaders in establishing hospitals and 

advancing health education. As hands-on 

healers, managers, researchers and inventors, 

the sisters of both congregations were 

compassionate leaders in health care 

administration and nursing education. 

Above: St. Mary’s Infirmary opened in 

May 1877 in St. Louis. It was the first 

hospital opened by the Sisters of St. Mary, 

who immigrated to the United States in 

November 1872. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE FRANCISCAN SISTERS 


Below: In 1933, St. Mary’s Infirmary in 

St. Louis became the first Catholic hospital 

for African Americans in the nation. 

It also was a place for African-American 

physicians and nurses to train and practice 

their profession. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE FRANCISCAN SISTERS 



1 7 7

Above: In 2002, SSM Health Care 

became the first health care winner of the 

Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. 


Below: Sister Mary Jean Ryan, FSM, 

was the first president/CEO of SSM 

Health Care. She served at the helm of 

the organization for twenty-five years 

and continues as board chair. In 2011, 

William P. Thompson succeeded her as 

president/CEO of the organization. 



178 

Following the modernizing reforms of the 

Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, both 

congregations began reconnecting as they 

planned for the future. By the early 1980s, they 

felt called to a shared future and began serious 

conversations to deepen their relationship. A 

vote in 1985 began the process of reunifying 

the two congregations as the Franciscan Sisters 

of Mary. The many hospitals started by the 

sisters were united in 1986 as SSM Health 

Care, and in 1987, the reunification of the 

congregations was finalized. 

Today, SSM Health Care includes 18 

hospitals, more than 60 outpatient locations, 

about 175 physician clinic locations, regional 

home care and hospice services, a health 

plan, a pharmacy benefits management 

company and two long-term care centers. 

SSM Health Care operates with annual 

revenue of $5 billion and employs nearly 

30,000 people, including 1,300 physicians. 

It is one of the largest employers in the 

communities it serves. In 2002, SSM Health 

Care became the first health care organization 

in the nation to win the Malcolm Baldrige 

National Quality Award, given annually 

by the U.S. Department of Commerce to 

high-performing, high-quality organizations. 

SSM Health Care is headquartered in 

St. Louis, with hospitals and care facilities 

located in Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma 

and Wisconsin. The St. Louis metro area 

has the largest concentration of SSM 

hospitals, including: 

• SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical 

Center, St. Louis 

• SSM DePaul Health Center, Bridgeton 

• SSM St. Clare Health Center, Fenton 

• SSM St. Joseph Health Center, St. Charles 

• SSM St. Joseph Health Center—Wentzville 

• SSM St. Joseph Hospital West, Lake Saint 

Louis 

• SSM St. Mary’s Health Center, Richmond 

Heights 

Also located in St. Louis are four SSM Urgent 

Care Centers, along with multiple outpatient 

care sites and physician clinic locations. SSM 

Integrated Health Technologies and SSM Home 

Care are also based in St. Louis and partner 

with local operations throughout the system.

In mid-Missouri, SSM Health Care operates 

nine clinics and two hospitals—St. Mary’s 

Health Center in Jefferson City and Audrain 

Medical Center in Mexico. In addition, SSM 

Health Care owns and operates St. Francis 

Hospital & Health Services in Maryville, 

which serves residents in a nine-county rural 

region that reaches into Iowa. 

Wisconsin is home to three SSM hospitals 

located in Madison, Janesville and Baraboo 

and to SSM’s Dean Health Systems, which 

includes a physician group, a health plan, 

a pharmacy benefits company and an 

accountable care organization with St. Mary’s 

Hospital in Madison. 

In Illinois, SSM Health Care jointly 

sponsors St. Mary’s Good Samaritan, Inc., in 

Centralia and Mount Vernon. In Oklahoma, 

SSM operates St. Anthony Hospital and Bone 

and Joint Hospital at St. Anthony in Oklahoma 

City, St. Anthony Shawnee Hospital in 

Shawnee, and two St. Anthony Healthplexes. 

The year 2013 was full of important 

milestones for SSM Health Care. It began 

with the opening of the replacement 

hospital for Good Samaritan Regional 

Health Center in Mount Vernon, Illinois. 

By spring, SSM Health Care added its 

eighteenth hospital with the purchase of 

Audrain Medical Center in Mexico, Missouri. 

In summer, the final beam was put in 

place for the next replacement hospital, 

which will open in Jefferson City in the fall 

of 2014. 

Today, SSM Health Care is well-positioned 

to meet the health care needs of people in the 

twenty-first century who value convenient 

access to high-quality, affordable care. 

SSM Health Care is led by President and 

CEO William P. Thompson. He succeeded 

Sister Mary Jean Ryan, FSM, who served 

as president for twenty-five years until 

becoming chair of the board of SSM Health 

Care in 2011. 

SSM Health Care honors its rich heritage 

and the spirit of its founding sisters in a 

mission statement created by SSM Health 

Care employees: Through our exceptional 

health care services, we reveal the healing 

presence of God. 

Above: In 2013, SSM Health Care— 

St. Louis won its fourth consecutive 

“Best Place to Work” recognition from the 

St. Louis Business Journal. 


Below: In 2013, Dean Health Systems 

merged into SSM Health Care. To 

commemorate the event, SSM Health Care 

President and CEO William P. Thompson, 

donned a Dean logo tie and visited with 

employees at many of the Madison, 

Wisconsin clinic locations. 



1 7 9

THE UNIVERSITY 

OF MISSOURI- 

ST. LOUIS 

UMSL initially held classes in 

neighboring storefronts. 


180 

The University of Missouri-St. Louis is 

the largest research university located in 

Missouri’s most populous and economically 

important region. It provides excellent learning 

experiences and leadership opportunities 

to a diverse student body whose influence on 

the region upon graduation is immense. 

No other university brings more to bear 

on the social and economic advancement of 

the region than UMSL, which is fitting for a 

campus created just for that purpose. 

In 1958 residents of the Normandy 

School District passed a bond issue to 

purchase the Bellerive Country Club as its 

membership had decided to relocate. The 

district and its residents determined in the 

early 1960s that the best course of action 

was luring a higher education institution 

to the site as a means of offering more 

opportunities to St. Louis area residents and 

stabilizing nearby neighborhoods. 

During this period, the University of 

Missouri—headed by President Elmer Ellis— 

was exploring the possibility of campuses 

in Kansas City and St. Louis. The university 

ultimately decided the Bellerive site was ideal 

for a St. Louis area campus. 

So a deal was struck. Normandy would 

transfer ownership of the 128 acre country 

club for a nominal fee. In return, the university 

would establish a campus on the 

Bellerive site. 

State lawmakers, unanimously in the Senate 

and on a vote of 150-3 in the House, passed 

legislation making the land 

transfer legal. Governor John 

Dalton quickly signed the 

legislation into law. 

So, in 1963, the University 

of Missouri-St. Louis opened 

on the grounds of a closed 

golf course in Normandy, 

Missouri. It had one building, 

a handful of faculty and fewer 

than 700 students. Classes 

were initially held in the 

former clubhouse and nearby 

storefronts along Natural 

Bridge Road. 

At its dedication, Ellis 

said UMSL was beginning 

with a strong liberal arts 

curriculum foundation, but 

added, “What our successors 

in another generation will 

see to build [UMSL] into, 

only time can tell.” 

Ellis would be impressed. 

Today, UMSL is spread across 350 acres of 

rolling hills in suburban St. Louis County 

adjacent to two Interstate highways and 

five minutes from Lambert-St. Louis 

International Airport. The campus has 

seventy academic and general-purpose 

buildings as well as a variety of student 

residence halls, condominiums and 

apartments. UMSL has developed a business 

park that houses the world headquarters 

of Express Scripts Inc. and operates two 

business incubators concentrating on life 

sciences and information technology. It has 

also opened a building in Grand Center— 

the arts and entertainment district in 

St. Louis—that houses classes and St. Louis 

Public Radio. 

UMSL has 1,500 faculty, 1,200 staff, 10 

schools and colleges and a $200 million 

annual budget. More than ninety-six percent

of tenure and tenure-track faculty hold 

doctoral or terminal degrees in their 

respective fields and edit or have articles 

routinely published in a variety of nationally 

renowned academic journals. Several of 

the university’s ninety-one degrees and 

programs have attained national recognition 

for quality, including biology, criminology, 

education, information systems, international 

business, nursing, optometry, psychology, 

public policy and tropical ecology. The 

UMSL faculty as a whole was ranked seventh 

nationally among universities with fewer 

than fifteen doctoral programs in the 

Academic Analytic’s Faculty Scholarly 

Productivity Index—behind Boston College 

and Georgetown University. 

UMSL enrolls nearly 17,000 students from 

48 states and more than 100 countries, with 

40,000 additional students participating in 

non-credit continuing education programs. 

Despite its international flavor, the UMSL 

student body comes primarily from, and 

reflects the diversity of, the region. More 

than 1,200 students live on campus and 

175 students participate in one of eleven 

NCAA Division II sports programs. 

While UMSL graduates have taken leadership 

roles nationally and internationally, their 

influence remains centered in the St. Louis 

region. No university has more alumni in the 

St. Louis region. More than seventy percent 

of UMSL’s 87,500 graduates live and work in 

the region—supporting the unofficial campus 

tagline “We Educate St. Louis.” 

Above: UMSL today has seventy academic 

and general use buildings and enrolls nearly 

17,000 students. 

Below: UMSL graduates more than 3,000 

students a year—most of whom remain in 

the region long after commencement. 


1 8 1

ST. LOUIS 

MERCANTILE 

LIBRARY AND 

UMSL 

Below: Founded in 1846, the St. Louis 

Mercantile Library is the oldest library west 

of the Mississippi River. 

Bottom: As a unit of the University of 

Missouri-St. Louis, students and researchers 

have gained greater access to the vast 

collections of the St. Louis 

Mercantile Library. 


182 

The St. Louis Mercantile Library can look 

back on its heritage as the oldest library in 

continuing existence west of the Mississippi 

River with confidence in its important role 

in the future. 

Founded in 1846 by business leaders for 

the public good, the Mercantile was the 

city’s first viable art museum, the city’s first 

theater, an early college of sorts and a 

home for the city’s earliest scientific and 

other learned societies. The Mercantile 

quickly evolved into a huge collection of 

books on every subject—early universities 

used its law and medical book collections. 

Soldiers like the young William T. 

Sherman studied the tactics of Alexander 

and Napoleon in its stacks. Journalists 

such as Joseph Pulitzer read omnivorously 

in the library’s holdings to learn the craft 

of writing. Authors 

like Kate Chopin, Sara 

Teasdale and Eugene 

Field studied the classics 

in the Mercantile. 

In the process, the 

Mercantile’s holdings 

kept enlarging, and 

today, the many lesserknown 

holdings—in 

art, manuscripts, photos 

and prints—make 

the collections a kind of bibliographic laboratory 

for the history of reading and learning 

in America. 

The library was a great forum, an 

athenaeum, for the city. Its theater boasted 

many successful performances by Jenny Lind, 

Lola Montez and the initial seasons of 

the world-famous St. Louis Symphony. The 

library’s lecture hall hosted Oscar Wilde, 

William Thackeray, Susan Anthony, Ralph 

Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville, as 

well as homegrown talents like Mark Twain. 

In serious times the library’s halls rang with 

tumultuous speeches such as Senator Thomas 

Hart Benton’s exhortation on “Westward the 

Star of Empire,” an impassioned speech on 

the development of the transcontinental 

railroad. The library became a bulwark for 

the Union in the 1860s, a place where the 

Emancipation Proclamation was read and 

ratified by the Missouri Legislature. Clearly, 

the Mercantile Library has lived its share of 

great historical events. 

Celebrating its 150th anniversary in 

1996, members of the Mercantile decided to 

transfer its collections and assets to become 

part of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. 

The Mercantile’s collections have grown and 

are now housed in a modern, secure, climatecontrolled 

facility on UMSL’s campus in 

suburban St. Louis County. 

The relationship with UMSL 

has greatly increased public 

access, use and visibility of 

the Mercantile’s art treasures 

and its historic collections 

that focus on the history, 

development and growth of 

the St. Louis region and 

the American West. Not only 

did it open the Mercantile’s 

treasures to UMSL’s students 

and faculty, but also the 

electronic conversion of the 

Mercantile’s catalog records 

now allows access to researchers 

around the state, 

the nation and the world. 

Together, UMSL and the 

Mercantile are preserving the 

past for the future.

BLANCHE M. 

TOUHILL 

PERFORMING 

ARTS CENTER 

As university laboratories go, the Blanche 

M. Touhill Performing Arts Center at the 

University of Missouri-St. Louis is spectacular. 

Designed by world-renowned architectural 

firm, I. M. Pei, the Touhill is the region’s best 

venue for patrons and performers. 

The facility serves as an academic laboratory 

for UMSL students in classes in the College of 

Fine Arts and Communication. Theater, music 

and dance students have the opportunity to 

learn and perform in the very same space that 

hosts some of the most talented and recognizable 

professional performers in their fields. 

The Touhill offers quality arts and entertainment 

from across the spectrum of the 

performing arts genres—attracting nearly 

1 million visitors since it opened in 2003. The 

1,600 seat Anheuser-Busch Hall provides a 

breathtaking backdrop for big-name national 

acts, as well as locally produced attractions. 

The E. Desmond and Mary Ann Lee Theater 

is a versatile stage space that fits 350 patrons 

for national and local productions as well. 

Hundreds of UMSL’s music and theater 

students take the big stage for music and 

dance concerts, musicals and plays, or to 

build sets and design lighting. They also use 

the smaller Lee Theater for more intimate 

music and stage performances. 

On any given day during the week, busloads 

of school children arrive at The Touhill. 

Some of them perform on stage. Others get to 

experience a symphony, opera, musical or dance 

performance for the first time—often from 

one of UMSL’s myriad presenting partners. 

The Arianna String Quartet and Modern 

American Dance Company, for example, have 

residence status with UMSL, meaning The 

Touhill serves as their performance home. 

Both are popular with external audiences 

and with students who learn from the groups’ 

professional performers. 

Among external groups that perform 

regularly at The Touhill are Ambassadors of 

Harmony, Jazz St. Louis, Opera Theatre of 

Saint Louis, Saint Louis Ballet, St. Louis Jazz 

Orchestra and Dance St. Louis. The ongoing 

relationship benefits patrons as well as the 

performers, who reach a diverse audience in 

a unique setting. 

“The beauty and majesty of the Touhill 

enhances each of our presentations and 

thrills artists and audiences alike,” said 

Michael Uthoff, artistic and executive director 

of Dance St. Louis. 

Now a decade old, The Touhill is achieving 

its goals of enhancing UMSL’s performance 

programs and making world-class cultural 

performances accessible to new audiences— 

particularly individuals living in north 

St. Louis County. 

The Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts 

Center at UMSL has become a tangible symbol 

of the power of the arts in the lives of its 

students and the community that continues to 

support it. 

Above: The Blanche M. Touhill Performing 

Arts Center is a superior public 

performance venue as well as a unique 

student-learning laboratory. 

Below: UMSL students perform and practice 

their craft in the Blanche M. Touhill 

Performing Arts Center. 


1 8 3

BI-STATE 

DEVELOPMENT 

AGENCY 

Below: MetroBus, wrapped for 2012 Fair 

Saint Louis, is driven in the Veiled Prophet 

Parade in Downtown St. Louis. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF LEE HARRIS. 

Bottom: MetroLink marked its twentieth 

anniversary in July 2013. 



184 

Bi-State Development Agency (BSDA) is a 

multifaceted agency that includes public transit 

operations and transit oriented development as 

well as business enterprises related to aviation 

and tourism. Metro, the public transit system 

for the St. Louis region, is currently the best 

known division. Metro includes the 46-mile 

MetroLink light rail system; a MetroBus fleet 

of approximately 400 vehicles which serves 

75 routes and more than 7,400 bus stops in 

St. Louis City, St. Louis County and St. Clair 

County, Illinois; and Metro Call-A-Ride, which 

primarily serves the elderly and disabled with 

a fleet of 121 vans. 

BSDA owns and operates St. Louis 

Downtown Airport and its surrounding industrial 

business park located in Cahokia and 

Sauget, Illinois. Additionally, BSDA operates 

the Gateway Arch trams, ticketing center and 

parking facility in a unique partnership with 

the National Park Service. BSDA also owns 

and operates excursion boats on the Mississippi 

Riverfront as part of its tourism operations. 

BSDA was established in 

1949 through an Interstate 

compact between Missouri 

and Illinois. Legislation 

establishing the compact 

was ratified by the U.S. 

Congress and signed by 

President Harry S. Truman. 

The agency employs 

approximately 2,400 persons 

and is governed by 

a 10 member Board of 

Commissioners comprised of 5 members 

from Missouri and 5 from Illinois. BSDA is 

neither governmental nor private. It has no 

taxing authority, but as a quasi-public agency, 

it is authorized to issue revenue bonds, 

collect fees and receive funds from federal, 

state and private agencies. 

“While the agency may be best known for 

its public transit services, its overall mission is 

to drive economic development on both sides 

of the Mississippi River,” said BSDA President 

and CEO John M. Nations. “The organization 

has broad powers that enable us to cross local, 

county and state boundaries to plan, construct, 

maintain, own and operate services and entities 

crucial to the economic vitality of the region 

like bridges, tunnels, airports and terminal 

facilities, and to plan and establish policies for 

other critical infrastructure for the region.” 

During its first years of operation the agency 

focused on regional challenges, including commissioning 

a comprehensive plan for development 

of the Missouri-Illinois Metropolitan 

District, which outlined major needs of the 

region and recommended solutions. The 

agency also conducted a study of water pollution 

on the Mississippi River, a study of sewer 

problems in St. Louis County, which led to 

the establishment of the Metropolitan Sewer 

District, and an area-wide survey of highways 

and expressways in Missouri and Illinois, 

which became one of the first instances of 

coordinated interstate highway planning. 

BSDA continues to play a role as a leader in 

regional infrastructure planning, financing 

and development and is currently 

involved in several projects that 

may prove beneficial to the region 

in the future. These projects 

include evaluating the potential for 

a new MetroLink station as the 

mobility hub for the rapidly growing 

Cortex area in the Central West 

End of St. Louis; working with 

regional leaders on High Speed 

Rail connectivity from St. Louis 

to Chicago; and strategizing with 

area leadership on formation of a 

Regional Freight District to support 

and grow the region’s logistics 

and freight industries.

In the 1960s the St. Louis region’s public 

transit system was operated by 15 private 

companies that were all plagued with financial 

and reliability issues. A study commissioned 

by the City of St. Louis and St. Louis 

County recommended a unified, region wide 

approach to public transportation and BSDA 

was called on to provide the solution to this 

critical regional challenge. In 1963 the 

agency issued bonds and purchased those 15 

private transit companies to create the first 

St. Louis regional transit agency. 

More than fifty years later MetroBus leads 

the transit industry with improved efficiencies 

that provide maximum return on public 

investment entrusted to the agency. In addition 

to the wise stewardship of public funds, 

the MetroBus predictive maintenance program 

is viewed as a model to transit agencies around 

the world for its success in significantly 

stretching the life of transit service vehicles 

and improving reliability by increasing the 

number of miles between bus breakdowns. In 

recent years, MetroBus has been nationally 

recognized for record ridership. 

During the 1970s, BSDA was one of the 

first transit agencies in the nation to operate 

wheelchair lift-equipped buses in regular 

service. In 1987, BSDA introduced Call-A-Ride, 

a curb-to-curb service designed to ensure 

accessibility for customers with disabilities. 

Today, Call-A-Ride transports approximately 

600,000 passengers a year. 

Plans for a light rail transit system for the 

region finally started to become reality in 1988 

when a full funding agreement for MetroLink 

was signed in a ceremony on top of the 

Gateway Arch parking facility. This agreement 

symbolized a commitment by the federal 

government to fund construction of MetroLink, 

and by Metro to design, build and operate the 

system in cooperation with the jurisdictions 

served by BSDA. 

The original seventeen-mile MetroLink 

alignment opened in July 1993 with sixteen 

stations and began operating between the 

North Hanley Station in Missouri and the 

Fifth and Missouri Station in East St. Louis, 

Illinois. Less than a year later, MetroLink’s 

Lambert Airport Terminal #1 Station and 

the East Riverfront Station opened. During a 

visit to St. Louis on June 24, 1994, President 

Bill Clinton rode MetroLink from the airport 

to Union Station, becoming the first U.S. 

president in office to ever ride an American 

light rail system. The Lambert Airport 

Terminal #2 Station was added in 1998. 

MetroLink quickly became one of the greatest 

success stories in the agency’s history as the 

region chose MetroLink as a viable option for 

getting to work, school and special events. 

MetroLink ridership more than doubled 

in January 1999 during a historic visit to 

St. Louis by Pope John Paul II. 

Above: St. Louis Downtown Airport, 

located only three miles from Downtown 

St. Louis, conveniently serves corporate 

business travelers, sports teams, and elected 

officials, as well as aviation enthusiasts. 

Left: President Bill Clinton rode MetroLink 

from Lambert-St. Louis International 

Airport to Union Station on June 24, 1994. 

Below: Metro Call-A-Ride operator helps a 

customer board in January 2014 after the 

St. Louis region was hit with more than a 

foot of snow. 



1 8 5

Above: Gateway Arch Riverboats cruise the 

mighty Mississippi River at St. Louis. 

Below: Metro transit operates MetroLink, 

MetroBus, and Metro Call-A-Ride services. 



186 

In 2001, MetroLink expanded and began 

operating on the 17.4 mile St. Clair County 

MetroLink extension to serve eight new 

MetroLink stations and seven Metro Park- 

Ride lots from Fifth & Missouri in East 

St. Louis to Southwestern Illinois College in 

Belleville. MetroLink service extended further 

into Illinois in 2003 with a 3.5 mile extension 

from Southwestern Illinois College to Scott 

Air Force Base. 

In 2006, Metro opened the eight-mile Cross 

County MetroLink Extension, expanding service 

from the Forest Park-DeBaliviere Station 

southward to Shrewsbury, Missouri. Today, the 

forty-six mile MetroLink system ranks near the 

top of the industry for its on-time performance 

of ninety-seven percent, and is an essential 

component of a transit system admired around 

the world for its efficiencies. 

In addition the areas around the MetroLink 

stations are continuing to experience significant 

private investment. Since 2011, more 

than $1.8 billion in public and private 

development has been built, is now under 

construction, or planned within a half-mile of 

MetroLink stations. 

The East-West Gateway Council of 

Governments collaborated with BSDA to 

develop a thirty year long-range regional transit 

plan known as “Moving Transit Forward.” 

The plan, which was completed in 2010, is 

based on a comprehensive look at expansion 

options, market research consideration of 

new, existing and future transit technologies, 

and a detailed funding plan that outlines the 

critical role of local, state and federal support. 

The oldest excursion boat company on the 

Mississippi River began operation in 1891 as 

Streckfus Steamers and has called St. Louis 

its home port since 1917. The name was later 

changed to Gateway Riverboat Cruises, and 

in 2001, BSDA purchased the company along 

with its riverboats, the Becky Thatcher and the 

Tom Sawyer. BSDA has been operating them 

since then as Gateway Arch Riverboats, an 

extension of the educational venues of the 

Gateway Arch to share the rich history of the 

region and the Mississippi River.

The construction of the Gateway Arch 

presented unique design, construction and 

funding challenges, and as a result, BSDA was 

asked to provide solutions for funding and 

operations. It financed construction of the 

tram system through the sale of $3.3 million 

in revenue bonds. The Arch was completed 

in 1965 and the tram system opened to the 

public in 1967, carrying visitors 630 feet to 

the top of the Gateway Arch in cable-drawn 

pods. BSDA continues to operate the trams to 

this day. In 1983, at the request of regional 

leaders, BSDA issued $8.4 million in bonds 

for a 1,224 car parking facility to serve visitors 

to the Gateway Arch and other riverfront 

attractions. The garage opened in 1986 and 

the bonds were paid off in December 2012. 

BSDA employees have worked seamlessly 

with the National Park Service since the 

partnership began in 1962 to expand the 

Gateway Arch tram ride attraction into 

an internationally recognized, multifaceted 

attraction destination, which includes a 

museum, two movie theaters, bike rentals, 

riverboat cruises and sightseeing rides from 

the nation’s only floating heliport. Nearly 

one million visitors from every corner of 

the world take a trip to the top of the 

Gateway Arch at the Jefferson National 

Expansion Memorial for a chance to see 

thirty miles in every direction, after 

experiencing 200 years of westward 

expansion history in the museum below. 

Before the Gateway Arch the iconic 

symbol on the St. Louis Riverfront was 

the historic Eads Bridge, which opened 

in 1874 and is now a partnership 

between BSDA and the City of St. Louis. 

BSDA is using a federal grant, through 

the American Reinvestment and Recovery 

Act, to restore the national landmark, 

which was the first steel structure bridge 

project in the United States. Extensive 

rehabilitation of the bridge’s support 

structure and rail deck is underway 

and expected to be completed by the 

end of 2015. MetroLink trains cross 

the bridge over the Mississippi River 

nearly 300 times a day, and along with 

the vehicular deck on the bridge, provide 

a critical connection for the region. 

In the early 1960s area leaders recognized 

a need to develop reliever airports for 

Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, and 

BSDA was asked to help solve this regional 

challenge. In 1964, BSDA purchased Parks 

Metropolitan Airport, which had ceased 

operation. BSDA reopened it in 1965 as 

Bi-State Parks Airport. In 1999 the facility 

was renamed St. Louis Downtown Airport to 

emphasize its three-mile proximity to downtown 

St. Louis. The airport is now the third 

busiest in Illinois, behind O’Hare and Midway 

Airports in Chicago, and the second busiest 

airport in the bi-state region. In 2012 the 

Illinois Department of Transportation reported 

that the airport and surrounding industrial 

business park contribute $584 million in 

annual economic benefit to the local economy. 

The reconstruction of the airport’s primary 

runway was completed in 2011 to handle 

aircraft weighing up to 200,000 pounds such 

as the Airbus 320 and the Boeing 757. Since 

2013 the airport has seen a significant 

increase in the number of large charter planes 

bringing professional sports teams and others 

to St. Louis. 

Every day the Bi-State Development Agency 

contributes in many different ways to help 

keep the St. Louis region moving. 

The ownership of the historic 

Eads Bridge is a partnership between 

Bi-State Development Agency and the 

City of St. Louis. 



1 8 7

ARCHDIOCESE 

OF ST. LOUIS 

St. Louis history is closely intertwined 

with the Catholic Church in Missouri and, 

for the most part, it is the Church and Her 

faithful who have led the city during its 250 

year history. Without the influence of the 

pioneer priests, religious and lay Catholics 

who labored to spread the Gospel, assimilate 

the Church into its new society, and tend to 

the needs of all St. Louisans, the city would 

not be the culturally rich place it is today. 

or “Old Cathedral.” French Catholics from 

Illinois began to populate the St. Louis settlement 

after the British gained control of the 

territory east of the Mississippi, necessitating 

the construction of the first permanent 

church building in 1770. The church was 

granted the status of a canonical parish in 

1776, but it was not until the arrival in 1818 

of William L. V. DuBourg, bishop of the 

Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, 

that the story of the established church in the 

St. Louis area begins. 


188 

The Rome of the West—a moniker the 

Catholic Church in St. Louis has long 

held—is unlike many early American cities, 

which were strongly English and Protestant. 

St. Louis was founded by French Catholics, 

developed by Catholics of many ethnic 

origins, and has never lost its distinctive 

Catholic character. Almost every corner of 

the city is an exhibit of the impact of the 

Church on civic life in St. Louis. 

When Pierre Laclede began planning the 

village named for St. Louis IX in 1764, 

he dedicated the square next to his home for 

a church, which would become the site of 

one of the city’s most significant landmarks, 

the Basilica of Saint Louis, King of France 

Education and social service have been 

main concerns for St. Louis Catholics since 

DuBourg’s arrival, and the bishop’s early contributions 

are still felt by modern residents. 

Prior to coming to St. Louis, DuBourg recruited 

large groups of men and women religious 

to establish schools, hospitals and charitable 

institutions, and many of these orders still 

have representatives in the region. One of 

DuBourg’s first acts was to establish St. Louis 

College, the first institute of higher education 

west of the Mississippi. He followed this with 

establishment of the first Catholic seminary 

in the West in 1822, choosing as its president 

the future Bishop Joseph Rosati. 

DuBourg also brought the Jesuits to the 

area, including the legendary Peter de Smet 

to establish an Indian school and seminary. 

The Religious of the Sacred Heart, led by the 

future St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, came to 

establish schools, convents and orphanages. 

Bishop DuBourg resigned his post in 

1826 to return to France. The bishopric of 

Louisiana was soon split in two, and the 

Diocese of St. Louis was officially established.

Dubourg’s successor, Joseph Rosati, was 

installed as bishop in 1827 and chose to 

remain in St. Louis. Among Rosati’s many 

accomplishments was the completion and 

dedication of the Cathedral of Saint Louis, 

King of France in 1834. The Old Cathedral 

remains the oldest building in the city and 

was the only structure left intact in the 

Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. 

Rosati continued DuBourg’s practice of 

bringing religious orders to St. Louis to establish 

schools and social welfare institutions. 

These included the Daughters of Charity, who 

founded St. Louis Mullanphy hospital, the 

first hospital west of the Mississippi. Today, 

the hospital is known as DePaul Hospital. 

Following Rosati’s death in 1843, Peter 

Richard Kenrick succeeded as the second 

bishop of St. Louis. Because of its growing 

population, the Diocese of St. Louis was 

elevated to the rank of archdiocese in 1847, 

making it the third ecclesiastical province to 

be erected in the United States. 

The city of St. Louis suffered through devastating 

cholera epidemics and a destructive 

fire during this period, and the city’s Catholic 

population, which numbered around 25,000, 

was not spared the effects of these disasters. 

The Church ensured that those who suffered 

from disease or lost their homes in the fire 

had a chance to recover their health and property. 

The St. Vincent DePaul Society, 

which opened its first U.S. chapter in 

St. Louis in 1845, was quick to assist 

victims with basic needs. Religious 

orders continued their care for the 

struggling population. 

During the divisive Civil War, 

Archbishop Kenrick instructed his 

clergy and lay faithful that neutrality 

was his official approach, and he never 

publicly expressed his views on slavery. 

Kenrick was a skillful shepherd to 

his flock, and sixteen new dioceses 

were created during his nearly fifty 

years as archbishop. Parish life thrived 

during his leadership and St. Louis 

Catholicism truly came into its own. 

Kenrick died in 1896 at the age of 

eighty-nine and was succeeded by 

John Kain of West Virginia. 

Shortly after Archbishop Kain’s installation, 

St. Louis was hit by a tornado that killed over 

130 people and damaged hundreds of buildings, 

including several Catholic churches. 

Despite the tragedy, Kain was able to implement 

a directive that each parish establish an 

elementary school. In addition, Kain chose the 

site of Lindell Boulevard and Newstead Avenue 

as the future home of the Cathedral Basilica of 

Saint Louis (known as the “New Cathedral.”) 

Archbishop Kain died in 1903 and was 

succeeded by John Joseph Glennon, who 

was destined to serve the archdiocese for 

forty-three years. His reign coincided with 

one of the strongest and most vibrant periods 

in St. Louis history. 

The 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis was a 

pivotal event in the city’s history, bringing 

growth and a level of prestige to the city 

it had never before experienced. The Church 

was also growing, and in 1908 Glennon laid 

the cornerstone for what would become the 

Cathedral Basilica at Lindell and Newstead. 

In addition, Glennon presided over construction 

of the new Kenrick Seminary and inaugurated 

the archdiocesan high school system. 

Religious orders continued to establish 

healthcare and charitable institutions during 

this era, and outstanding clergymen such as 

Father Timothy Dempsey established rooming 

houses and food pantries for impoverished 


1 8 9

citizens. Lay Catholics also founded social 

action organizations such as the National 

Catholic Women’s Union to help those in need. 

In 1912 these efforts culminated in the establishment 

of Catholic Charities of St. Louis. 

Archbishop Glennon 

served the archdiocese 

during the trying times 

of World War I, the Great 

Depression, and World 

War II. He was named a 

cardinal by Pope Pius XII 

in February of 1946, 

and died in March of 

the same year. He was 

succeeded by Joseph 

Elmer Ritter. 

One of Ritter’s first 

acts as archbishop was 

to declare the end of 

racial segregation in 

parochial schools. This came eight years 

before the U.S. Supreme Court would take 

similar action in regard to public schools. 

Growth in St. Louis exploded during the 

post-war economic boom, and Ritter established 

an average of three parishes per year in 

St. Louis city and county. A total of sixty parishes 

were opened during his tenure. Ritter also 

developed what is now known as the Annual 

Catholic Appeal, which remains a primary 

source of financial support for many archdiocesan 

educational and charitable activities. 

Ritter was elevated to the College of 

Cardinals in 1961 and played a significant 

role in the Second Vatican Council. On 

August 24, 1964, at Kiel Auditorium in 

St. Louis, Ritter celebrated the world’s 

first authorized Mass in English. 

John Joseph Carberry succeeded Ritter in 

1968 during one of the most turbulent times 

in both ecclesiastical and American history. 

Carberry led the archdiocese through 

unprecedented social and political upheaval 

and gently guided his flock through the post- 

Vatican II era. When the U.S. Supreme Court 

decided in favor of legalized abortion in Roe 

versus Wade, Carberry issued a pastoral letter 

concerning the rights of unborn children and 

established the first archdiocesan Pro-Life 

Committee in the nation. 

Cardinal Carberry’s successor, John Lawrence 

May took his post in 1980 and guided the archdiocese 

through a rapidly changing social and 

cultural environment. Archbishop May strongly 

supported desegregation of public schools 

and, in the spirit of ecumenism, encouraged 

collaboration among Christian denominations. 

May presided over the long-awaited completion 

of the Cathedral Basilica of what would 

become Saint Louis, which contains the largest 

collection of mosaic art in the world. 

May died in 1994 and Justin Francis Rigali 

was named seventh archbishop of St. Louis. 

Rigali presided over perhaps the most significant 

event in the history of the archdiocese, the 

visit of Pope John Paul II to the city in 1999. 

Rigali was appointed Archbishop of 

Philadelphia and elevated to the College of 

Cardinals in 2003, and Raymond Leo Burke 

was installed as his replacement. Burke 

became known for his steadfast approach to 

Church teachings and his strong stance on 

life issues. He was elevated to the College of 

Cardinals in 2010 and named Cardinal 

Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the 

Apostolic Signatura. 

The current archbishop, Robert James 

Carlson, has served since 2009. His priorities 

have included the revival of Catholic education 

through the Mission Advancement 

Initiative as well as the issue of religious freedom 

in response to the HHS mandate. 

As the Catholic Church in St. Louis moves 

toward the future, she continues to reflect 

on her great history and the efforts of the 

dedicated men and women who have 

improved the spiritual and material welfare 

of St. Louis’ citizens. The Archdiocese of 

St. Louis is called by our Lord Jesus Christ to 

be His Church and live His Gospel. 


190

St. Louis Community College expands 

minds and changes lives every day. A premier 

provider of higher education and workforce 

training in the St. Louis metropolitan area, 

STLCC has served more than 1.2 million 

students since its founding in 1962. 

STLCC is the largest community college 

system in Missouri and the second largest 

institution of higher education in Missouri. 

The college serves an area of more than 700 

square miles that includes St. Louis City, 

St. Louis County, and portions of Franklin 

and Jefferson Counties. 

More than 81,000 individuals annually 

enroll in traditional college programs as well 

as continuing education and performanceenhancing 

programs sponsored by employers. 

STLCC’s four campuses—Florissant Valley, 

Forest Park, Meramec and Wildwood—are 

shaped by their urban and suburban communities. 

STLCC also has education centers in south 

St. Louis County and north St. Louis City. 

With environmental stewardship as an 

integral part of STLCC’s mission, the 

Wildwood campus was the first higher 

education facility in the area to earn the 

U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in 

Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) 

gold certification and was the first higher 

education institution to provide charging 

stations for electric vehicles. The William J. 

Harrison Education Center in north St. Louis 

was the first educational facility in St. Louis 

City to earn LEED gold certification. 

The Workforce Solutions Group of St. Louis 

Community College, housed at the STLCC 

Corporate College in Bridgeton, leverages 

education for growth in the knowledge economy 

by offering programs and services designed 

to advance people, businesses and communities. 

The Center for Workforce Innovation at 

the Florissant Valley campus also delivers programs 

and services focused on workforce 

needs, including advanced manufacturing at 

the college’s Aerospace Institute. 

The college supports Centers of Excellence 

in plant and life sciences, digital arts and 

visual technology, emerging and advanced 

information technology, and engineering 

and manufacturing. These centers were 

developed to provide advanced technology 

training on state-of-the-art equipment for 

high-wage jobs in high-demand occupations. 

STLCC offers more than 100 degree and 

certificate programs and has more than 300 

transfer agreements with secondary and other 

higher education institutions. In addition to 

traditional academic curricula, the college 

continues to expand programs in nursing and 

allied health disciplines, as well as science, 

technology, engineering and mathematics 

(STEM). This includes programs in health 

information technology, biotechnology, cyber 

security, and other areas of specialization. 

Approximately 1,800 STLCC students 

transfer to Missouri four-year colleges and 

universities each year. Nearly ninety percent 

of all STLCC graduates remain in the region. 

Through innovative partnerships and 

state-of-the-art programs, STLCC is a vital 

element of the local, regional and state 

economy. The total economic impact of 

St. Louis Community College is more than 

$2.5 billion annually. 

ST. LOUIS 

COMMUNITY 

COLLEGE 

Left: The college’s culinary arts program 

is industry recognized and is housed in a 

facility named after the program’s founder, 

the late Jack C. Miller. 

Right: St. Louis Community College was the 

first institution of its kind in the Midwest to 

offer a biotechnology program. 


1 9 1

WEBSTER 

UNIVERSITY 

Right: At Webster, students have access to 

classes taught in English by faculty from 

around the world. The university has 

campuses in North America, Europe, Asia 

and Africa. 


192 

Webster University is the only Tier 1, 

private, nonprofit university with campus 

locations around the world including metropolitan, 

military, online and corporate, as 

well as American-style traditional campuses 

in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. 

How it evolved to this point is a story 

almost 100 years in the making, beginning 

with its founding in St. Louis in 1915. Its 

path to becoming a leader in international 

education is a fascinating one that required a 

pioneering spirit, determined perseverance, 

entrepreneurial courage and nearly a century 

of devoted and dynamic faculty members 

teaching students who were driven to become 

highly educated members of a global society. 

The Sisters of Loretto, a Catholic religious 

order founded in 1812, established a college 

for women at a time when 

such a mission was considered 

progressive, when American 

women had yet to attain even 

the right to vote. 

Originally named Loretto 

College, the school was one of 

the first Catholic women’s colleges 

west of the Mississippi 

River. The college opened 

with more teachers than students; 

eight Sisters of Loretto 

taught classes for the five students 

who became the first 

graduating class in 1919. 

From that small beginning grew Webster 

University, a private, nonprofit university 

offering undergraduate and graduate education 

to students at campus locations across 

the United States and around the world. 

The first signal of Webster’s future global 

orientation occurred in 1919 when two 

French students enrolled. In the following 

two decades, nearly 200 faculty members and 

students went abroad or came to Webster, primarily 

from Asia, Europe and South America. 

The school’s name was changed to Webster 

College in 1924 to avoid confusion with Loretto 

Academy, another Loretto school in St. Louis. 

Webster received its first accreditation—from 

the North Central Association of Colleges and 

Secondary Schools—that same year. 

After surviving the worldwide economic 

depression of the 1930s, Webster enjoyed 

consistent growth throughout the 1940s 

and 1950s. Student enrollment climbed 

and the campus expanded beyond Webster 

Hall and Loretto Hall, the school’s two 

original buildings. 

The 1960s brought an era of change. The first 

two male students enrolled in 1962, although 

the list of available classes for men remained 

limited. Six years later, however, the school 

became fully coeducational with no restrictions. 

A grant from the Ford Foundation allowed 

Webster to launch the innovative Master of 

Arts in Teaching program in 1963, which 

reached teaching professionals who could not 

afford to abandon their everyday work. It was 

Webster’s first venture into offering evening 

classes for full-time professionals.

Left: Webster’s students are locally 

committed, while taking full advantage of 

the opportunities afforded them by their 

global colleagues. Webster faculty, staff and 

alumni are equipped to work well with 

people of all cultures and be successful in 

their chosen careers anywhere in the world. 

Facing changing societal demographics 

and economic times of 1967, the Sisters of 

Loretto transferred ownership of the school 

from the Catholic Church to a lay board of 

directors—the first in the nation to do so. 

The directors made sure Webster survived, 

thrived and stayed true to its mission of 

serving the underserved with higher education 

options. The lay board remains in 

place today, operating Webster as a private, 

nonprofit university. 

The popularity of the evening programs in 

St. Louis prompted the college to expand its 

offerings across the state. In 1966, Webster 

offered its first courses outside of St. Louis at 

a campus in Kansas City. Classes were taught 

in the evening by practicing professionals, 

and Webster became the ideal choice for those 

who were seeking a college education but 

were unable to put their careers on hold. 

Today, Webster has campus locations in 

metropolitan areas across the United States. 

The Webster model caught the attention 

of the federal government and, in 1974, the 

U.S. Department of Defense invited Webster to 

become the first college to open an extended 

campus program at a military installation— 

Fort Sheridan near Chicago. Today, Webster 

operates on nearly forty military installations 

across the United States. 

Webster opened its first international 

campus in 1978 in Geneva, where there was 

high demand for American-style education. 

The popularity of the Geneva program led to 

the establishment of other European campuses 

in Vienna, Leiden, in the Netherlands, and 

London. More recently, campus locations have 

been added in China and Thailand, and a new 

campus opened in Accra, Ghana, in 2014. 

Webster has moved far beyond its initial 

role as a small women’s liberal arts college 

and is now a comprehensive, innovative 

institution of higher education. The school 

was renamed Webster University in 1983 to 

reflect this status. Defining moments since 

have included establishing five schools and 

colleges in the early 1990s; offering online programs 

beginning in 1999; 

acquiring the St. Louis 

Symphony Community 

Music School in 2001; 

opening Missouri’s first 

Confucius Institute in 

2008; opening signature 

library and classroom 

buildings in 2003 and 

2012; and establishing 

over a dozen new domestic 

and international partnerships 

in 2012. 

Below: Every Webster University student is 

connected to the Emerson Library, one of 

many outstanding facilities on the home 

campus in St. Louis. Technology seamlessly 

enables graduate and undergraduate 

students in St. Louis and at military, online, 

and international and metropolitan campus 

locations access to the finest resources in the 

world of academe. 


1 9 3

Right: Every May, degree candidates from 

around the world gather at The Muny in 

St. Louis’ historic Forest Park for Webster’s 

spectacular commencement ceremony. 

Students come from 100 countries and 

represent diverse cultures, ages and 

socioeconomic backgrounds, as they are 

transformed for global citizenship and 

individual excellence. 

Below: Webster and the U.S. Department 

of Defense have worked together for forty 

years to provide graduate level programs at 

military installations and other locations 

throughout the country. Webster University 

has more than 25,000 military alumni, 

including several generals at the Pentagon 

and Joint Chiefs of Staff. 


194 

Today, Webster enrolls more than 22,000 

students worldwide and counts more than 

163,000 living alumni, including more than 

200 active duty and retired generals and 

admirals. Students come from all fifty states 

and 148 nations. Although the university 

operates in nearly sixty cities on three 

continents around the world, the home 

campus in the St. Louis suburb of Webster 

Groves remains its largest. More than 9,400 

students study at the forty-seven acre 

campus, and the worldwide curriculum and 

global academic and operational excellence 

are directed from the home campus. 

As it approaches its centennial, Webster 

University’s vision is to be a premier 

U.S.-based international university setting a 

distinct standard for global education. This 

vision is built on a foundation of excellence in 

teaching and is enhanced by an international 

perspective that fosters dialogue, respect 

and understanding across boundaries and 

between people. 

Webster remains firmly rooted in St. Louis 

and is dedicated to academic excellence 

and innovation in higher education, meeting 

students’ needs in an ever-changing world 

by incorporating an international perspective 

throughout the curriculum. This approach 

serves its mission of transforming students 

for global citizenship and individual excellence, 

in a century that demands both. 

For additional information about Webster 

University, visit www.webster.edu.

ST. LUKE’S 

HOSPITAL 

For nearly 150 years, St. Luke’s Hospital 

has provided quality, compassionate patient 

care, a broad range of services, and a strong 

commitment to the community. The hospital’s 

mission has always been to improve the quality 

of life for its patients and the community. 

The hospital was organized in 1865 by a 

group of Episcopal Church leaders and 

physicians who were concerned about the 

lack of medical care in the growing city 

of St. Louis. The group was inspired by 

Bishop Cicero Hawks and led by Reverend 

J. P. Cannon, a medical doctor from Memphis. 

The founders named the hospital in honor of 

St. Luke, the patron saint of physicians, and 

they chose the eight-pointed Maltese Cross 

as the symbol of the new hospital. 

The first St. Luke’s was a twenty-five room 

infirmary at Thirteenth and Lamme Streets, 

near the present day Interstate 55 and Russell 

Boulevard. The first patient was admitted 

on February 28, 1866. The infirmary had a 

medical staff of only eight physicians, and 

family and friends provided nursing care. 

The new medical facility faced its first 

challenge just a few months later when a 

cholera epidemic swept through the city. 

The hospital’s board of directors decided that 

all cholera patients should receive treatment 

free of charge. With the support of the 

Episcopal Church and the community, 

St. Luke’s Hospital managed to continue caring 

for patients during this time. 

St. Luke’s grew steadily over the next 

four decades and moved several times to 

larger facilities. During this period, the 

hospital established a School of Nursing 

and introduced the latest medical services to 

the community. 

In 1904—the year of the St. Louis World’s 

Fair—St. Luke’s moved to a new three story 

building on Delmar Boulevard on the city’s 

growing western edge. Despite challenges, 

the hospital continued to grow through the 

Depression years of the 1930s and the war 

years of the 1940s, providing high quality, 

compassionate care to a growing population. 

In 1948 the Presbyterian churches in the 

St. Louis area joined the Episcopalians in 

the sponsorship of St. Luke’s. This 

dual sponsorship reinforced the 

hospital’s mission as a ministry 

dedicated to witnessing the healing 

presence of Christ in the world. 

Today, the hospital’s main campus 

is located in Chesterfield. 

St. Luke’s provides care in more 

than sixty specialty areas from more 

than twenty locations across the 

greater St. Louis area. “We continue 

to seek out new technology and 

treatments to stay on the leading 

edge of healthcare,” said Gary Olson, 

St. Luke’s Hospital president and 

CEO. “Through the dedicated efforts 

of an exceptional team of caregivers 

and support staff, we are able to 

further our mission of improving 

the quality of life for our patients 

and the community.” 

Above: St. Luke’s Hospital, with its main 

campus located in Chesterfield, provides 

care in more than sixty specialty areas from 

more than twenty locations across the 

greater St. Louis area. 

Below: An exceptional team of caregivers 

and support staff furthers St. Luke’s mission 

of improving the quality of life for its 

patients and the community. 


1 9 5

JCI 

Above: Henry Giessenbier, Jr., with fellow 

active citizens in St. Louis, 1914. 

Below: Henry Giessenbier, Jr., formed the 

Young Men’s Progressive Civic Association 

in 1915, which later became JCI 

(Junior Chamber International). 


196 

Born in St. Louis—JCI (Junior Chamber 

International) celebrates a century of active 

citizenship, 1915-2015. 

JCI, founded in St. Louis, Missouri, began 

with the premise that youth should not be a 

barrier to personal development, participation 

or service in community affairs. Staying true 

to its foundation, JCI’s Mission is, “to provide 

development opportunities that empower 

young people to create positive change.” 

From its humble beginnings as a dance club 

in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1915, the organization 

has grown from a concept to an international 

movement. JCI offers young active citizens 

worldwide the opportunity to engage with 

community members from all sectors of society 

to address community challenges and work 

together toward developing sustainable impact. 

In 1910, Henry Giessenbier, Jr., founded 

the Herculaneum Dance Club with the aim 

of supplying social elevation for its members. 

By 1914 the Herculaneum Dance Club 

merged with six other dance clubs to form 

the Federation of Dance Clubs. However, 

Giessenbier soon yearned to be a part of 

something more engaging. He then began 

inviting community leaders to speak at 

Federation meetings on current issues. 

The Federation met at the Mission Inn, 

formerly located at the corner of Grand and 

Magnolia Avenues in St. Louis. During a 

Federation meeting in the summer of 1915, 

Giessenbier was moved by the words of 

a local political leader, H. N. Morgan, who 

spoke of the need to involve young men in 

public affairs with the aim of developing 

strong community leaders. After a series of 

meetings with Morgan, Giessenbier formulated 

a plan for an organization of young men 

to study and analyze civic and business 

problems and provide opportunities to 

participate in civic activities. 

On October 13, 1915, at the Mission Inn 

in St. Louis, thirty-two young men formed 

the Young Men’s Progressive Civic Association 

(YMPCA) with Giessenbier as the first elected 

president. The group quickly became involved 

in St. Louis civic affairs and won respect for 

effectively addressing community challenges. 

In less than six months, the membership grew 

from thirty-two to 750. 

During the early years, YMPCA gained 

support, but none more valuable than the 

president of the St. Louis Chamber of 

Commerce, Clarence H. Howard. In his 

inaugural address, Howard called for a group 

capable of training and educating young 

men in public affairs. The very next day, 

Giessenbier and Andrew Mungenast contacted 

Howard to speak with him about the goals 

of YMPCA. Howard soon secured the old art 

museum at Nineteenth and Locust Streets to 

serve as the YMPCA headquarters. 

YMPCA soon became known as the Junior 

Citizens, “J. C.” for short. The organization 

gained greater influence in the community and 

attracted nationwide attention for its many 

achievements. In 1918 the J. C.’s affiliated 

with the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce. 

The name officially became the Junior Chamber 

of Commerce to reflect the affiliation. 

After service abroad in World War I, 

Giessenbier spearheaded a meeting of twentynine 

clubs from around the country, where a 

plan for a national organization formed. 

Giessenbier was elected first president of 

the national organization, the U.S. Junior 

Chamber, or U.S. Jaycees. At his inauguration, 

Giessenbier outlined a platform of community 

service and educational programs that 

remains the core of the organization. 

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Junior 

Chamber grew not only in size, but also in 

scope, creating several national programs.

Projects included the “50 Million Voters 

Campaign” to increase national voter registration, 

“Americanism” in response to the 

threat of communism, the Ten Outstanding 

Young Men Award, recognizing personal 

accomplishment in professional and civic 

matters, and a conservation program which 

spawned the National Wildlife Federation. 

Regionally, the Jaycee members supported 

the early startup efforts of the downtown 

Jefferson National Expansion Memorial 

project, which began in 1939, culminating 

with the completion of the Gateway Arch 

on the St. Louis Riverfront more than 

twenty-five years later. This acclaimed 

modern urban renewal project received 

many national and international awards 

for its architect, the late Eero Saarinen, its 

contractor, McDonald Construction Co., 

and other firms involved in its large scope. 

The recent “City-Arch-River” Project, planning 

and constructing a major public park over 

the central downtown Interstate highway to 

complete the esthetics and ambience of the 

Gateway Arch Park, is also supported by 

the St. Louis Jaycees nearly seventy years 

after the initial Jefferson National Expansion 

Memorial groundbreaking. 

In 1944, Junior Chamber International 

(JCI) was founded. JCI now boasts members 

in more than 120 countries around the globe. 

In 1947 the National Headquarters moved 

to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was soon joined 

by the JCI headquarters in 1953. Between 

the years of 1955 and 1969, JCI was 

headquartered in Miami Beach, Florida, and 

then moved to Coral Gables, Florida, for 

the next thirty-three years. In 2002 the JCI 

World Headquarters moved back to St. Louis, 

where the movement began. In 2011 the 

National Headquarters joined JCI and both 

are now located in Chesterfield, a western 

suburb of St. Louis. 

Above: The historic first meeting in 

Mexico City, Mexico, where JCI (Junior 

Chamber International) was formed. 

The first National Organizations forming 

JCI were Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, 

Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua 

and the United States, 1944. 

Below: The Mission Inn, St. Louis, Missouri, 

USA, the birthplace of the JCI movement. 


1 9 7

Above: The JCI World Headquarters 

was inaugurated on June 23, 2004. 

Pictured from left to right, 2003 JCI 

President Bruce Rector, 2004 JCI President 

Fernando Sanchez-Arias, Chesterfield 

Mayor John Nations and JCI Foundation 

Chairperson Sonny Yu. 

Below: Delegates and JCI members at 

the JCI Conference of the Americas in 

Curitba, Brazil. Delegates participated in 

an eight-part community project educating 

the community about and taking action to 

advance the Millennium Development 

Goals, 2012. 

The evolving organization has undergone 

many changes throughout its 100 years. In the 

wake of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, 

the Jaycee Women Auxiliary group disbanded 

and women were allowed to become active 

U.S. Jaycee members, rising to leadership and 

officer roles. The St. Louis Jaycees “Birthplace 

Chapter” has hosted two female presidents in 

recent years, reflective of the overall trend of 

women holding leadership positions throughout 

the organization across the world—illustrating 

the promise of talented, trained 

younger leadership for the nation and world. 

As an organization started by young 

people, JCI now boasts nearly 200,000 active 

members between the ages of eighteen and 

forty, with many more alumni and past members. 

JCI members are engaged and dedicated 

to creating impact in their communities, 

forming a vibrant global network of young 

active citizens. 

Committed to creating positive change, 

JCI members run impactful projects with a 

common goal of creating a sustainable impact. 

Just like JCI’s founder, today JCI members 

take responsibility for local issues, and find 

targeted, sustainable solutions that benefit 

their communities and the world. Guided by 

the passion to lead the world in a new 

direction, JCI members have the courage to 

address the critical challenges of our time, 

involving all sectors of society. Solutions that 

ensure healthy communities, drive economic 

empowerment, and secure a sustainable world. 

In 2015 the St. Louis Jaycees and JCI 

will be welcoming members and supporters 

from around the world to St. Louis where 

the JCI movement started, honoring the 

100 year anniversary. 

To learn more how you can become part 

of this exciting international momentum 

toward impact, visit www.jci.cc and locate a 

JCI Local Organization in your community. 

The JCI World Headquarters is located on 

Olive Boulevard (at the I-40/Clarkson-Olive 

exit) in Chesterfield, Missouri. 


198

Charles Litterest was stunned as he watched 

his home burn on a bitterly cold January 

evening. He, his wife, son and grandson 

fled the house with the clothes on their backs 

and shoes on their feet. Sitting in his truck, 

watching firefighters battle the blaze, Litterest 

was paralyzed with disbelief and uncertainty 

until the Red Cross arrived. Volunteers provided 

comfort, direction and immediate assistance 

with food, shelter and clothing. In the days 

that followed, Litterest worked with his 

insurance company and St. Louis Red Cross 

volunteers on a plan for his future. 

Every day the American Red Cross provides 

shelter, food and emotional support to 

victims of disasters like this. The Red Cross 

also supplies forty percent of the nation’s 

blood; teaches skills that save lives; provides 

international humanitarian aid; and supports 

military members and their families. 

Clara Barton, who founded the Red Cross 

in 1881, visited St. Louis in 1884 to provide 

disaster relief following spring flooding along 

the Mississippi. She ordered a boatload of 

supplies and headed down the treacherous 

floodwaters, distributing badly needed provisions 

from St. Louis to Cairo, Illinois. 

The St. Louis Chapter of the 

Red Cross was officially chartered 

in 1917 with the escalation of 

World War I. During World 

War II, some 2,500 Red Cross 

volunteers produced 14,000 

Prisoners of War packets daily. 

Today the St. Louis Red Cross 

supports more than 1,600 military 

families annually, from the 

moment members enlist through 

their lives as veterans. 

Roughly three times a day, 

St. Louis Red Cross volunteers 

respond to local disasters, most 

often home fires; volunteers 

teach lifesaving First Aid, CPR 

to nearly 45,000 residents every 

year. Area residents annually 

download nearly 30,000 free Red 

Cross mobile apps for immediate 

help in a crisis. 

The Red Cross Missouri-Illinois 

Blood Services Region operates 

ten blood donation centers and hosts more 

than 3,000 blood drives each year in the 

Greater St. Louis Region, receiving hundreds 

of thousands of blood and platelet donations. 

To carry out its mission to prevent and 

alleviate human suffering in the face of 

emergencies, the St. Louis Chapter mobilizes 

the power of volunteers and the generosity 

of donors. Less than 

one percent of the 

region’s annual budget 

comes from government, 

and volunteers 

make up more than 

ninety percent of the 

Red Cross workforce. 

Because of this volunteer 

workforce, the 

Red Cross is able to 

invest ninety-one cents 

of every dollar donated 

in services. 

In 2011 four area 

Red Cross chapters merged to become the 

Greater St. Louis Region. Today the region 

serves the City of St. Louis and sixty-six 

surrounding counties in Missouri and Illinois. 

AMERICAN 

RED CROSS 


1 9 9

THE MUNY 

Top: The new fans, installed for The Muny’s 

2013 season, have a twenty foot span. 

Above: At each performance, The Muny 

would set aside about 1,500 free seats, 

a grand tradition that continues today. 

The photograph is from 1921. 


200 

The Muny is America’s 

oldest and largest outdoor 

musical theatre. 

Since 1919, it has produced 

season after season 

of world-class entertainment, 

all in the same 

beautiful location in the 

heart of Forest Park. 

No other live theatre 

in the country, indoor or 

outdoor, can claim so 

long and unbroken a 

history. The Muny has 

prospered through Prohibition, the Great 

Depression, World War II, the Cold War, 

hippies, yuppies, tweets, and texts. 

The history of outdoor musical theatre in 

Forest Park may be said to have begun during 

the 1904 World’s Fair. However, it was not 

until 1914, the 150th anniversary of St. Louis’ 

founding, that Forest Park would be home to 

another spectacular theatrical event. The 

Pageant and Masque was performed on 

Art Hill that year, featuring a cast of 7,000 

St. Louisans. Hundreds of thousands attended, 

and the venture was a resounding success. 

Two years later, the world was celebrating 

the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, and 

St. Louis joined in with an alfresco production 

of As You Like It. This, too, was well attended 

and well reviewed, but of more lasting 

significance, it was performed on the site of 

today’s Muny. 

The year 1917 saw the grand opera Aida 

presented in the same natural amphitheater to 

honor a convention of the World Advertising 

Federation. By 1919 it was decided that 

outdoor musical extravaganzas in Forest Park 

should become an annual event. 

On March 6, 1919, plans were set in motion 

to present six light operas, beginning in June. 

Things began to move quickly. Stars were 

engaged from New York, and actors and 

musicians were hired locally. Ticket prices 

were set at twenty-five cents to a top price of 

one dollar. For each performance almost 

1,500 seats were set aside as free, a tradition 

that continues to this day. 

The Muny’s “birth certificate” was issued on 

June 10, 1919, when the Municipal Theatre 

Association attained official status with a pro 

forma decree of incorporation. 

On Monday, June 16 at exactly 8:25 p.m., The 

Star-Spangled Banner rang through Forest Park 

on the first Muny opening night. The operetta 

was Robin Hood, and it marked the beginning 

of what has been called “a living tradition.” 

The first years of The Muny were not always 

blue skies, but even when the cast was singing in 

the rain, it was evident that St. Louis loved and 

supported grand musical theatre under the stars. 

The initial seasons of the fledgling theatre 

were rocky, but with the help of friends like 

Mayor Henry Kiel, The Muny flourished. 

Almost immediately, technical improvements 

were made to enhance the audience’s enjoyment 

of the show.

The inaugural season required that 

performers have truly remarkable vocal 

capabilities, as absolutely no amplification 

was available. In 1920, a sounding board, 

which better directed the sound, was 

installed. In 1923 a modern sound system 

was initiated, consisting of five bull horn-like 

speakers strung over the stage. Today, 

microphones are wireless and the actors wear 

them throughout the show. The Muny’s sound 

equipment is leased each season, assuring 

state-of-the-art technology, and is regulated 

from a sound board that resembles the deck of 

the starship Enterprise. 

musical requires many set 

changes, frequently threedimensional 

pieces. They are 

now designed by the same 

men and women who design 

for Broadway productions, 

and for theatres around 

the world. What has not 

changed is that they are still 

painted by hand by St. Louis 

artists, who are skilled in 

the highly-specialized techniques 

necessary for such 

large scale designs. 

The titles of the shows 

have changed since 1919, 

and the faces of the performers. But the heart 

of The Muny has remained the same 

throughout the decades. 

One of the proudest Muny traditions is 

its unparalleled orchestra. In an era when so 

many theatres substitute digitally produced 

music for live, The Muny proudly hires a 

full contingent of professional musicians for 

each production, the exact number depending 

upon the requirements of the score. They are 

the men and women who help keep Forest 

Park alive with the sound of music. 

Above: Installation of The Muny’s 

turntable, 1930. 

Left: Great praise for performance of 

Aida, 1917. 

A S H O R T L I S T O F M O M E N T S 

T H A T C O U L D O N L Y H A P P E N 

A T T H E M U N Y 

Lighting, too, evolved through the 

decades. In that first season, lighting 

equipment consisted of two telephone poles 

borrowed from Bell Telephone. Dimmers were 

improvised with water barrels filled with salt 

water, and the electrical switchboard was left 

over from the Pageant and Masque. Today, 

The Muny’s lighting system consists of about 

five hundred instruments, and is run by a 

computer programmed by a world-class 

board operator. Five spotlights, directed by 

five lighting technicians, catch every nuance 

of movement, and focus the audience’s 

attention with dramatic precision. 

In 1919 the sets were designed by local 

architects and painted by local artists. These 

were generally “flats” or framed expanses of 

muslin, nailed to the floor. A modern Muny 

• A B-25 bomber flew over the audience for 

a production of South Pacific. 

• A real helicopter added a chilling touch of 

reality during Miss Saigon. 

• The Muny has featured swimming pools 

(Wish You Were Here), ice rinks (Cinderella 

on Ice), hot air balloons (Around The World 

In 80 Days), a trolley car (Meet Me In 

St. Louis), the Wells Fargo Wagon (The 

Music Man), and full-sized basketball 

games (Wish You Were Here). 

• The Muny has employed three real camels 

for its production of Disney’s Aladdin, real 

horses for Oklahoma!, and a baby elephant 

for Kismet. 

• When producing The Music Man, The Muny 

typically engages a live marching band, 

consisting of nearly two hundred pieces. 


2 0 1

Above: The Muny on a summer night. 

Below: A full Muny audience under a 

full moon. 


202 

T H E M U N Y B Y T H E N U M B E R S 

• Since its inception, nearly 52 million 

people have enjoyed a night at The Muny. 

• Roughly 9 million people have seen a show 

from the free seats or through community 

service tickets. 

• The average size of a Broadway theatre 

is about 1,200 seats. Every night of the 

summer The Muny gives away almost 

1,500 free seats—more than would fill an 

entire Broadway theatre. 

• Each week, the Muny construction crew 

uses enough lumber to build a house. 

• The “working” area of The Muny stage is 

90 feet deep and 100 feet wide. The 

Majestic theatre, a large Broadway house, 

has a stage that is 40 feet 10 inches deep, 

and 47 feet 10 inches wide. 

• The Muny’s “footprint” in Forest Park is 

over six acres. 

• The new fans, installed for The Muny’s 

2013 season, have a twenty foot span. 

It would be close to impossible to list all of 

the big-name performers who have starred 

at The Muny through the years. Past Muny 

stars include W. C. Fields, Archie Leach (Cary 

Grant), Irene Dunne, Betty Grable, Vincent 

Price, Bob Hope, Ethel Merman, Pearl Bailey, 

Joel Grey, Debbie Reynolds, Mickey Rooney, 

Angela Lansbury, Gene Kelly, Bernadette Peters, 

Sonny & Cher, Betty White, Liza Minnelli, 

Robert Goulet, Cab Calloway, Yul Brynner, 

Mikhail Baryshnikov, Carol Burnett, Rock 

Hudson, Zero Mostel, Carol Channing, Howard 

Keel, John Travolta, and Jennifer Holliday. 

Looking toward the future, in 2018 The 

Muny will produce its hundredth summer in 

Forest Park. The Muny, a nonprofit 501-(c)3 

organization, is proud to celebrate a century 

of creating exceptional musical theatre, 

accessible to all.

Fontbonne University conducted its first 

St. Louis classes ninety years ago, but its 

history goes much deeper and is irrevocably 

intertwined with that of its founders, the 

Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, an order 

founded in France in 1650. 

The sisters, whose American community 

dates from 1836, were dedicated to the 

‘discovery, understanding, preservation and 

dissemination of truth,’ and dreamed of 

opening a college for women. 

Ground was broken for the Fontbonne 

College campus in 1924, although the first 

class actually began studies in 1923 at the 

CSJ’s Carondelet location. 

The land on which Fontbonne is built was 

part of the 1904 World’s Fair and the original 

buildings included administration, science, 

fine arts, gymnasium and boiler house. Students 

moved to the new campus on Founder’s Day, 

October 15, 1924. Fontbonne’s main campus 

remains in the same location at 6800 Wydown 

Boulevard. The university also operates a site 

in Brentwood, where evening and on-line 

programs are coordinated and taught. 

Since its founding, Fontbonne University has 

grown in terms of enrollment, experienced faculty, 

relevant academic programs and services 

for students. The original class of nine women 

grew to seventy-six after only one year. The 

school became coeducational in 1973 and the 

first graduate degree was approved two years 

later. Significant global outreach was achieved in 

1996 when Fontbonne signed educational agreements 

with universities in Taiwan and Thailand, 

beginning a new era of international education. 

Fontbonne’s OPTIONS program became one 

of the premier adult education models in the 

St. Louis area in the 1990s. Fontbonne changed 

its status from college to university in 2002. 

Today, Fontbonne has 236 faculty members, 

nearly 400 total employees, more than 2,000 

students and an alumni base of nearly 18,000. 

The university offers 47 undergraduate majors, 

28 minors and 20 graduate programs in traditional 

as well as evening and on-line formats. 

Undergraduate majors include internationally 

known programs in deaf education and 

speech-language pathology (also offered at the 

master’s level) as well as popular programs 

such as cyber security, dietetics, social work, 

education and performing arts. Prominent 

master’s programs include education/special 

education, fine arts, nonprofit management, 

and instructional design and technology. The 

university is also home to the one-of-a-kind 

Dedicated Semester of innovative academic 

endeavors each fall that engages both 

campus and community in an in-depth study 

of a major theme such as Judaism and Its 

Cultures, Goals for World Change, Immigrant 

Experiences, Happiness: Traditions and 

Tensions, The Disability Experience: Quest for 

Empowerment, Foodology, and Sustainability. 

In keeping with the 

traditions and values 

of its founders, the 

Fontbonne community 

embraces a culture of 

service. Fontbonne Day, 

an annual, universitywide 

day of service, 

sends faculty, staff, students 

and administration 

into locations across the 

St. Louis metro area. 

Fontbonne also sponsors 

local, national and international 

service trips 

for students throughout 

the year. Community 

outreach and service 

learning are interwoven 

into classes and events 

throughout the campus. 

Looking to the future, 

Fontbonne University 

strives to develop modern, relevant programs 

to stay ahead of a rapidly advancing society. As 

always, in everything, Fontbonne University 

continues striving to ‘educate leaders to serve 

a world in need.’ 

Additional information is available on the 

Internet at www.fontbonne.edu. 

FONTBONNE 

UNIVERSITY 

Above: In 1928 one of Fontbonne 

University’s inaugural classes celebrates 

commencement on the front lawn of the 

school’s campus. 

Below: In 2012 a group of students gathers 

on the steps of Ryan Hall, one of five 

original buildings at Fontbonne University, 

which still stands at the center of the 

university’s campus today. 


2 0 3

WORLD AFFAIRS 

COUNCIL OF 

ST. LOUIS 

Right: An international visitor group 

from Brazil working on racial integration 

meet with the great-granddaughter of 

Dred and Harriet Scott in front of her 

ancestors’ statue. 

Below: World Affairs Council of St. Louis 

Gala —left to right, Dr. William H. 

Danforth, chairman, and Dr. James C. 

Carrington, president of the Danforth Plant 

Science Center accept the International 

Humanitarian of the Year award from 

Deepak Kant Vyas, president of the Council. 


204 

The World Affairs Council of St. Louis 

is dedicated to connecting citizens of the 

region with the world. Its mission is to 

promote understanding and engagement, 

develop relationships and inspire leadership 

in world affairs. 

Originally known as the Council on 

World Affairs, the organization was formed 

in 1948 by J. S. McDonnell, founder of 

McDonnell Douglas Corporation, 

and a group of civic leaders to 

help overcome the isolationist 

attitudes of American citizens 

following World War II. The 

Council’s mission was to present 

programs directed toward improved 

international understanding. 

The Council is a member of a 

Washington-based national association, 

the World Affairs Councils 

of America, and is one of nearly 

a hundred independent Councils 

that comprise the oldest and largest 

organization in the country promoting 

‘citizen diplomacy’ and 

improving global understanding. 

Other key leaders in the Council’s early 

days were John Francis Bannon of Saint 

Louis University, Arthur Holly Compton of 

Washington University, Leo C. Fuller and 

Sidney R. Baer of Stix Baer & Fuller Co., 

J. Lionberger Davis of Boatmen’s Bank, 

Morton J. May, of the May Company, David R. 

Calhoun of Saint Louis Union Trust and other 

prominent citizens. 

Larry Carp, an attorney who studied in Paris 

and Geneva and worked for the United Nations 

and the State Department before moving 

to St. Louis, remembers well the Council’s 

early efforts to host foreign visitors and 

provide a forum for businessmen, academics 

and civic leaders with international interests. 

Prominent guest speakers over the years 

have included President George W. Bush, 

Secretaries of State Alexander Haig and 

Henry Kissinger, Senator Stuart Symington, 

Soviet leader Anatoly Gromyko, journalist 

Dan Rather, Charles, Prince of Wales, 

and two Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff, Admiral William Crowe and Air Force 

General Ron Fogleman. 

Helen Moran was the Council’s 

first executive director. Hired in 

1963, at a salary of $350 per month, 

she served the Council until the late 

1980s with excellent programming 

that built a strong membership. 

Today, the Council sponsors 

twelve to fifteen programs per year, 

all open to the public. 

Ambassador Forums, held three to 

four times per year, are a series of 

programs that bring ambassadors 

from strategic countries around the 

world to St. Louis for a major evening 

event, meetings with local and 

state leaders, and discussions with 

interested business organizations.

The Great Decisions Series 

consists of eight moderated 

discussions on current foreign 

policy topics selected and 

documented by the Foreign 

Policy Association. The series, 

over eight successive weeks, 

is widely attended by citizens 

in the region who wish to 

stay informed on topics of 

vital interest. 

For the past eleven years, 

the Council has sponsored 

Academic “WorldQuest,” the 

only international knowledge 

competition in the region that 

invites all area public and private high 

schools to field teams to take part in the 

competition. The winning team receives an 

all-expenses paid trip to Washington, D.C., to 

represent St. Louis in a national competition. 

The Council presents the International 

Humanitarian of the Year Award annually to 

an individual or organization in the region 

that has done extraordinary work to favorably 

impact a global humanitarian crisis. 

Recent recipients have included Dr. Patricia 

Wolff, whose Meds & Food for Kids organization 

has saved the lives of more than 

65,000 children in Haiti; the Danforth Plant 

Science Center for its success in improving 

the human condition through crop research 

that centers on feeding the hungry; and 

the U.S. Transportation Command at Scott 

Air Force Base for its massive efforts in 

delivering aid to victims of the Haiti earthquake, 

the Japan earthquake and tsunami, 

and the Pakistan flood. 

For more than forty years, the Council 

has been the regional host for the 

International Visitor Leadership Program, 

the State Department’s premier professional 

exchange program. This exchange seeks to 

build mutual understanding between the 

U.S. and other nations through short-term 

visits to the U.S. for current and emerging 

foreign leaders. More than 200 of these 

visitors come to St. Louis each year. The 

Council enjoys a large number of volunteer 

hosts; an example being Frankie Freemen, 

a distinguished lawyer and civil rights 

advocate, now in her nineties, who continues 

to be actively involved with our visitors. 

In February 2014 the Council will sponsor 

its twenty-third Annual Chinese New Year 

Celebration. The Council was one of the first 

non-Chinese organizations to celebrate this day 

in a major way. It was initiated by Jean Emory 

(Mrs. William), while Newell S. Knight, Jr., 

was president, and continues to fund a major 

portion of our community outreach. 

The St. Louis 

Council was recognized 

in 2009 by the 

World Affairs Councils 

of America for being 

the most dynamic 

midsize council in the 

nation. This award is 

given annually for 

extraordinary innovation, 

growth, outreach 

and impact. 

The Council derives 

all its funding from 

memberships, programs, fundraising, grants 

and gifts. 

The Council is governed by a president, 

an executive committee, and a board of 

directors. Under the leadership of Executive 

Director Robert A. Fischer, the number of 

organization members has increased from 

thirty-seven in 2002 to sixty currently. 

Combining individual and organization 

members, the Council currently has an active 

roster of over 700 people. 

Above: Performers from the St. Louis 

Modern Chinese School entertain guests at 

the annual Chinese New Year Celebration. 

Bellow: A team of four high school students 

contemplates the answer to a question at 

Academic WorldQuest, an annual 

international knowledge competition. 


2 0 5

BJC 

HEALTHCARE 

Massive changes forecast for the U.S. healthcare 

industry during the late 1980s galvanized 

St. Louis’ multiple independent hospitals to 

adopt new ways of providing care. For the 

visionary leaders behind the development of 

BJC HealthCare, the pathway to success was 

clear: ensure sustainability through unity and 

together continue to create healthy futures for 

the people of St. Louis and surrounding regions. 

The twelve hospitals, five service organizations 

and multiple community health locations 

that make up today’s BJC HealthCare deliver 

a full range of healthcare services to urban, 

suburban and rural communities primarily in 

the greater St. Louis, southern Illinois and mid- 

Missouri regions. Services include inpatient 

and outpatient care, primary care, community 

health and wellness, workplace health, home 

health, community mental health, rehabilitation, 

long-term care and hospice. 

BJC also provides more 

care to the poor and uninsured 

than any other hospital or 

healthcare organization in 

Missouri. In 2012 more than 

160,000 patients and families 

were able to focus on the 

care of their loved ones 

when they received financial 

assistance to cover all or 

part of their healthcare services, 

which totaled more than 

$123 million in charity care. 

BJC is the largest healthcare 

provider in the St. Louis 

area, and one of the largest 

nonprofit healthcare delivery 

organizations in the country. 

With more than 27,000 employees and 4,422 

physicians, BJC is the metropolitan area’s 

largest employer. In 2012, BJC reported 

$3.8 billion in net revenues, 150,000 hospital 

admissions, 220,000 home health visits and 

500,000 emergency department visits. 

BJC traces its roots to 1993, with the merger 

of Barnes Hospital and The Jewish Hospital 

of St. Louis with Christian Health Services, 

which operated seven hospitals in Missouri 

and Illinois. Each of these medical facilities was 

highly successful at the time of the merger. 

However, reductions in Medicare and Medicaid 

reimbursements, an oversupply of hospital 

beds in the region and other issues seemed to 

threaten their long-term viability. By uniting, 

Barnes, Jewish and Christian—founded in 

1914, 1902 and 1903 respectively—could sustain 

their long-standing reputations for excellence 

in medical treatment and care while maximizing 

efficiency and reducing costs. 

In 1994 two more medical institutions 

joined BJC. Missouri Baptist Medical Center, 

founded in 1913, gave the organization an 

expanded presence in west St. Louis County 

as well as Missouri Baptist Sullivan Hospital 

in Sullivan, Missouri. St. Louis Children’s 

Hospital, established in 1879, enriched BJC 

with a premier facility for the care of children. 

Other hospitals that are part of BJC 

HealthCare are Barnes-Jewish West County 

Hospital, Barnes-Jewish St. Peters Hospital, 

Alton Memorial Hospital, Progress West 

Hospital and Parkland Health Center. Boone 

Hospital Center is owned by Boone County 

and operated under a lease arrangement with 

BJC. The Rehabilitation Institute of St. Louis is 

a partnership with HealthSouth Corporation. 

Two of BJC’s hospitals, Barnes-Jewish 

Hospital and St. Louis Children’s Hospital, 

have formal affiliations with Washington 

University School of Medicine, which is consistently 

ranked among the top medical 

schools in the country. The School of 

Medicine, founded in 1891, is known internationally 

for research in neuroscience, genetics, 

diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other 

areas. It has contributed to many groundbreaking 

discoveries and has been associated 

with seventeen Nobel Laureates. 


206

BJC is one of the leading supporters of 

healthcare education in the region. During 

2012, BJC contributed $135.2 million toward 

the training of more than 11,586 students. By 

supporting medical research, BJC ensures the 

future of healthcare and provided $24 million 

in research funding in 2012. 

Barnes-Jewish and Children’s hospitals have 

anchored the city’s Central West End with a 

medical complex since 1927. A $320 million 

renovation and expansion, completed in 

2001, brought significant improvements to 

the campus, including the consolidation of 

outpatient care in the Center for Advanced 

Medicine, the Charles F. Knight Emergency 

and Trauma Center, and the Alvin J. Siteman 

Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institutedesignated 

comprehensive cancer center for 

treatment and research. 

Today the planning for renovation and 

new construction with the Campus Renewal 

Project is a long-term vision to renew the 

medical center campus on Kingshighway 

Boulevard, encompassing BJC’s Barnes-Jewish 

Hospital and St. Louis Children’s Hospital 

along with Washington University School of 

Medicine. Additional private inpatient rooms 

are a key component of the overall project. 

Building and expansion could be seen at 

many BJC hospitals over the past ten years. 

Since 2007, Missouri Baptist Medical Center 

has added two new patient pavilions with private 

patient rooms, a new emergency department, 

cancer center, cardiac recovery floor 

and surgery center. In 2010, Alton Memorial 

Hospital completed a major bed tower expansion 

with seventy-six state-of-the-art private 

rooms. In 2011, Boone Hospital Center completed 

the largest-ever expansion with a new 

seven-story patient bed tower that houses 128 

private patient rooms. Between 2003 and 

2012, Missouri Baptist Sullivan completely 

rebuilt the hospital, adding a new emergency 

department, new childbirth wing, critical care 

beds, cardiac rehab services, a cancer center 

and a wound care center. 

Community outreach plays a vital role in 

BJC’s commitment to meeting the health 

needs of patients throughout the region. In 

2012, BJC and its member hospitals and 

health service organizations provided more 

than 633,000 individual community health 

services. BJC sponsors youth programs, 

including immunizations and check-ups, and 

partners with schools in developing curricula 

and educational programs. 

BJC also offers a continuum of care to older 

adults through retirement communities and 

long-term care facilities. The OASIS program 

offers educational and volunteer opportunities 

and other assistance to senior citizens and 

has touched the lives of more than 720,000 

individuals since 1982. 

In October 2012, BJC partnered with 

CoxHealth of Springfield, Missouri; Memorial 

Health System of Springfield, Illinois; and 

Saint Luke’s Health System of Kansas City, 

Missouri, to create The BJC Collaborative to 

achieve even higher quality care for the 

patients served by the independent not-forprofit 

healthcare organizations. Blessing 

Health System in Quincy, Illinois, and 

Southern Illinois Healthcare in Carbondale, 

Illinois, joined The Collaborative in 2013. 

While remaining independent, Collaborative 

members are focused on implementing clinical 

programs and services to improve access to and 

quality of healthcare for patients, lowering 

healthcare costs and achieving cost savings. 

BJC HealthCare works towards enhancing 

the lives of all ages every day and helps people 

realize the possibilities of a healthy future. 

BJC takes pride in making medicine better for 

our patients, families and communities. 


2 0 7

DELTA DENTAL 

OF MISSOURI 

Above: Current location—taken in 2012. 

Right: David Haynes, current president and 

CEO, taken in 2011 in current building 

lobby on Gravois Road. 

Below: Thirty-fifth anniversary photograph 

taken at the Delmar office building in 1993. 

Delta Dental of Missouri is the state’s dental 

benefits leader, with 1.5 million members 

in more than 1,800 companies, both large 

and small. Ninety-five percent of practicing 

dentists in Missouri participate in one or both 

of Delta Dental’s networks: Delta Dental PPO SM 

Network and Delta Dental Premier ® Network. 

However, when the organization was first 

organized in 1958 as Missouri Dental Service, 

few expected it would grow to serve so many 

members. Many, including dentists, predicted 

it would fail. 

The organization got its start after dentists 

approached health insurance companies and 

tried unsuccessfully to persuade them to 

offer a dental insurance product. They were 

informed by the underwriters that because of 

the nature of the procedures, it was impossible 

to do. Meanwhile, a group of dentists on the 

West Coast decided they would bypass the 

insurance companies and form a pre-paid 

dental coverage program on their own. This 

led to the formation of the first nonprofit 

dental service company—Washington Dental 

Service. Using this approach as a model, 

Missouri Dental Service was founded a few 

years later to address the oral health crisis 

that was unfolding in this state due to a lack 

of access to care. 

Dr. Joseph Hagan of Crystal City, Missouri, 

was the founder and president of the Missouri 

Dental Service Board of Directors. Dr. Hagan 

persuaded James Edsel Judd, a dental health 

educator for the State of Missouri, to become 

the organization’s executive director. The 

office secretary was Marge Contryman. This 

team signed the first participating dentists in 

the St. Louis area and secured Midvale Dental 

Lab as the first dental insured group. 

Judd eventually became president and 

CEO of the company, a position since held 

by Joseph P. Hopkins, Steven P. Gaal and 

David W. Haynes. 

The organization’s first offices were located 

above a men’s clothing store on High Street in 

Jefferson City, Missouri. The offices consisted 

of a tiny nine square foot room that had been 

used by the clothing store’s seamstress, plus 

three other small rooms located at the back 

of the building. 

With little revenue and only lukewarm 

support from the state’s dentists, times 

were tough for the organization in its early 


208

days. Judd, the executive director, 

traveled throughout the state to visit 

with local dental societies and groups 

of dentists. “When I told them about 

our plans for Missouri Dental 

Services, I endured giggles and even 

outright laughter from the dental 

professionals,” he recalls. “Their 

intent was not to make fun of me; 

they just could not believe what we 

were trying to accomplish.” 

Since Judd could not afford an 

apartment in Jefferson City, the small 

offices became his home away from 

home. A communal bathroom down 

the hall provided a sink and cold 

running water, and Judd budgeted $1.50 per 

day for food, which he cooked on an old 

waffle iron. There was no refrigerator. “I don’t 

know how I survived,” Judd later commented. 

“I never once went to a movie, restaurant or 

lounge. I just had no money. I would leave 

Jefferson City about noon every Friday, drive 

155 miles to Lancaster, Missouri, spend the 

weekend with my family, and be back in 

the office at 10 a.m. Monday morning. My 

normal workday was 10-15 hours for the 

next few years.” 

The programs offered by Missouri Dental 

Service gradually began to catch on. Based on 

an operating agreement with Blue Cross of 

St. Louis and the acquisition of a large client 

base there, the company decided to open a 

second office in St. Louis, renting space 

from Blue Cross. It was during this period 

that Pam Clyde (Martin) was hired to help 

process claims. She later became manager 

of the department and now serves as senior 

vice president and COO of Delta Dental 

of Missouri. “Pam Clyde Martin is, without 

question, one of the most influential persons 

involved in the early development of Missouri 

Dental Service,” says Judd. 

In 1977, Delta Dental moved all its operations 

to St. Louis to a location near Westport 

Plaza and later purchased a building at 

8390 Delmar in 1982. As the organization 

continued to grow, the name was changed to 

Delta Dental Plan of Missouri in 1985. In 

1988, Delta Dental became independent from 

Blue Cross and Blue Shield. 

As part of the national Delta Dental Plans 

Association, Delta Dental of Missouri offers 

dental and vision benefits in Missouri and 

South Carolina. Recognized as the leading 

dental benefits provider in the nation, Delta 

Dental’s two networks—Delta Dental PPO SM 

Network and Delta Dental Premier ® 

Network—offers the largest proprietary network 

of participating dentists. Clients benefit 

from Delta Dental’s unique two-tiered 

approach to dentist networks as they work 

to provide better access, better protection 

and better savings. Nationally, Delta Dental’s 

effective discounts lead the industry in 

network savings for clients and members. 

Delta Dental of Missouri is a 501(c)(4) 

nonprofit organization with a social mission 

to improve oral health in the communities 

it serves. The company proudly supports the 

Delta Dental Land of Smiles educational 

touring theater program, Delta Dental Health 

Theater Give Kids A Smile, and Missouri 

Missions of Mercy, as well as a scholarship 

program for dental hygiene students. 

As a nonprofit organization with a social 

mission, Delta Dental of Missouri has a 

responsibility to return excess profits to the 

community. That sense of duty runs deep 

throughout the company’s culture—not as an 

obligation, but as a privilege. The company’s 

commitment to improving oral health drives 

its leadership to do more each year in the 

ultimate quest to eradicate chronic oral 

disease and improve the overall health of the 

communities it serves. 

Above: Land of Smiles Program with 

Tooth Wizard and PlaqueMan. Educational 

outreach program to elementary schools 

across Missouri. 

Below: Pam Clyde (Martin) c. 1980, then 

manager of claims processing. Now senior 

vice president and chief operating officer 

of Delta Dental of Missouri. 


2 0 9

MARYVILLE 

UNIVERSITY 

A gathering place: students congregate 

outside the Gander dining hall on the 

campus of Maryville University. 


210 

Founded in 1872, Maryville University is a 

respected St. Louis tradition in higher education 

and recognized as one of the outstanding 

private universities in the Midwest. Maryville 

provides excellent academic and professional 

programs through the College of Arts and 

Sciences, the School of Education, the College 

of Health Professions, the John E. Simon 

School of Business and the School of Adult 

and Online Education. 

As the City of St. Louis celebrates its 250th 

birthday in 2014, Maryville University’s enrollment 

exceeds 5,000 students in more than 75 

undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programs. 

The school was founded as Maryville 

Academy by the Religious of the Sacred Heart, 

an order established in France by women 

dedicated to excellence in education. Mother 

Rose Philippine Duchesne, a pioneer in the 

field of education, founded the American 

branch of the Religious of the Sacred Heart. 

She established numerous schools around 

St. Louis, including the one that eventually 

became Maryville Academy—a school for 

young women located in South St. Louis. 

This later evolved into a junior college, and 

became a four-year college in 1923. 

The institution’s visionary grasp of the 

growth potential of West St. Louis County 

sparked its purchase in the late 1950s of 

290 acres adjacent to U.S. 40, now I-64, and 

Woods Mill Road. The dedication of the 

new campus on this site in 1961 marked 

the beginning of Maryville’s mission as a 

community-focused institution grounded 

in the liberal arts. The University became 

coeducational in 1968. 

Governance of Maryville was turned over 

to a lay Board of Trustees in 1972. The institution 

became Maryville University of Saint 

Louis in 1991. 

The heritage bequeathed to the University 

by the Religious of the Sacred Heart still 

remains, within a non-sectarian context. 

This includes a commitment to the education 

of the whole person through programs 

designed to meet the needs of traditional 

and adult students. Throughout the day, 

evening, weekend, online and blended 

learning formats, Maryville emphasizes a 

rigorous education delivered by highly 

qualified faculty who also serve as dedicated 

mentors and advisers. 

A number of key leaders and benefactors 

have contributed to the long success of 

Maryville University. Among the most notable 

are the late philanthropist and longtime 

Maryville trustee John E. Simon and his wife, 

Adaline. Both the John E. and Adaline Simon 

Athletic Center and the John E. Simon School 

of Business are named in honor of their 

generous support. 

A generous gift in 2010 from two St. Louis 

philanthropists, the late Maryville trustee 

Earl E. Walker and his wife, Myrtle, paved 

the way for construction in 2013 of a new 

home for Maryville’s College of Health 

Professions. Named in their honor, Myrtle E. 

and Earl E. Walker Hall will feature state-ofthe-art 

facilities for classrooms, laboratories, 

meeting spaces and more. The Walker 

Scottish Rite Clinic for Childhood Language 

Disorders, co-founded by Earl Walker, is a 

key part of the building. Also housed in 

the building will be a studio and office suite 

for Kids Rock Cancer, a free music therapy 

outreach program for children battling cancer 

and other blood disorders.

In 2013, Rawlings Sporting Goods 

Company, Inc., named the Rawlings Sport 

Business Management program, the first 

such naming partnership in the nation. 

Later that same year, a generous gift 

from Mercy Health named Maryville 

University’s Catherine McAuley School 

of Nursing. 

Maryville University has seen tremendous 

growth under the leadership of President 

Mark Lombardi, the school’s tenth leader. 

Lombardi’s innovative leadership has sparked 

significant achievements, including record 

enrollments, record fundraising, new construction 

and facilities improvements, increased 

international participation, increased diversity 

among students and reclassification to the 

National Universities category in U.S. News & 

World Report. 

Maryville enjoys a growing national reputation 

and was named by U.S. News & World 

Report as the No. 1 Overperforming University 

in the nation in both 2012 and 2013. In addition, 

Forbes and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance 

magazines consistently rank Maryville on their 

“Best Colleges” lists. 

Since 1981, when Maryville University 

pioneered flexible adult education, thousands 

of adults have earned degrees and advanced 

their careers while maintaining a satisfying 

work-life balance. 

With enrollment growing by 30 percent 

since 2007, the student body at Maryville 

represents 46 states and 30 countries 

and includes 2,800 undergraduate and 

2,300 graduate students. In 2014, Maryville 

employed 671 full- and part-time faculty and 

staff. More than 17,000 of Maryville’s 21,000 

alumni live and work in the St. Louis region. 

The University constantly strives to 

expand and develop partnerships that 

provide strong leadership in the St. Louis 

region. Collaborating with corporations, 

businesses and other organizations, Maryville 

presents ongoing, engaging programs for 

the community such as Maryville Talks 

Books, Maryville Talks Innovation, Maryville 

Talks Women and Leadership and others. 

Since 1998, Maryville has presented the 

St. Louis Speakers Series at Powell Symphony 

Hall, a prestigious forum for national and 

international leaders in government, business, 

the arts and more. 

Guided by a comprehensive strategic plan, 

Maryville University is poised to continue 

the rich tradition of excellence, visionary 

growth and thoughtful expansion evident 

throughout the institution’s history. 

Maryville University, led by 

President Mark Lombardi, was named 

by U.S. News & World Report as the 

No. 1 Overperforming University in the 

country in 2012 and 2013. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SARAH CROWDER/ 

LADUE NEWS. 


2 1 1

THE LUTHERAN 

CHURCH– 

MISSOURI SYNOD 

Top: Historic Trinity Lutheran Church is 

the oldest Lutheran Church–Missouri 

Synod (LCMS) congregation west of the 

Mississippi River. Founded in St. Louis 

in 1839 by 600 immigrants from Saxony, 

Germany, Trinity quickly grew to become 

an influential Protestant congregation in 

the area. Its second pastor, the Reverend 

Dr. C. F. W. Walther, helped found the 

LCMS and Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, 

and served as the first president of the 

church body and the seminary. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ERIK LUNSFORD 

AND LCMS COMMUNICATIONS. 

Above: The Reverend Johann F. Buenger, 

an early Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod 

pastor, responded generously to the Lord’s 

call to serve his neighbors in need. Buenger 

founded St. Louis’ first Protestant hospital 

in 1847, which became known as Lutheran 

Hospital; established a convalescent home 

that evolved into St. Louis-based Lutheran 

Senior Services, now one of the nation’s 

largest senior-living networks; and founded 

an orphanage after the Civil War that 

eventually grew into what is known today as 

Lutheran Family and Children’s Services of 

Missouri, which provides counseling, 

human-care and relief services. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF 

CONCORDIA HISTORICAL INSTITUTE. 


212 

The St. Louis-based Lutheran Church– 

Missouri Synod (LCMS) is a biblical, confessional, 

witness-oriented Christian denomination 

with 2.2 million members in 6,151 congregations. 

Through acts of witness and mercy, 

the church carries out its mission to make 

known the love of Christ by word and 

deed within its churches, communities and 

the world. 

The LCMS was officially founded in 1847, 

but its roots run much deeper. In 1838-39, 

a small group of Saxon and other German 

immigrants arrived in the United States seeking 

the freedom to practice and follow confessional 

Lutheranism. These immigrants arrived in the 

Port of New Orleans and made their way 

upriver to St. Louis before returning south 

to Perry County, Missouri, where they settled 

and eventually helped to establish the LCMS. 

On April 26, 1847, twelve pastors representing 

fourteen congregations from Illinois, 

Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, New York and 

Ohio signed the church body’s constitution at 

First Saint Paul Lutheran Church in Chicago. 

The first president of the Synod was the 

Reverend Dr. C. F. W. Walther, a young pastor 

who had joined the Saxon Germans who 

immigrated to the U.S. in 1839. At the age of 

twenty-seven, he became the leader of the 

group that settled in Perry County. 

Dr. Walther presided over the new Synod 

and led the church’s growth during a period 

of great migration of German immigrants. 

He served as president of Concordia Seminary, 

St. Louis, and as editor of Der Lutheraner, a 

leading magazine of the day that reached 

confessional Lutherans across the country. 

While serving as the Synod’s first president, 

he was appointed by the mayor and city 

council of St. Louis to help care for residents 

during the city’s deadly cholera epidemic in 

1849. He also served as a pastoral leader during 

the city’s devastating fire in that same year. 

Today, Dr. Walther is revered as a leading 

Lutheran theologian of his time and is fondly 

known as the “Father of the Missouri Synod.” 

The LCMS was blessed with many outstanding 

leaders who helped the church grow 

during its early years. In 1847, the Reverend 

Johann Friedrich Buenger founded St. Louis’ 

first Protestant hospital, which became known 

as Lutheran Hospital. He also established a 

convalescent home that evolved into St. Louisbased 

Lutheran Senior Services, now one of the 

nation’s fifteen largest senior-living networks. 

Reverend Buenger also opened his home 

to children orphaned during the Civil War. 

This led to a modest orphanage in Des Peres, 

Missouri, which eventually grew into what is 

known today as Lutheran Family and Children’s 

Services of Missouri. This statewide social ministry 

serves more than 22,000 individuals and 

families with counseling, adoption, foster care, 

mentoring and disaster-relief services. 

The LCMS founded Concordia Publishing 

House on South Jefferson Avenue in St. Louis 

in 1869 to produce Bibles, worship and 

doctrinal materials, periodicals, gifts and books, 

including the Arch Books series, one of the most 

successful series of Christian children’s books 

in the country. Today, Concordia Publishing 

House continues to serve the people of the 

church and share the Gospel in communities 

around the world.

Twelve Missouri Synod laymen joined 

together in 1917 to form the Lutheran Laymen’s 

League to ease the Synod’s financial needs. 

They went on to fund the Synod’s first 

pension plan for pastors and teachers and 

support the church’s pioneer efforts in 

Christian broadcasting. KFUO, a Lutheran 

radio station, first went on the air in 1924 

and still broadcasts the saving message of 

Jesus Christ from studios in St. Louis. 

LCMS women, who have a rich legacy of 

helping individuals in need, joined together 

to form the Lutheran Women’s Missionary 

League (LWML) in 1942. Since then, 

the LWML has raised millions of 

dollars and served untold numbers 

of hours in support of the church at 

home and around the world. 

Concordia Seminary, the church’s 

first seminary, was founded in 1839 

and moved to St. Louis in 1850. Still 

in operation, the seminary has trained 

thousands of pastors and deaconesses 

for service to the church. Today, a second 

seminary, located in Fort Wayne, 

Indiana, and ten colleges and universities 

also operate under the auspices 

of the LCMS, and its congregations 

operate one of the largest parochial 

school systems in America. 

Since 2004 the LCMS has awarded 

millions through domestic and 

international grants for emergency 

response and disaster relief in the 

wake of such events as the tsunami 

in Asia; Hurricane Katrina; the 

earthquakes in Japan, Haiti and 

Chile; Superstorm Sandy and 

Typhoon Haiyan. 

The LCMS is in full doctrinal fellowship 

with thirty-four other confessional Lutheran 

church bodies worldwide and is a founding 

partner of Lutheran Services in America, 

an affiliation of 300 social-ministry organizations. 

The church also partners with 

Lutheran World Relief in serving communities 

living in poverty overseas and with 

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service 

in advocating for and ministering to 

immigrants, asylees and refugees to the 

United States. 

The church’s headquarters are in Kirkwood, 

Missouri, in a two-building campus known 

as the LCMS International Center. Concordia 

Historical Institute, the Synod’s official archives 

based at Concordia Seminary, holds more 

than 2.5 million documents and 7,500 

artifacts tracing Lutheran history in the U.S. 

and the world. 

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod 

ranks as one of the largest U.S. Christian 

denominations and represents one of the 

largest nonprofit organizations in the 

St. Louis metropolitan area. 

Left: The Reverend Dr. Walter A. Maier— 

a religious broadcast pioneer and Lutheran 

Church–Missouri Synod pastor—speaks 

with passion on KFUO Radio, which he 

helped found in St. Louis in 1924. KFUO 

is still broadcasting today, earning it 

distinction as the world’s longest 

continuously operating Christian radio 

station. Maier was the first speaker for 

“The Lutheran Hour”—still on the air— 

which debuted in 1929 on KFUO. 


CONCORDIA HISTORICAL INSTITUTE. 

Below: The Reverend Dr. Matthew C. 

Harrison (center) presides at the altar in 

the Chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus at 

Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, during his 

installation as president of The Lutheran 

Church–Missouri Synod in September 2013. 

Harrison, who was first elected in 2010 and 

re-elected to a second three-year term in 

2013, is the thirteenth man to serve as 

president of the church body. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MICHAEL SCHUERMANN 

AND LCMS COMMUNICATIONS. 


2 1 3

ASCENSION 

Bottom, left: Alexian Brothers Hospital, 

St. Louis, in 1874. This building replaced 

the Simonds Mansion that the Alexian 

Brothers had turned into their first 

St. Louis hospital in 1869. 


ALEXIAN BROTHERS PROVINCIAL ARCHIVES. 

Bottom, right: The Daughters of Charity, 

a historical sponsor of Ascension, opened 

their first St. Louis hospital in a three room 

log cabin at Fourth and Spruce Streets 

downtown in 1828. By the 1940s, when 

they were operating DePaul Hospital on 

North Kingshighway Boulevard in St. Louis, 

the congregation had begun its transition to 

sponsoring a national healthcare system, 

with its hospitals sharing services in an 

effort to make operations more efficient. 


THE DAUGHTERS OF CHARITY ARCHIVE. 

From the beginning, a vision of new frontiers 

has animated those who call St. Louis 

“home.” Ascension—which, at its founding 

in 1999, established the country’s largest 

Catholic and nonprofit healthcare system 

here—certainly embraces this local legacy, 

as its Health Ministries work vigorously 

nationwide to lead the transformation of 

healthcare. Ascension’s commitment to serve 

has roots in St. Louis that stretch back nearly 

200 years, to the city’s early days. 

The Daughters of Charity trace their roots 

to seventeenth century France, where they 

provided care for the poor in their homes 

and later in hospitals, orphanages and 

schools. Their foundation in the United 

States dates to 1850 when the Emmitsburg, 

Maryland, Sisters of Charity, founded in 

1809 by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, joined the 

Daughters of Charity. 

The Sisters first journeyed to frontier 

St. Louis in 1828, sent from Emmitsburg to 

provide medical care to settlers. By the end 

of the decade they had established the first 

hospital west of the Mississippi in a three 

room log cabin. The Daughters would eventually 

expand across the country, working 

in existing hospitals and opening new ones. 

By the 1940s, the Daughters had begun 

sharing services among their facilities, bringing 

greater efficiency to their ministry. 

This laid the groundwork for what would 

become the Daughters of Charity National 

Health System, based in St. Louis, which by 

1999 had grown to approximately eighty hospitals, 

nursing homes and other healthcare 

facilities in fifteen states. 

Other branches of Ascension’s history of 

healing in the St. Louis area grow from the 

religious congregations that would one day 

become the ministry’s founding sponsors, 

connected through their Christ-centered 

commitment to serve all persons, with special 

attention to those who are poor and vulnerable. 

Some came together in 1999, while others 

joined Ascension later. 

Two early historical sponsors of Ascension— 

the Sisters of St. Joseph of Nazareth (now part 

of the Congregation of St. Joseph) and the 

Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet—share a 

common foundation with roots in seventeenth 

century France, where their original 

ministries included hospitals, orphanages and 

institutes for the deaf. 

In 1836, Bishop Joseph Rosati invited the 

Sisters to St. Louis to teach the deaf. Eight Sisters 

were sent to begin the ministry and establish a 

motherhouse for the order in the United States. 

Initially, they opened two facilities—one in 

Carondelet, the other in Cahokia, Illinois. 

By 1860 the congregation had become independent 

of its French roots, and soon after, 

other communities were formed throughout 

the Midwest—including two (in Nazareth, 

Michigan, and Wichita, Kansas) that sponsored 

health ministries. Eventually, the Sisters of 

St. Joseph of Nazareth (a founding sponsor of 

Ascension) would grow their health system to 

encompass four regional systems operating 

more than thirty hospitals, nursing homes 

and other healthcare facilities throughout 

lower Michigan. 

Meanwhile, by 1981, the Sisters of St. Joseph 

of Carondelet brought thirteen healthcare 

institutions together as one organization that 

would ultimately become St. Louis-based 

Carondelet Health System, which joined 

Ascension in 2002. 


214

Since their arrival in St. Louis in 

1870, the Congregation of the Alexian 

Brothers has also made an important 

mark on local healthcare. Its initial 

hospital had twenty beds, and by 1874 

it expanded to open the city’s first 

psychiatric division. 

Like the religious women who preceded 

them, the Brothers’ healthcare 

ministry often extended beyond acute 

care settings into related work such 

as nursing homes and clinics. Their 

groundbreaking PACE (Program of Allinclusive 

Care for the Elderly) effort in 

St. Louis became the first such program 

in the country to receive permanent 

funding from Medicare in 2001. 

When Alexian Brothers Health System 

joined Ascension in 2012, its operations in four 

states included hospitals, clinics, senior living 

facilities, rehabilitation services and community-based 

programming for the elderly. 

A spirit of innovation was always at the 

heart of these healing ministries deeply rooted 

in St. Louis’ history. The religious women 

and men who ran them often had to invent 

ways to address the needs of the people and 

communities they served. This same spirit 

is alive at Ascension today, as it works to 

develop bold approaches for sustaining and 

expanding a thriving, vibrant Catholic health 

presence throughout the United States and 

beyond. One recent fruit of this commitment: 

the decision in 2010 to create a non-congregational 

Public Juridic Person as the sole 

sponsor of Ascension. Under this sponsorship 

model, religious and laypeople share 

responsibility for the ministry’s ongoing leadership 

and success. Most recently, Ascension 

welcomed the Marian Health System, sponsored 

by the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother, 

into Ascension Health in 2013. 

Today, from its base in the St. Louis area 

with more than 630 associates, Ascension 

supports the efforts of 150,000 associates 

nationwide that are transforming healthcare, 

finding new ways to provide person-centered, 

holistic care that is safe and reliable across the 

care continuum. Ascension’s Health Ministries 

operate more than 1,900 sites of care in twentythree 

states and the District of Columbia. 

In 2013, Ascension provided nearly $1.5 billion 

in care of persons living in poverty and community 

benefit programs, had total operating 

revenue of $17 billion and total assets of 

$30 billion. 

Building on its legacy of healing, Ascension 

is a national leader, delivering on its promise 

to provide Healthcare That Works, Healthcare 

That Is Safe, and Healthcare That Leaves No 

One Behind, For Life. Ascension is energetically 

taking up the call to look beyond current 

operations, in order to advocate for—and create—a 

compelling vision of what healthcare 

might become over the next 250 years. 

Above: A Brother Supervisor and hospital 

interns work in the laboratory at Alexian 

Brothers Hospital, St. Louis, in 1915. 


ALEXIAN BROTHERS PROVINCIAL ARCHIVES. 

Below: Rooted in the loving ministry 

of Jesus as healer, Ascension’s historical 

sponsors have a long history of providing 

healthcare services to those in need. 

This photograph from the Daughters of 

Charity Archive shows Sisters caring for 

a patient at DePaul Hospital on North 

Kingshighway Boulevard in the late 1960s. 


2 1 5

MISSOURI 

BOTANICAL 

GARDEN 

Right: Henry Shaw (1800-1889). 

Below: The statue of Juno in the 

Kresko Family Victorian Garden. 


216 

Founded in 1859 the Missouri Botanical 

Garden is one of the nation’s oldest botanical 

gardens and operates today as a world leading 

center in botanical research and science 

education, conservation, and horticultural 

display. Guided by its mission statement 

“To discover and share knowledge about 

plants and their environment in order to 

preserve and enrich life.” the Garden today is 

a National Historic Landmark and a literal 

oasis within the city of St. Louis. 

Henry Shaw, founder of the Garden, came 

to St. Louis from his native England as a 

young man in 1819. Determined to make his 

name in business he opened a general store 

selling hardware and cutlery. As St. Louis 

grew, Shaw’s business expanded to include 

investments in agricultural commodities, 

mining, real estate and furs. 

Shaw’s fortune grew along with the city itself; 

he retired from the business of his general 

store a wealthy man at the end of 1839 just 

shy of his fortieth birthday. He began 

purchasing real estate and in 1842 bought 

nearly 760 acres outside the city limits of the 

time. He travelled abroad over the next ten 

years visiting some of the finest public and 

private gardens and parks in all of Europe and 

in 1851 upon his last trip abroad the idea of 

establishing a botanical garden in his adopted 

home city of St. Louis came to fruition. 

In the years to follow word began to spread 

that Shaw was developing the grounds around 

his then rural country estate, which became 

known as Tower Grove. In 1856, he corresponded 

with William J. Hooker, director of 

the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, just outside 

of London, who suggested that Shaw contact 

fellow St. Louis local physician and botanist 

Dr. George Engelmann who persuaded Shaw 

to include the scientific study of plants 

including a library and herbarium in his plan 

for the Garden. Shaw also gained the support 

of noted Harvard botanist Asa Gray with 

whom Engelmann had already discussed 

Shaw’s efforts. 

Today the Missouri Botanical Garden features 

seventy-nine acres of beautiful horticultural 

displays. More than 4,800 trees live on 

the grounds, including some unusual varieties 

and a few stately specimens dating back 

to the nineteenth century when Shaw planted 

them. Outstanding displays include the 

Chinese Garden, English Woodland Garden, 

Ottoman Garden and Victorian District. The 

Japanese Garden also known as “Seiwa-en” 

covers fourteen acres, making it the largest 

Japanese strolling garden in North America. 

The Climatron, a stunning conservatory 

first opened in 1960, has become a lasting 

symbol for the Garden. A geodesic domed 

structure inspired by the futuristic designs of 

R. Buckminster Fuller, the Climatron covers 

more than a half-acre and is a year round,

ever-changing impressive display that features 

a vibrant tropical rainforest. The adjoining 

Shoenberg Temperate House is home to a 

multitude of Mediterranean species; this spacious 

conservatory displays plants unique to 

the temperate regions of the world. In applied 

horticulture the Garden features the William 

T. Kemper Center for Home Gardening, the 

nation’s most comprehensive resource center 

for gardening information including twentythree 

residential-scale demonstration gardens. 

Other historic structures and conservatories 

at the Garden feature designs of famed 

St. Louis architect George I. Barnett. These 

include Tower Grove House built in 1849, 

which served as Shaw’s country home and 

focal point from which the Garden first grew, 

the Museum, the Linnean House, and Shaw’s 

Townhouse that was moved from downtown 

St. Louis to the Garden after his death in 

1889. Today, Shaw lies in state on Garden 

grounds in his granite mausoleum located in 

the Victorian District. 

In addition, the Garden family includes 

two other properties outside St. Louis city 

limits. The 2,400 acre Shaw Nature Reserve 

in Gray Summit, Missouri, was established in 

1925 to protect the Missouri Botanical Garden’s 

plant collection from smoke pollution. Today 

it has become a premier educational habitat 

restoration site featuring seasonal events, 

native wildflowers, and miles of hiking trails. 

The Sophia M. Sachs Butterfly House, located 

in Chesterfield’s Faust Park, was established 

in 1995 to increase awareness of the natural 

habitat in which butterflies thrive. 

Significant resources are invested at the 

Garden in developing and sharing new discoveries 

in plant science and using that 

knowledge to help better understand ecosystems 

here and around the world. Classes and 

educational opportunities are available for 

every age group and experience level and the 

Garden is host to various volunteer opportunities 

and supports educational outreach to 

school children of all ages. The Garden strives 

to inspire and educate all about the benefits of 

being good environmental stewards through 

responsible use of natural resources by promoting 

sustainability for the betterment of 

society and for the protection of the planet. 

From the Orchid Show in February, the 

Wednesday summer nights of the Whitaker 

Music Festival, the Japanese Festival on 

Labor Day weekend, to the Gardenland 

Express holiday flower and train show— 

there is something happening at the Garden 

for all any time of the year. Located at 4344 

Shaw Boulevard in St. Louis, the Missouri 

Botanical Garden is easily accessible throughout 

the entire metropolitan area. Visit the 

website at www.missouribotanicalgarden.org 

for an online calendar of events. 

Above: Climatron and lily pools featuring 

“Angel Musicians” sculptures by 

Carl Milles. 

Below: Zigzag bridge in the Japanese 

Garden or Seiwa En meaning “Garden of 

pure, clear harmony and peace.” 


2 1 7

SAINT LOUIS SCIENCE CENTER 

With a mission to “ignite and sustain 

lifelong science and technology learning,” 

the Saint Louis Science Center serves as an 

informal learning environment for science, 

a resource for current science 

issues and a playground for 

imagination. Making learning 

accessible to all members of 

the community through free 

admission, the Science Center 

welcomes more than 900,000 

visitors annually. 

The Saint Louis Science 

Center traces its roots to 

the Academy of Science of 

St. Louis founded in 1856. 

In 1959 the Academy created 

the Museum of Science and 

Natural History in Clayton’s 

Oak Knoll Park. In 1984 the 

Museum acquired the James S. 

McDonnell Planetarium from 

the City of St. Louis. After 

an extensive renovation of 

the iconic 1963 structure, it 

reopened in 1985 as the Saint 

Louis Science Center. In 1991, 

following a community-wide 

campaign, the Science Center’s 

landmark highway-spanning 

campus opened connecting 

the Planetarium in Forest Park 

to the main building on 

Oakland Avenue. 

Today, the Saint Louis Science Center is 

one of the top twenty science centers in the 

United States and the world as ranked by the 

Association of Science-Technology Centers. It 

is recognized as one of “America’s Top 25 Most 

Visited Museums” by Forbes Traveler magazine 

and as one of the nation’s “10 Best Science 

Centers for Families” by Parents magazine. 

“We just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary 

of the Planetarium, and it’s amazing to think 

about the changes in science and technology 

from 1963 to now, let alone think about the 

changes over the last 250 years since Laclede 

and Chouteau established the settlement that 

became St. Louis,” said President and CEO 

Bert Vescolani. “We live in a world overflowing 

with information, ideas and innovations. 

The Science Center plays a vital role in this 

ever-changing landscape by helping people 

connect with science, technology, engineering 

and math.” 

Each day, explorers travel through space 

in the James S. McDonnell Planetarium, one 

of the nation’s leading space educational 

facilities. Originally developed in the context 

of Sputnik and the space race, the Planetarium 

consistently delivers dynamic experiences 

in astronomy, space science and aviation. 

One of its most amazing features, the Zeiss 

Planetarium Model IX, projects 9,000 stars 

onto an eighty foot dome creating a brilliant 

star field. The Boeing Space Station offers 

two floors of exhibits that demonstrate 

what it is like to live and work in space 

and explore the future of space travel. The 

Planetarium’s lobby displays two spacecraft— 

the Mercury and Gemini—built in St. Louis 

by McDonnell Aircraft. The Planetarium’s 

iconic shape, designed by internationally 

renowned architect Gyo Obato, is one of 

the most recognized architectural treasures 

in St. Louis. 

Visitors to the Saint Louis Science Center 

experience hands-on science learning through 

more than 700 interactive exhibits. They can 

see Earth during the dinosaur era in the 

Ecology and Environment Gallery, extract 

DNA in the Life Science Lab, program robots 

in Cyberville SM and complete a miniature 

Gateway Arch in Structures. Boeing Hall, 

which opened in 2011, is a LEED ® -certified, 


218

13,000 square foot exhibition space 

allowing the Science Center to 

present traveling exhibitions and 

special events. EVie, the Electric 

Vehicle, travels the region with 

interactive exhibits on energy and 

the environment from her home 

base at the Science Center. The 

fascinating Energizer ® Ball Machine 

in the Emerson Lobby is an 

example of the Science Center’s 

world-class exhibits. 

The Science Center’s OMNIMAX ® 

Theater offers the ultimate in film 

experience. Visitors sit under a five 

story, seventy-nine foot diameter 

tilted, domed screen taking in 

breathtaking images from a 70mm 

film projection system. The IMAX ® 

technology has the largest film 

frame in motion picture history— 

ten times the size of a standard 

35mm frame. Combined with 

15,000 watts and six channels of 

digital surround sound, it is an 

immersive film experience like no other. 

The Saint Louis Science Center offers educational 

programs for learners of all ages, both 

on site and off site. The Taylor Community 

Science Resource Center, at the corner of 

Kingshighway and Manchester, serves as the 

home base for the Science Center’s successful 

public, school, and community outreach 

programs, offering classroom, meeting, and 

laboratory space while housing a collection of 

nearly 100,000 artifacts. The Taylor Center also 

houses the Science Center’s signature youth 

development program, Youth Exploring Science 

(YES). This collaboration with numerous 

community organizations encourages teens 

with multiple risk factors to set and achieve 

educational and career goals. 

School programs, camp-ins, summer camps, 

and scout events get young visitors excited 

about doing science. First Fridays, the Science 

Center’s monthly evening program, gives 

adults an opportunity to explore the geekier 

side of life through engaging presentations, 

pub-style trivia, LASERIUM ® shows and 

screenings of classic science fiction movies 

introduced by a local scientist. The Saint Louis 

Science Center offers opportunities for people 

of all ages to connect with science. 

For more information, including directions, 

hours of operation and current events, please 

visit slsc.org. 


2 1 9

SAINT LOUIS ZOO 

Above: Workers pose for a photograph 

during construction of 1904 World’s Fair 

Flight Cage. 

PHOTOGRAPHY FROM SAINT LOUIS ZOO ARCHIVES, 

COURTESY OF THE RONVIK FAMILY. 

Bottom, left: In this iconic image, Miss Jim, 

the elephant acquired for the Saint Louis 

Zoo by collecting pennies from hundreds 

of school children, is out for a stroll on Zoo 

grounds. The elephant was an institution at 

the Zoo from her arrival in 1916 until her 

death in 1948. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SAINT LOUIS ZOO ARCHIVES. 

Bottom, right: Zoo’s First Elephant House 

was built in 1917. 


The Saint Louis Zoo has educated, entertained 

and earned a place in the hearts of 

Saint Louisans for generations. 

Home to 600 species and 19,800 animals, 

many of them rare and endangered, the Zoo 

is one of the few free zoos in the nation. It 

has been named number one zoo by Zagat 

Survey’s U.S. Family Travel Guide in association 

with Parenting magazine. The Zoo, which 

annually attracts three million visitors, is an 

engine for regional growth, with an annual 

economic impact of more than $200 million. 

A giant elliptical bird cage, built in 1904 

for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, eventually 

became the first Saint Louis Zoo exhibit. 

Locals were so proud of the cage that at the 

close of the World’s Fair, it was purchased as 

a permanent feature of the city’s Forest Park. 

This purchase prompted the 1910 formation 

of the Saint Louis Zoological Society. Society 

members recognized the need to enlist public 

participation in a local zoo, and the citizens of 

St. Louis responded with enthusiasm—donating 

bear cubs, tigers, antelopes even a camel. 

The City of St. Louis set aside seventy-seven 

acres within the nearly 1,300 acre Forest 

Park, and a state law was passed ruling that 

“the zoo shall be forever free.” 

In 1915 the Society asked city residents 

to join the crusade to approve a mill tax of 

one-fifth of a penny. With the 1916 approval 

of this tax, St. Louis became the first city in 

the world to support its Zoo through public 

taxes. Now these tax revenues cover a third of 

the Zoo’s budget. 

Also in 1916, a collection of pennies from 

school children allowed the Society to acquire 

its first elephant. The creation of an elephant 

house followed as did a basin for sea lions and 

a lion house. Several other historic buildings 

were constructed during the 1920s and 1930s, 

including the still-used bird, primate and reptile 

houses and an antelope exhibit. One of the 

most notable early exhibits was the open and 

moated Bear Grottos—a natural, unbarred visual 

display that became a model for other zoos. 

In the following decades, the Zoo continued 

to grow in animal exhibits, attendance and 

national acclaim under George P. Vierheller, 

who served as director from 1922 until 1962, 

when he was succeeded by Marlin Perkins. 

Perkins gained international fame through 

his Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom television 

program. However, it was the Zoo’s sixth 

director, Charles H. Hoessle, who brought 

the Zoo to its modern-day standards in terms 


220

of wildlife education, animal management, 

animal health and research. 

A year after Perkins took the reins, Zoo and 

community leaders drove a golden spike into 

the ground on August 30, 1963, to mark the 

first ride of the Zoo’s train—now the Emerson 

Zooline Railroad. The nation’s largest miniature 

rail line, this six-locomotive train has carried 

nearly 35 million riders since that first trip. 

The 1970s marked the creation of a taxsupported 

Zoo Museum District, supporting 

local cultural institutions, including the Zoo. 

In 1983 the citizens of St. Louis City and 

County agreed to raise the district tax rate. 

These years also marked the openings of 

Big Cat Country and Jungle of the Apes and 

unprecedented growth for the Zoo’s education 

program—now one of the nation’s largest. 

In the 1990s, the Zoo added the Endangered 

Species Research Center & Veterinary Hospital 

and the Emerson Children’s Zoo and began 

the first phase of River’s Edge, which allows 

visitors to journey along a mythical waterway 

seeing everything from elephants 

to cheetahs. In 2000, Monsanto 

Insectarium opened with more 

than 100 species of invertebrates 

and a walk-through geodesic dome 

filled with butterflies. 

Since 2002, under the leadership 

of the Zoo’s current President 

and CEO Jeffrey P. Bonner, Ph.D., 

the Zoo has expanded River’s Edge 

habitats, opened a new penguin 

and puffin exhibit that gives 

visitors a close-up experience with 

the birds and become a leader in 

international conservation with 

the establishment of its WildCare 

Institute. That institute brought 

the Zoo’s conservation initiatives 

under a single organization of 

twelve centers focused on creating 

a sustainable future for wildlife 

and people around the world. 

This period also marked the creation 

of the Donn & Marilyn Lipton 

Fragile Forest, a new home for 

orangutans, chimps and gorillas, 

and the William R. Orthwein, Jr., 

and Laura Rand Orthwein Animal 

Nutrition Center, which provides top-notch 

dietary care for Zoo animals. 

In 2012 the Zoo opened its awardwinning 

Sea Lion Sound, where visitors can 

walk through an underwater tunnel into 

the sea lions’ habitat or enjoy the First Bank 

Sea Lion Show at an open-air arena. Also in 

2012, Zoo attendance hit an all-time high 

of 3.5 million, and the Zoo purchased the 

13.5-acre former Forest Park Hospital site 

across Highway 64 from the Zoo. It adds 

fourteen percent more land to the Zoo, giving 

it room to grow. 

With more exhibits planned for painted 

dogs and polar, Andean, Malayan sun and 

grizzly bears, the Saint Louis Zoo is living 

up to its excellent reputation as a worldclass 

conservation organization. Thanks to 

enlightened volunteer and staff leadership 

and strong community and donor support, 

the Zoo’s 100 plus years have been marked 

by extraordinary growth and achievement. 

For more information visit www.stlzoo.org. 

Above: Phil, the Gorilla. 


Below: Sea Lion Sound opened in 

summer 2012. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DAVID MERRITT, 

SAINT LOUIS ZOO. 


2 2 1

MATHEWS- 

DICKEY BOYS’ 

& GIRLS’ CLUB 

Above: Vice President of Public Relations 

and Special Events Barbara A. Washington 

with members of the organization’s Girls’ 

Program during the “Christmastime All 

Over The World” celebration of the annual 

Sheer Elegance Fashion Show. 

Right: President, CEO and co-founder 

Martin Luther Mathews. 

Below: Mathews surrounded by young 

club members. 


222 

More than two million young men and 

women have learned the Three R’s of Respect, 

Restraint and Responsibility at the Mathews- 

Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club. 

The organization was founded in Handy 

Park in 1960 by Dr. Martin Luther Mathews 

and the late Hubert ‘Dickey’ Ballentine, neighborhood 

baseball coaches. As the number of 

teams grew, plans were made to establish a 

clubhouse at the former Bob Russell Sporting 

Goods Store at 4738 Natural Bridge Road. 

Soon a five-team league was formed and 

the clubhouse attracted more members and 

volunteers. By 1964 pioneer benefactor Union 

Electric (now Ameren Missouri and still a 

strong Club supporter decades later) funded 

uniforms for seventy-five baseball and twentytwo 

football teams. By 1970, and with this 

type of corporate support, the Club had 

become an integral part of the community. 

In 1980, with the advice of G. Duncan 

Bauman, the Club was led to two corporate 

leaders, August A. Busch III, then chairman 

and CEO of Anheuser-Busch Companies, and 

Charles F. Knight, then chairman and CEO of 

Emerson Electric Co., to co-chair a multimillion 

dollar building campaign for a new home 

at 4245 North Kingshighway Boulevard. The 

building’s design was created 

by architect Karl Grice, a Club 

alumnus, and then board member 

Raymond Maritz. 

President Ronald Reagan 

dedicated the new facility in 

1982, declaring it a model for 

the country. The president also 

presented the nation’s highest 

civilian honor, the Presidential 

Citizens Award, to Mathews 

and Ballentine for their lifetime 

achievements. The facility is 

equipped with an Olympic-size 

pool, the Reverend William G. 

Gillespie Board Room, Robert 

E. Grote, Jr. Tennis Courts, the 

Richard B. Loynd Gymnasium, 

Dick and Mary Casey Hall 

of Fame, community meeting 

rooms and administrative offices. 

A multipurpose outdoor athletic 

complex was built in 1984 in 

honor of baseball Hall of Famer James ‘Cool 

Papa’ Bell with support from the Boosters and 

President Reagan. The Club expanded its 

athletic programming to North County with 

the donation of the Bob Russell Park in 2011. 

The Girls’ Program was established in 

1986 under the direction of advisor Evelyn 

Williams and late board member Charles 

‘Big Charlie’ Ruprecht, with leading support 

from Casey and Grote. A 19,000 square 

foot expansion wing was built for the new 

program with six learning classrooms and a 

teaching and demonstration kitchen. Olympic 

Gold Medalist Jackie Joyner-Kersee took part 

in the dedication of a new auditorium in her 

honor. The Club was renamed the Mathews- 

Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club in April 2001 with 

a lead gift by Insituform Technologies. 

Today, the organization provides direct 

educational, cultural enrichment, career and 

leadership and sports programs to 6,000 

youth members and indirect services to more 

than 40,000 young men and women annually. 

The United Way member, 501(c)(3) organization 

achieves amazing results with a small but 

dedicated board and staff, with an annual 

budget of $2.5 million. Volunteers are the 

organization’s lifeblood, generating more than 

1.9 million service hours each year.

Since its beginning as an institution to train 

teachers for the public schools, Harris-Stowe 

State University has evolved into a university 

offering four-year academic opportunities in 

the areas of teacher education, business, and 

arts and sciences. 

HSSU was founded by the St. Louis Public 

School system in 1857 as a normal school, thus 

becoming the first public teacher education 

institution west of the Mississippi River and 

only the twelfth such institution in the nation. 

The school, open to white students only, was 

later named Harris Teachers College in honor 

of William Torrey Harris, a St. Louis school 

superintendent and also a United States 

Commissioner of Education. 

The College began offering in-service 

education for white teachers in the St. Louis 

schools in 1906 and became a four-year 

undergraduate institution in 1920. The 

school was first accredited in 1924. 

Meanwhile, Stowe Teachers College began 

in 1890 as a normal school for future black 

elementary school teachers. The school, an 

extension of Sumner High School, became 

a four-year, degree-granting institution in 

1924. The school’s name was changed to 

Stowe Teachers College in 1929 in honor of 

abolitionist leader Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

The two teacher education institutions were 

merged by the St. Louis Board of Education in 

1954 as the first of several steps to integrate 

the city’s public schools. The merged institution 

was known as Harris Teachers College. 

In response to many requests from alumni 

of Stowe Teachers College, the name was 

changed to Harris-Stowe College. The school 

became the newest member of the State system 

of higher education in 1979 and the official 

name became Harris-Stowe State College. 

The school attained university status in 2005. 

Since its founding 157 years ago, HSSU has 

been the “university of choice” for first-generation 

college students who otherwise would 

not have an opportunity to pursue a bachelor’s 

degree. The school currently serves 1,400 

students at its Givens campus in St. Louis. 

Dr. Henry Givens, Jr., who served as the 

school’s president for thirty-two years before 

retiring in 2011, was instrumental in expanding 

the campus from one building in 1999 to 

HARRIS-STOWE STATE UNIVERSITY 

seven buildings today. Currently, the university 

offers fourteen competitive degree options. 

HSSU, with 190 full-time employees, is 

steadily positioning itself to be the right 

choice for every student it serves and a major 

educational competitor in the areas of Science, 

Technology, Engineering and Math. Plans on 

the horizon for Harris-Stowe State University 

include positioning the school for future 

academic-centered growth so that it continues 

to cater to the educational needs of the 

metropolitan community by being the most 

affordable and accessible option available for 

individuals seeking a quality education. 


2 2 3

GREATER 

SAINT LOUIS 

COMMUNITY 

FOUNDATION 

Right: Left to right, D’Angela Jeffries, 

Dawson Haley, and Raven Ginger earned 

college scholarships as part of the Redbird 

Rookies Saigh Scholarship program, a 

Cardinals Care program at the Greater 

Saint Louis Community Foundation. 

Below: In 1994, William C. Black 

established a scholarship fund in memory 

of his wife, Bertha Black, who was a teacher 

at Vashon High School, to help St. Louis 

area African-Americans—particularly 

Vashon graduates —attend college or 

professional school. 


224 

Founded in 1915, the Greater Saint Louis 

Community Foundation continues to help 

St. Louisans make meaningful and lasting 

contributions to the causes they care about, 

and also help promote charitable giving in 

our community. 

Consider Edward Bredell, who was a 

St. Louis area merchant and philanthropist. In 

1894, he established a fund with the St. Louis 

Community Trust, which 

later became the Greater 

Saint Louis Community 

Foundation. Now, 120 

years later, the Community 

Foundation continues to 

act as the steward of 

Bredell’s instructions and 

provides financial support 

in his name to local organizations 

and ensures his 

charitable wishes continue 

to be honored. 

By making a gift to the 

Community Foundation, 

a donor can contribute 

to the charitable causes or 

organizations of their choice during their 

lifetime—and posthumously. With the help 

of the Greater Saint Louis Community 

Foundation, charities can benefit from a 

donor’s generosity for decades—and possibly 

—centuries to come. 

Lucille Pappenick was a woman of modest 

means when she died in 1992, yet she left 

$340,000 to the Foundation to provide for 

local nonprofits. Her fund has already 

contributed $250,000 to local organizations, 

and thanks to the work of the Community 

Foundation, her fund is now valued at 

$400,000. Her good will have a positive 

impact on St. Louis for generations to come. 

Over the past twenty-five years, the 

Community Foundation and its donors like 

Bredell and Pappenndick have distributed a 

total of $217 million to charitable causes. 

More than seventy percent of those grants 

were made to nonprofits in the St. Louis 

region. Today, the Community Foundation 

has more than 425 funds serving nearly 

2,000 donors with charitable assets totaling 

almost one-quarter of a billion dollars. 

At the same time, the Community 

Foundation has also broadened its mission 

and serves as an important resource for 

St. Louis area nonprofits by pairing these 

worthwhile organizations with interested 

and prospective donors. In addition, the 

Foundation often brings these organizations 

to the table with key decision-makers to 

develop innovative solutions that address a 

variety of complex community challenges. 

In its next century, the Greater Saint Louis 

Community Foundation will remain dedicated 

to working with charitable-minded St. Louisans 

and the nonprofits they love to help ensure a 

more vibrant St. Louis for future generations.

ST. MARY OF 

VICTORIES 

CHURCH 

(1843) 

St. Mary of Victories Church, founded 

at Third and Gratiot Streets in the 

“Chouteau’s Landing” Historic District of 

Downtown (south of the Gateway Arch), 

is one of the beloved churches of Old 

St. Louis. Established in 1843, the charming 

neo-classical red brick edifice was designed 

by noted St. Louis architects Franz Saler 

and George I. Barnett. (Barnett’s firm would 

later go on to design the “New Cathedral” 

Basilica on Lindell Boulevard and other 

noteworthy churches and public buildings 

in the Victorian Era.) St. Mary’s ornate 

interior, featuring hand-painted frescoes, 

statuary and carving, was designed by 

Professor Max Schneiderhahn, the city’s first 

professional church artist. The ornate statue 

of St. Mary of Victories, cast in 1844, still 

stands in the Sanctuary. The church was 

the second Roman Catholic Church to be 

constructed in the city after the Old 

Cathedral. Presently, it is a historic church 

designated by the city, the Archdiocese, 

and the National Register of Historic Places. 

This is the only church in the Archdiocese 

featuring the Papal Coat of Arms of Pope 

Benedict XVI and Pope St. John Paul II. 

Blessed Father Francis X. Seelos, C.Ss.R., 

preached here in 1865, and is slated for 

eventual canonization as St. Louis’ second 

saint after St. Rose Phillipine Duchesne. 

Blessed Karl, the last Hapsburg emperor of 

Austria-Hungary, is also honored here. 

Originally established for German immigrants 

to St. Louis in the nineteenth century, 

Old St. Mary’s enjoyed a second rebirth as 

a spiritual and cultural home to Hungarian 

immigrants who arrived after the Hungarian 

Revolution in 1956. Today, St. Mary of 

Victories proudly serves the descendants of 

these groups, the south Downtown business 

community, and the Catholic community 

attached to the “Novus Ordo” (Vatican II) 

Latin Mass in the City of St. Louis. Visitors 

and numerous tourists enjoy the quaint, 

decorative charm and tranquility of the old 

church and its landscaped Old World courtyard. 

Masses, including weddings, funerals and 

regularly scheduled weekday and week end 

services are still held at the parish. A fully 

equipped church hall and catering facility 

also operates as part of the parish outreach to 

the general community and St. Louisans of all 

faiths. Many visitors and families attend our 

Annual Parish Homecoming Festival in mid- 

August—oldest in St. Louis. Check the St. Louis 

Review and our website, www.smov.info, for 

festival information and dates. 

The Friends of Historic St. Mary of Victories, 

a nonprofit, community-based group dedicated 

to the preservation and future mission of 

this historic church, and the redevelopment 

of Downtown St. Louis, thank you for your 

support and generosity. We invite you to come 

back to visit (and worship) often! 

Profile written and donated by Max S. Kaiser, Jr. 


2 2 5

SISTERS OF 

ST. JOSEPH OF 

CARONDELET 


226 

The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a 

congregation of women religious, follows 

the spirit of the foundation established in 

LePuy-Velay, France around 1650 by Jean 

Pierre Medaille, a Jesuit priest, with Francoise 

Eyraud and her five women companions. 

Dedicated to the practice of spiritual and 

corporal works of mercy, the community had 

a rapid growth until the time of the French 

Revolution when convents were suppressed 

and the sisters were forced to live as lay 

persons. Mother St. John Fontbonne was one 

of these sisters. Many sisters were imprisoned 

and some guillotined, and Mother St. John 

herself was arrested and placed in the prison 

at St. Didier. However, the eve of the day 

scheduled for her execution saw the fall of 

Robespierre—July 27, 1794—which meant 

the end of the Reign of Terror. Released from 

prison, she and her companions returned 

again to her parent’s home. In 1807, Cardinal 

Fesch, Bishop of Lyons, asked her to reestablish 

the Sisters of St. Joseph in his diocese. 

A combination of circumstances contributed 

to establishment of the Sisters of St. Joseph 

in America. Through her work with the 

Propagation of the Faith, Countess Felicite’ 

Duras was greatly moved by a letter from 

Bishop Rosati, the first Bishop of St. Louis, 

asking for sisters who would undertake 

instruction of deaf-mutes. She offered to 

defray the expense of establishing a community 

of Sisters of St. Joseph in his diocese of 

St. Louis. She had a great love and admiration 

for Mother St. John Fontbonne and asked her 

to send sisters to America. The Bishop accepted 

six sisters to instruct the children, and two 

others were included to teach the deaf. 

The initial six sisters—the oldest was 30, 

the youngest just 21—arrived in New Orleans 

March 5, 1836 after seven weeks at sea. The 

sisters enjoyed the hospitality of the Ursuline 

Sisters for two weeks, learning much about 

life in America. The sisters then traveled up 

the Mississippi, reaching their destination 

March 25, 1836. 

While waiting to occupy a log cabin in 

Carondelet, about five miles south of St. Louis, 

three of the sisters studied English under the 

tutelage of the Madames of the Sacred Heart. 

Anne Eliza Dillon, who was a student there, 

became the first American postulant. 

Many institutions had their start at 

Carondelet and continue their good works 

today. St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf, 

St. Joseph’s Academy, and Fontbonne College, 

(now Fontbonne University), all began in the 

convent at Carondelet. 

Today, the sisters continue to work closely 

with lay persons as they serve in parishes, 

schools, colleges, universities and diocesan 

offices; in healthcare, childcare, deaf education, 

youth ministry and adult education 

literacy programs; in homes and programs 

for the elderly, in social work, neighborhood 

and community development and social 

concerns; as artists, consultants, counselors, 

and spiritual directors. 

In a special way the sisters are in partnership 

with men and women who are desirous 

of sharing the mission of Jesus. As non-vowed 

associates, these men and women meet regularly 

to share life and prayer with one another 

and to share in the Church’s mission with the 

Sisters of St. Joseph.

The German Catholic immigration to 

America in the nineteenth century produced a 

great number of local parish benevolent societies, 

some of which sent delegates, in 1855, to 

the convention in Baltimore that founded the 

Catholic Central Verein (Union) of America. 

Annual conventions have been held since then 

in cities around the country, and, in 1908, a 

Central Bureau was established in St. Louis to 

co-ordinate the Verein’s benevolent, charitable 

and educational endeavors. Since 1921 the 

Bureau has been located at 3835 Westminster 

Place in Midtown near the University. 

The purpose of the Central Verein has 

always been “the promotion of Catholic practice, 

Christian virtue and works of charity,” 

spreading “the knowledge and love of God” 

and helping “to effect a Christian reconstruction 

of society” based on the principles of the 

great papal social encyclicals of the nineteenth 

century and later. Among the noteworthy 

achievements of the Central Verein has been 

its successful support of credit union enabling 

acts, workmen’s compensation acts, and laws 

allowing public school buses to transport 

Catholic school children. 

During and after the Second World War, 

the Central Bureau of the Central Verein served 

as the official agency of the Archdiocese of 

St. Louis for resettling refugees and other 

displaced persons from Europe and elsewhere. 

The Bureau continued this work into the 

1950s. In more recent years it has conducted 

humanitarian aid efforts in Central America. 

No longer specifically a German organization; 

the Central Verein and its Central Bureau have 

extended their activities for the good of people 

of all ethnic backgrounds. 

CENTRAL BUREAU OF THE CATHOLIC 

The library of the Central Verein, located in 

a remodeled stable behind the Central Bureau 

building, contains an extensive collection of 

German-Americana, as well as many other 

volumes in history and the social sciences. It 

is not a lending library, but scholars continue 

to avail themselves of its resources, which 

include microfilm files of German-language 

newspapers and periodicals published in the 


During recent decades, the most effective 

work of the Central Verein apostolate has 

been conducted through its bi-monthly 

journal Social Justice Review, published by 

the Central Bureau since its foundation in 

1908. Originally containing both Germanand 

English-language sections, the Review 

has been entirely in English since 1941. Its 

founding editor was Frederick Philip Kenkel, 

who was director of the Central Bureau from 

1908 until his death in 1952. 

The Central Verein, its journal and members 

still strive to bring together ideas and 

resources to promote the kind of social justice 

that is founded in Christian humanism, and 

to engender respect for the dignity and natural 

rights of all human beings. They offer a 

place for open discussion of social, philosophical, 

ethical and artistic issues, and a critical 

centre for reflection in and for the larger 

Catholic community. 

CENTRAL VEREIN OF AMERICA 

Top, left and right (close-up): 

Central Bureau of the Catholic Central 

Verein of America, founded in 1855. 

Left: Founder Frederick Philip Kenkel. 


2 2 7

COMMEMORATION COMMITTEE FOR THE 

Margaret and Daniel Carr. 

BATTLE OF FORT SAN CARLOS 

The Battle of Fort San Carlos is an 

American Revolutionary War battle fought 

west of the Mississippi River on May 26, 

1780. More than twenty villagers were killed 

in this battle, and their heroic efforts halted 

British efforts to seize the land from Spain. 

Saint Louis was never attacked again. 

The seeds for the battle were planted in the 

summer of 1779 when Spain joined the 

American Revolution against Great Britain. 

British military planners hoped to secure the 

Mississippi River corridor against both 

Spanish and patriot activity. These plans 

included expeditions to take New Orleans 

and to gain control of the village of Saint 

Louis and other settlements in the upper 

Mississippi. Their mission was to drive out 

the rebels led by George Rogers Clark. 

Clark learned of the British plans and 

warned the Spanish Commandant at Saint 

Louis, Fernando de Leyba, to prepare for an 

attack. With money from the villagers and his 

own resources, de Leyba began fortifying 

the town. A tower called Fort San Carlos was 

quickly constructed near what is today Fourth 

and Walnut Streets. A two-mile long trench 

was dug to protect the town. Cannons were 

brought from nearby Saint Charles, Missouri, 

(San Carlos), and placed in the Tower. 

About 1 p.m. on May 26, 1780, a large force 

of Native Americans and other British allies 

attacked the defenders. These included the 

people of the town, a small force of Spanish 

soldiers, militia from Ste. Genevieve, Missouri 

as well as from Saint Charles, Missouri. The 

commandant directed the defense. 

Soon, cannon fire alarmed the Native 

American attackers. They withdrew which 

caused the attack to fail. 

Unfortunately, some of the villagers were 

surprised in the fields outside the town, and 

more than twenty were killed, and seventy 

captured. That same day, a second simultaneous 

attack on an American outpost at 

Cahokia, Illinois was repulsed by George 

Rogers Clark and his militia. Again, this was 

a victory for the American cause. 

The importance of the Battle of Fort San 

Carlos faded over the generations. There were 

those who sought to keep the memory of the 

battle alive. We honor their efforts. 

The Commemoration Committee for the 

Battle of Fort San Carlos was cofounded by 

Margaret A. Carr and her now late husband, 

Daniel F. Carr. Under their leadership, the 

battle has become much more well-known. 

The Missouri History Museum will have an 

exhibit on the battle in October 2014. The 

renovated museum under the Arch will have 

exhibits on the 1750-1821 period, which will 

contain information about the battle by 2015. 

And, a wayside exhibit about the battle will be 

placed in the Luther Ely Smith Square near 

the Old Courthouse also by 2015. 

The Commemoration Committee hosts a 

memorial to those who died at the battle each 

year at the Missouri History Museum on the 

Sunday of Memorial Day weekend in May. 

Anyone interested in Saint Louis History is 

welcome to attend and is invited to join the 

Commemoration Committee. 


228

When the first Sisters of Mercy arrived 

in St. Louis on June 27, 1856, it was already 

a thriving river trading town and the secondlargest 

port in the country. But it was sorely 

lacking in education and healthcare, especially 

for the poor. 

The Sisters came to St. Louis to teach; 

within five days, they also began visiting the 

poor and sick in their homes. By 1871 

frequent cholera and typhoid epidemics 

required more help, so the Sisters turned 

their school building into a twenty-five bed 

hospital for women and children. Three years 

later, St. John’s Hospital became a general 

hospital with wards for the poor and private 

rooms for men, women and children. 

By the 1904 World’s Fair, the hospital was 

home to Mercy’s first school of nursing in 

St. Louis as well a motor-driven static X-ray 

machine, one of the most advanced medical 

technologies of the era. 

As the city continued to grow, so did 

its need for healthcare. In 1912, St. John’s 

Hospital expanded and relocated to Euclid 

Avenue near Forest Park, and by the late 

1950s the Sisters made the then-radical 

decision to follow the city’s rapid migration 

to the west. In 1963, two 

years before the Gateway 

Arch was completed, 620 

bed St. John’s Mercy Medical 

Center was opened on Ballas 

Road in St. Louis County. 

In more recent years, the 

changes have continued to 

be dramatic for the Sisters 

and their health ministry in 

St. Louis. As the number of 

active Sisters declined, lay 

leaders have emerged to 

help take the ministry into a 

new century of care. St. John’s 

Mercy, now one of the nation’s 

largest Catholic hospitals, 

was renamed Mercy Hospital 

St. Louis in 2011 and is one 

of three Mercy hospitals in 

the greater St. Louis area. A 

shift toward greater outpatient 

care and the establishment 

of Mercy Clinic has 

brought physician leadership 

to the forefront, as well as 

new sites of primary and specialty 

services across Mercy’s 

growing landscape. 

With St. Louis as an operational 

and administrative base, Mercy’s 

present-day health ministry encompasses 

health and human services across a seven 

state region. Mercy today is the sixth largest 

Catholic health system in the United States 

with more than 30 hospitals, 300 outpatient 

sites, 40,000 coworkers and 2,000 Mercy 

Clinic physicians. The organization is a 

national leader in healthcare supply chain, 

telemedicine and electronic health records. 

Just as the Sisters who established the 

ministry, Mercy continues to pioneer new 

ways of delivering healthcare to meet the 

needs of contemporary St. Louis and the 

surrounding region. 

MERCY HEALTH 

Above: St. John’s Hospital opened on 

Euclid Avenue in St. Louis in 1912. 

The present day Mercy Hospital, now 

located in St. Louis County, is one of the 

largest Catholic hospitals in the country. 

Left: Mercy operates one of the world’s 

largest electronic ICU programs, enabling 

specialists from the St. Louis control center 

to monitor ICU patients across four states. 


2 2 9

MISSOURI 

HUMANITIES 

COUNCIL 

Above: Winners of the 2013 Missouri 

Humanities Awards with members of the 

MHC board and staff. 

Bottom, left: A visitor viewing the 

Civil War traveling exhibit that was 

collaboratively developed by MHC and 

Missouri History Museum. 

Bottom, right: Storyteller Steve Otto 

presenting Civil War stories with fourth 

graders in Pierce City, Missouri. 


230 

A celebration of St. Louis 250th year is a 

celebration of the humanities. From Pierre 

de Laclede Liguest and Auguste Chouteau to 

Dred Scott, a World’s Fair, and the Gateway 

Arch itself, St. Louis has been home to a 

rich history of characters and events that 

have shaped the course and discourse of this 

country since its birth. 

The Missouri Humanities Council (MHC) 

seeks to extend that rich heritage by supporting 

and presenting humanities-based programs 

throughout Missouri. Since 1971, MHC has 

developed original programming in subjects 

including history, archaeology, anthropology, 

literature, religion, law, philosophy, and 

languages. As a 501(c) (3) organization 

affiliated with the National Endowment for 

the Humanities, MHC has proudly served 

over 2.15 million Missourians since its 

inception. Today, we offer a variety of 

programs throughout the state and in the 

Greater St. Louis area, including: 

• READ from the START—a program that 

encourages parents and caregivers to experience 

the joy of reading with their children, 

building the foundations for life-long 

learning and the love of books and stories. 

• Traveling Exhibits—in collaboration 

with the Missouri History 

Museum and other statewide institutions, 

MHC brings high-quality 

traveling exhibits to Missouri communities 

and helps them develop 

programs and exhibits to tell 

their own stories. Most recently, 

our partnership with the Missouri 

History Museum produced a traveling 

exhibit detailing the unique 

struggles of Missouri as a border 

state in the Civil War. 

• Project and Program Grants—awarding 

competitive grants to Missouri institutions, 

organizations, and communities to help 

them develop and present high-quality 

humanities-based programs, events, exhibits, 

and publications. 

• “Show Me Missouri” Speakers Services— 

in collaboration with the State Historical 

Society of Missouri, we are working to 

establish a network of experts and scholars 

to provide affordable, high-quality programs 

and presentations for organizations and 

institutions around the state, including 

community museums and libraries as 

well as civic and cultural groups (program 

commenced January 1, 2012). 

• Veterans’ Creative Writing Workshops and 

Anthology—in collaboration with the 

Warriors Arts Alliance and organizations 

such as public libraries and the VA, we offer 

creative writing workshops for veterans. This 

program continues to expand and is being 

augmented with an annual writing competition 

and anthology, co-sponsored with 

Southeast Missouri State University Press. 

• Heritage Tourism Initiative—supporting 

innovation in the effort to assist Missouri 

communities in preserving and sharing 

their own stories. This program invests in 

creative projects using new technology to 

encourage heritage tourism across the state. 

• The Missouri Humanities Awards—recognizing 

excellence in humanities-based 

education, literature and community 

service with an annual award ceremony. 

At the heart of these programs is our mission 

to build a more thoughtful, informed, 

and civil society. This 250th celebration is a 

time to reflect on that unending cause and 

redouble our efforts into the years ahead.

ST. LOUIS 

PUBLIC LIBRARY 

The St. Louis Public Library, with 70,000 

cardholders and a collection numbering 

3.5 million items, has served the St. Louis 

region for nearly 150 years. 

The library began in 1865 as the 

Public School Library and Lyceum, a private 

subscription library established by St. Louis 

Education Superintendent Ira Divoll and 

other supporters of public education. Its 

operations were transferred to the St. Louis 

Board of Education in 1877. 

Frederick Morgan Crundon, who became 

the second librarian in 1877, tirelessly 

promoted the public library as the “people’s 

university,” and advocated expansion into 

neighborhood branches and conversion to 

a free, tax-based citywide service. 

Crundon worked for passage of a new 

state law that authorized cities to levy taxes 

for public libraries and, in 1893, voters 

approved the creation of an independent 

board of directors and agreed to tax 

themselves to support a public library. The 

St. Louis Library opened, free to the public, 

on June 1, 1893. 

The library occupied the top two floors 

of the St. Louis Board of Education building 

at Locust and Ninth Streets but was soon 

in search of “adequate room for a growing 

institution and proper accommodations for 

its every increasing patronage.” 

When an attempt to levy a building tax 

for a new building failed, the library board 

contacted steel magnate and philanthropist 

Andrew Carnegie, who had embarked on a 

crusade to build public libraries across the 

nation. In 1901, Carnegie gave the city of 

St. Louis $1 million, half to be 

spent on construction of a 

Central Library and half on 

neighborhood branches. 

The Central Library was built 

at Thirteenth and Olive Streets 

on a location formerly occupied 

by the St. Louis Exposition and 

Music Hall. Designed by noted 

architect Cass Gilbert, Central 

Library featured an oval central 

pavilion surrounded by four 

light courts. The front of the 

building resembled a colossal 

arcade, with contrasting basrelief 

panels. A projecting three 

bay central block, like a 

triumphal arch, provided a 

monumental entrance. At the 

rear, Central Library faced a 

sunken garden. The ceiling of the Periodicals 

Room was modified from Michelangelo’s 

ceiling in the Laurentian Library. 

A $70 million renovation and renewal of 

the Central Library began in mid-2010 and 

was completed in December 2012. 

Today, the St. Louis Public Library operates 

sixteen locations with services ranging 

from circulation of books, music, and movie 

collections, to digital downloads and free 

computer training, to tools for business 

research, public Internet access, discussion 

groups, and speakers. 

The St. Louis Public Library operates with 

an annual budget of $23 million, with 

Executive Director Waller McGuire overseeing 

a staff of 300 employees. 


2 3 1

One of the many downtown buildings representing commercial and/or residential resurgence. 

FAUSZ FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH, 2011. 


232

THE MARKETPLACE 

S t . L o u i s ’ s r e t a i l a n d c o m m e r c i a l e s t a b l i s h m e n t s 

o f f e r a n i m p r e s s i v e v a r i e t y o f c h o i c e s 

Parkway Hotel ..........................................................................2 3 4 

Fabulous Fox Theatre .................................................................2 3 8 

Lowenhaupt Global Advisors, LLC ................................................2 4 1 

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ................................................2 4 2 

St. Louis Regional Chamber .........................................................2 4 4 

St. Louis Cardinals ....................................................................2 4 6 

TricorBraun ..............................................................................2 4 8 

Express Scripts Holding Company .................................................2 5 0 

St. Louis Economic Development Partnership..................................2 5 2 

Wells Fargo Advisors, LLC ..........................................................2 5 4 

Scottrade, Inc. ..........................................................................2 5 6 

Anheuser-Busch Employees’ Credit Union .......................................2 5 8 

Anheuser-Busch .........................................................................2 5 9 

Concordia Publishing House ........................................................2 6 0 

Vi-Jon ......................................................................................2 6 1 

Schnuck Markets, Inc. ................................................................2 6 2 

AAIM Employers’ Association ......................................................2 6 3 

Commerce Bank .........................................................................2 6 4 

St. Louis Post-Dispatch ..............................................................2 6 5 

Edward Jones ............................................................................2 6 6 

Residence Inn by Marriott St. Louis Downtown ...............................2 6 7 

Maritz .....................................................................................2 6 8 

Care-Tech ® Laboratories, Inc. 

O-T-C Pharmaceuticals ...........................................................2 6 9 

SPECIAL 

THANKS TO Best 

Western Airport 

Plaza Inn 

Kaestner Lawn Care LLC 

T H E M A R K E T P L A C E 

2 3 3

PARKWAY 

HOTEL 


234 

The Parkway Hotel is well known for 

its ‘Affordable Luxury’ but that slogan only 

partly explains the appeal of this unusual 

property. This unique, one-of-a-kind hotel 

in St. Louis’ Central West End is the sort 

of place where the manager brings his dog 

to work, guests enjoy freshly-baked cookies 

each afternoon, and patients attracted to 

nearby hospitals find a warm and caring 

environment. Tourists, business travelers, 

and medical patients alike consider the 

Parkway Hotel more of a home away from 

home, not just another room in a hotel. 

“What makes us unique 

is that a good percentage 

of our business is related 

to the hospitals,” explains 

General Manager Jim 

Ossola. “We’re adjacent to 

the renowned Barnes- 

Jewish Hospital and the 

St. Louis Children’s Hospital, 

Siteman Cancer Center, and 

the Washington University 

Medical Center. Because of 

this, we attract the vendors 

who are supplying the hospitals 

as well as patients 

and their families who come 

from all over the world for 

medical treatment at the medical centers.” 

Many of the guests are long-term patients 

and they and their families often live for 

months at the Parkway Hotel. Ossola recalls a 

family from Australia who stayed at the hotel 

for nearly a year while their six year old 

daughter received treatment. “The little girl 

had cerebral palsy and couldn’t walk or do 

much of anything,” Ossola says. “They heard 

of a radical procedure they do only at the 

Children’s Hospital so the family and their 

friends conducted fundraisers to raise the 

money and traveled from Australia so their 

daughter could be treated. We got an e-mail 

from the parents not long ago with the great 

news that their little girl is now walking.” 

Another six year old and his family were 

guests at the hotel for more than a year-anda-half 

while he received treatment. In this 

unusual case, the boy had no lungs and could 

breathe only with the aid of a machine 

attached to a trach in his throat. The boy 

also had a cleft palate and was fed through a 

feeding tube. 

“This kid was an inspiration to all of us,” 

says Ossola. “We got to watch him get his 

lung transplant, have the surgeries for his 

cleft palate, and watch him eat his first meal. 

He still comes back for check-ups and we’ve 

made him an honorary employee of the hotel. 

He even has his own little mailbox.” 

Ossola recalls that the six year old loved to 

vacuum and would come down to the lobby 

with his little breathing machine in one hand, 

grab a vacuum cleaner with the other, and 

clean the lobby carpets. “It got to the point 

where he would get all upset if he missed 

a day, because he didn’t think he was doing 

his job. The staff became very attached to 

the boy and threw a birthday party for him 

and helped his family celebrate Christmas. 

“We get letters from patient’s family members 

all the time, thanking us for making them feel 

so welcome in their time of need,” Ossola adds. 

Medical patients and their families constitute 

about thirty percent of the business at the 

Parkway Hotel. The remainder comes from the 

more traditional tourist and business travel. 

Whatever the reason for a visit to St. Louis, 

the affordable luxury at the Parkway Hotel is 

a strong attraction. The hotel is only steps 

away from the Metro Link light rail system, 

making it easy to visit downtown St. Louis and 

such attractions as Busch Stadium, Scottrade 

Center, Union Station, Washington University, 

and Cathedral Basilica. The hotel is only one 

block from world-famous Forest Park, site of 

the 1904 World’s Fair Exposition, and home 

to the St. Louis Zoo, St. Louis Art Museum, 

St. Louis Science Center, The Muny (Municipal 

Theatre Association of St. Louis) and two 

public golf courses. The hotel is only two miles 

from Chaifetz Arena, St. Louis University and 

Grand Center, which is home to the Fabulous 

Fox Theater, Sheldon Concert Hall, Powell Hall 

and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. 

Major League baseball games are a big draw 

for the Parkway, especially games between the 

St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs. 

Many fans come down from Chicago, stay at 

the Parkway and take the Metro Link right to 

the ballpark.

The independently owned and operated 

Parkway Hotel was built in 2003 in the 

historic Central West End. The Parkway Hotel 

offers three star luxury and modern elegance 

in the midst of a stately neighborhood of 

historic residences, fine restaurants, eclectic 

art galleries and first-class shopping. 

The neighborhood was created during the 

westward expansion of St. Louis in the late 

nineteenth century and the building boom 

that resulted from the 1904 World’s Fair. 

The Parkway is considered an anchor of 

the Central West End, as it is located at the 

southern border at the intersection of Euclid 

Avenue and Forest Park Avenue. 

The crisp, modern design and luxurious 

appointments of the Parkway’s lobby provide 

guests and visitors with a glimpse of the 

contemporary elegance that awaits them. The 

Parkway features 217 beautifully appointed 

guest rooms, with VIP and executive 

rooms located on the seventh and eighth 

floors. All rooms feature custom-designed 

traditional furniture, high-speed Internet 

access, microwave ovens, refrigerators, coffee 

makers, irons and ironing boards, multiline 

telephones with voice mail features, 

DVD players, hairdryers, granite vanities and 

elegant surroundings. 

A fitness center in the hotel offers guests 

a variety of machines for exercise and cardiovascular 

workouts. 


2 3 5

As you would expect from a hotel where 

the manager brings his dog to work every 

day, the Parkway is a pet-friendly hotel. 

“My office is right in the middle of the lobby, 

so I get a lot of visitors each day. And, a lot 

of them want to pet my Golden Retriever 

mix named Buttercup,” says Ossola. 

A popular Applebee’s Restaurant is located 

in the hotel lobby and dozens of other restaurants 

are located within walking distance. 

A free hot breakfast is served to hotel guests 

each morning. Just-popped popcorn is 

available all day and there is always a line 

when the cookies come out of the oven at 

5:30 p.m. each afternoon. 

Ossola feels that one of 

the strengths of the Parkway 

Hotel is its independence. 

The hotel is owned by the 

Privitera family of Kansas City 

and is not a part of any hotel 

franchise or group. “It’s individually 

owned, not corporately 

owned, and it’s run by 

the family,” Ossola explains. 

“We’re not handcuffed by 

a franchise or a management 

company, so we get to run 

things the right way,” Ossola 

explains. “There are no politics, 

no trying to please one 

group or the other. We don’t 

have to worry about some vice president 

in Los Angeles telling us how to run a hotel 

in St. Louis.” 

Ossola was hired to manage the hotel five 

years ago after a management company 

was unable to make the property profitable. 

A former professional hockey referee, Ossola 

grew up in Southern California and graduated 

from Pepperdine University. He was the 

youngest general manager in the Sheraton 

Corp. organization and worked for other 

hotel chains before becoming manager of 

the Parkway. 

Ossola feels that treating employees right 

is a major factor in the hotel’s success. 

“How you treat your employees is the most 

important thing in the hotel,” he says. 

“Because if you treat your employees 

right, they’ll take care of your customers. 

If you hold them accountable, treat them 

right, and create a very, very positive work 

environment, you keep costs down by keeping 

turnover down. The Parkway currently 

has 60 employees, including 11 managers, 

and we’ve had only 1 management staff 

member turnover.” 

The Parkway Hotel is a recipient of the 

Trip Advisor Certificate of Excellence, 

Travelocity Excellence Award, and the 

Expedia Insiders Select Award. Employees 

of the Parkway Hotel have earned the 

Hospitality Employee of the Year honor, 

presented by the Convention and Visitors 

Center, for three years in a row. 


236

This year’s winner was the hotel’s director 

of security, Denise Gardner. “She won 

because of something special she did for a 

little boy who must come to the hospital for 

treatment every six months,” explains Ossola. 

“He’s ten years old and had a little crush on 

Denise so he saved his money to take her to 

lunch. She really couldn’t do that because 

she was on duty, but instead of turning him 

down, Denise decorated a meeting room and 

made it look like a luxury restaurant with 

candles and the whole nine yards. The boy’s 

favorite food is Subway, so she got some 

Subway sandwiches and put out this whole 

big spread and had a special lunch with 

the boy.” 

Previous award winners from the Parkway 

were a maintenance staff member who 

used his own welding equipment to repair 

a wheelchair for a participant in the U.S. 

Open Tennis Wheelchair Championship; and 

another staff member who designed and 

built a customized headrest for a guest 

whose wheelchair had no support for the 

patient’s head. 

Because the Parkway has only three 

meeting rooms for about sixty-five people 

total, it does not consider itself a conference 

center. However, the hotel staff works with 

the E.P.N.E.C. Center on the Washington 

University School of Medicine/Barnes Hospital 

campus when large groups are booked. 

Now that the hotel is ten years old, plans 

are in the works for an extensive renovation 

of the Parkway Hotel over the next two 

years. The lobby will be redone completely 

and rooms will be touched up and new 

furniture added. 

“We try our best to make people feel at 

home here at the Parkway,” comments Ossola. 

“We realize our guests are staying in a hotel, 

but we want them to feel like they’re staying 

at home.” 


2 3 7

FABULOUS 

FOX THEATRE 

When the Fabulous Fox Theatre first 

opened in 1929 the owners proclaimed that, 

“No longer need residents of St. Louis look 

beyond their own city for the finest entertainment.” 

For more than half-a-century the 

Fabulous Fox presented a dazzling array of 

talent and entertainment and became the premier 

entertainment destination in the region. 

Top, left: Fox Theatre Auditorium. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DAN DONOVAN. 

Top, right: The Fabulous Fox Theatre. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF CHRIS CALDWELL. 


238 

The theatre declined and fell into disrepair 

in the 1970s and, for a time, the once proud 

theatre’s future was in serious doubt. There 

were fears that the majestic old structure 

would fall to the wrecking ball but a multimillion 

dollar restoration project restored the 

Fox to its former glory. 

More than 17 million people have passed 

through the theatre’s brass doors since the 

restoration in 1982 and the Fabulous Fox is 

once again a major showcase of entertainment. 

When it was constructed, the Fabulous 

Fox was part of a nationwide chain of more 

than 300 opulent movie palaces owned and 

operated by movie producer William Fox. 

Early Fox films, including a string of westerns 

starring Tom Mix, were big crowd pleasers 

and grossed nearly $1 million each, a huge 

amount in that era. Fox also developed the 

concept of the ‘movie star’ transforming 

actress Theodosia Goodman of Cincinnati into 

Theda Bara, who became known as ‘The Vamp’. 

He also pioneered the popular ‘newsreel’ with 

Fox Movietone News. One of the very first 

newsreels featured the take-off of Charles 

Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis enroute to 

the first nonstop flight from New York 

to Paris. 

Ground was broken for the Fabulous Fox 

Theatre in St. Louis in 1927 but it took an 

army of construction workers and artisans a 

year-and-a-half to complete the magnificent 

structure designed by architect C. Howard 

Crane. The ornate interior of the Fox has 

been described as ‘Siamese Byzantine’. One 

of the defining features of the theatre was 

a 5,280 pound chandelier with a twelve 

foot diameter. The chandelier was made of 

gilded pot metal, enhanced by 2,264 pieces 

of jeweled glass and illuminated by 259 light 

bulbs. Winkle Terra Cotta Company created 

the ornamental façade and architectural 

sculptor Victor Berlendis supervised the 

creation and fabrication of the decorative 

interior plaster. Other subcontractors were 

responsible for art glass, brass and painting. 

The St. Louis Fox also boasted a magnificent 

Wurlitzer organ, one of only five of its 

type ever constructed. Although the opening 

night movie on January 31, 1929, was a silent 

film, the Fox was one of the first theatres in 

the nation with equipment for the Movietone 

process of early sound movies.

More than 5,500 people crowded into 

the Fabulous Fox Theatre on opening night 

to see Missouri Governor Henry Caulfield 

dedicate the new motion picture temple. 

He was joined by the mayor of St. Louis and 

a host of other dignitaries. 

The St. Louis Fox grossed more than 

$50,000 opening week in 1929 and hopes 

were high that the theatre would soon 

produce a healthy profit. Those hopes were 

dashed just a few months later when the 

stock market crashed, plunging the nation 

into the worst economic depression of 

modern times. Fox’s personal fortune was 

lost to the depression and he lost all interests 

in his theatre chain in 1932, followed by 

bankruptcy in 1938. 

The St. Louis Fox went into receivership 

in 1931 and was leased to the bondholders 

the following year. Fanchon and Marco 

took a twenty-five year lease on the building 

in 1934 and Harry Arthur became general 

manager of the theatre. Over the years, the 

Arthurs gradually gained a controlling interest 

in Fox St. Louis Properties, which finally 

became known as Arthur Enterprises in 1959. 

The Arthurs managed to keep the theatre 

open during the depression and it retained 

its reputation as a first-rate movie house 

through the dark days of the depression and 

on into the 1940s and 1950s. However, the 

Fabulous Fox began to decline as newer and 

more modern movie theaters in the suburbs 

were opened. Although the Arthurs resorted 

to Kung Fu movies and an occasional rock 

concert in a struggle to remain open, the 

doors were finally locked in 1978 and the 

Fabulous Fox seemed doomed. 

Fortunately, there were those who remembered 

the glory days of the old theatre and felt 

it should be restored for modern audiences. 

On a cold morning in January 1981, Leon and 

Mary Strauss first toured the shuttered theatre 

with the aid of a flashlight and one working 

light bulb. Under the dirt, grime and decay of 

fifty-two years, they saw the potential for 

restoring the magnificent old movie palace. 

Banding together as Fox Associates, Leon 

Strauss, Robert Baudendistel, Dennis McDaniel 

and Harvey Harris purchased the structure 

from the Arthur family. In 1981, under the 

direction of Mary Strauss, Fox Associates began 

a one year, $2 million restoration program 

designed to restore the Fabulous Fox to its 

proper status as a premier entertainment 

venue. In 2014 the Fox partnership consists of 

Baudendistel, Mary Strauss, Lisa Baudendistel 

Suntrup and Julie Baudendistel Noonan. 

Restoring the building was a daunting 

prospect. An obsolete electrical system had 

to be upgraded. A leaking roof had to be 

replaced and serious plumbing and mechanical 

problems had to be addressed. The cleanup 

job alone was a massive undertaking. 

Despite the challenges, the new owners 

were determined to restore the theatre as 

closely as possible to its 1929 state of magnificence. 

With scrupulous attention to detail, 

thousands of square feet of ornate plaster 

work were recreated onsite, 7,300 yards of 

carpeting were woven in the original elephant 

pattern, missing art glass was authentically 

reproduced, ceilings were vacuum-cleaned 

and the magnificent chandelier was restored 

to its original brilliance. The stage was 

completely reequipped with state-of-the-art 

sound, lighting and stage technology. 

The Fabulous Fox Theatre reopened its 

doors on September 7, 1982, with the musical 

Barnum. A capacity crowd of 4,500 gave 

St. Louis’ most spectacular showplace a 

standing ovation. The theatre’s historic relevance 

was recognized when it was accepted 

into the National Register of Historic Places. 

On-going renovation projects have included 

a $2 million, twenty foot stage addition 

(October 1994–July 1995); a major lobby 

renovation and restoration of the ceiling mural 

Below: The detail and brilliance of the 

magnificent chandelier. 


2 3 9

Above: Fox Theatre lobby. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SAM FENTRESS. 


240 

in 2000 and the addition of the Marquee and 

Griffin Rooms for group and event dining. 

A video marquee was added in 2005 and 

a new, historically accurate vertical blade 

sign was installed in 2008. More recently, a 

$2 million energy-efficient air conditioning 

system has been installed, along with LED 

lighting and a new front 

façade. The long-awaited 

restoration of the magnificent 

auditorium ceiling was 

completed in 2013. 

When the Fabulous Fox 

originally opened in 1929, 

Peacock Alley was an art 

gallery that displayed paintings, 

statues and objects d’art 

collected by William Fox’s 

wife, Eve Leo. This area now 

showcases the more than 

1,600 shows and stars that 

have appeared at the theatre 

since the restoration. There 

is also a tribute to Stan Kann, 

long-time Fox Theatre organist 

and national television personality. 

Today, audiences flock to the Fabulous Fox 

for the very best in live entertainment. The 

Broadway Series brings all 

the top hits from New York 

to St. Louis, including The 

Phantom of the Opera, Mamma 

Mia!, Jersey Boys, The Lion 

King, Hairspray, and Wicked. 

Concert acts from the genres 

of pop, rock, country and 

R&B that have played the 

Fox stage include Lady Gaga, 

Harry Connick, Jr., Garth 

Brooks, Kelly Clarkson, James 

Taylor, Janet Jackson, Tony 

Bennett, Sting and Alabama. 

Other attractions include 

comedians (Jerry Seinfeld, 

Kathy Griffin); family productions 

(Dora the Explorer, 

Fresh Beat Band); dance 

companies (The Joffrey Ballet, 

Alvin Ailey American Dance 

Theater); and holiday specials 

(The Radio City Christmas 

Spectacular, Elf the Musical.) 

Constructed during the boom years of the 

motion picture industry and rescued from 

ruin by a group of dedicated visionaries, 

the Fabulous Fox Theatre is once again 

recognized as one of the major entertainment 

centers in the St. Louis region. 

For more about the Fabulous Fox Theatre, 

or to order tickets to an upcoming show, 

check their website at www.fabulousfox.com.

Abraham Lowenhaupt moved to St. Louis 

as a young lawyer in 1908 and had decided 

that he would concentrate on federal income 

tax. A tax enacted by the North to pay for the 

Civil War was repealed after the war was 

over, but Lowenhaupt was convinced another 

would come along. While waiting for an 

income tax to be enacted, Abraham relied for 

business on his brother and brother-in-law 

who were in the tobacco business, the firm of 

Moss and Lowenhaupt. When anyone spoke 

of what might become a lawsuit in the tobacco 

shop, Lowenhaupt’s brother or brother-inlaw 

would ask the speaker to drop a pack of 

cigarettes with Abe, the lawyer down the 

street. When the sixteenth amendment to the 

Constitution was enacted in 1913, the law 

firm, built until then on the tobacco industry, 

became the first firm in the US to concentrate 

in tax law. Today, Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff is 

proud to say it is the oldest law firm in the 

U.S. concentrating in federal tax law. 

Building on the tradition of tax law, 

Abraham’s son, Henry Lowenhaupt, was one of 

the best known tax lawyers of his generation. 

He argued many of the most important tax 

cases in the Supreme Court and was well 

known throughout the Internal Revenue 

Service and Tax Court. When Henry’s son, 

Charles, joined the firm after two years clerkship 

at the U.S. Tax Court in Washington, 

many of the clients of Abraham and Henry 

were selling businesses, which had grown large 

after World War II. The firm was focusing 

increasingly on tax and related laws involving 

private wealth in a world of portfolio investments. 

Due to the success of its legal work, the 

firm found itself performing what were becoming 

called “family office services.” At the 

request of its families, the firm began offering 

advisory services to wealthy families and single-family 

offices in the U.S., Asia and Europe. 

In 2006, Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff separated 

the advisory business into Lowenhaupt 

Global Advisors, LLC, an affiliated company 

of the law firm. Lowenhaupt Global Advisors 

is headquartered in St. Louis, with offices in 

New York, Miami and Sydney. That company, 

resourcing Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff and others, 

advises families worldwide on the practicalities 

of making their wealth accomplish their 

LOWENHAUPT GLOBAL ADVISORS, LLC 

purposes. The firm works with individuals 

and families of significant wealth to develop 

investment portfolios, fiduciary processes, 

governance plans, and philanthropic programs. 

From clients walking in with packages 

of cigarettes in 1908 to sophisticated family 

wealth communicating internationally by 

technology and serviced by jet, Lowenhaupt 

& Chasnoff based in St. Louis has grown with 

the U.S. economy and the global community. 

The Lowenhaupts: A 100 year history 

of working with St. Louisans and other 

private wealth holders around the world. 

For additional information, please visit 

www.lowenhauptglobaladvisors.com. 

Top, left: Founder, Abraham Lowenhaupt, 

Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff, LLC. 

Top, right: Managing Partner, Henry C. 

Lowenhaupt, Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff, LLC. 

Left: Chairman and CEO, Charles 

Lowenhaupt, Lowenhaupt Global 

Advisors, LLC. 


2 4 1

FEDERAL 

RESERVE BANK 

OF ST. LOUIS 

Above: St. Louis Fed customers at the 

Bank’s teller windows conduct financial 

transactions, such as redeeming 

U.S. Savings Bonds, 1923. 

Below: The Federal Reserve is a system 

that includes the board of governors in 

Washington, D.C., and twelve independent 

regional Reserve banks. The Federal 

Reserve Bank of St. Louis is responsible for 

Fed activities in the Eighth District. 


242 

St. Louis is home to one of twelve independent, 

regional Reserve banks in the 

Federal Reserve System, the nation’s central 

bank. Together with the Board of Governors 

and the Federal Open Market Committee, 

these twelve Reserve banks help promote a 

healthy economy for the nation by keeping 

inflation low and stable, fostering a sound 

financial system and supporting job creation. 

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is 

headquarters for the System’s Eighth District, 

with branch offices in Little Rock, Arkansas; 

Louisville, Kentucky; and Memphis, Tennessee. 

The District’s territory includes all of Arkansas 

and portions of six other states: Missouri, 

Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and 

Illinois. All of the Reserve Banks share some 

degree of similar duties, but because the banks 

are independent, each has some specialized 

assignments and tasks that distinguish it. 

The St. Louis Fed has a legacy of rigorous 

academic-style research that is on the frontier 

of monetary policy regarding controlling 

inflation and promoting maximum economic 

growth and employment. 

With its deep understanding of community 

banks, the Bank provides an in-depth perspective 

to national policymakers on the challenges 

to and benefits of community banks. 

Strong process management, innovation 

and customer orientation have earned the 

Bank the leadership role in overseeing all 

Federal Reserve fiscal agent activities 

for the U.S. Treasury. 

The Federal Reserve System was 

created by Congress in 1913 to 

serve as the nation’s central bank. 

The Act creating the Fed called for 

the establishment of between eight 

and twelve regional banks. Thirtyseven 

cities, including St. Louis, 

requested designation as one of the 

Federal Reserve cities. 

A blue-ribbon committee, headed 

by secretary of the Treasury and 

former chancellor of Washington 

University in St. Louis, David F. 

Houston, visited St. Louis in January 

1914. Then the nation’s fourthlargest 

city, an important banking 

center and the gateway to the nation’s 

Westward expansion, St. Louis was 

a logical choice. The St. Louis Fed

egan operations with six officers and seventeen 

employees in November 1914, led by its 

first chief executive, former St. Louis Mayor 

Rolla Wells. 

The Bank opened in rented space in the 

current Marquette Building at Broadway and 

Olive Streets. Land for the current building 

was purchased in 1918, but high construction 

costs delayed the groundbreaking until 

1923. The impressive neo-classic building, 

constructed of Bedford, Indiana limestone 

and Rockville, Minnesota granite, opened at 

the present location at Broadway and Locust 

Streets in June 1925. The original vault, 

which was designed to be “as near burglar, 

mob, fire, and explosive proof as science 

and engineering skills can make them,” has 

a forty-four ton, thirty inch thick door and 

still exists today. 

The Bank’s first chairman, William 

McChesney Martin, Sr., whom President 

Wilson had called on to help draft the Federal 

Reserve Act, went on to become the president 

of the St. Louis Fed, serving from 1929 

to 1941. His son and namesake, William 

McChesney Martin, Jr., became the longestserving 

chairman of the Federal Reserve 

Board of Governors, from 1951 to 1970. 

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the St. Louis 

Fed became known as a maverick in its 

advocacy of the importance of monetary 

policy for controlling inflation. St. Louis was 

the only Reserve Bank that consistently 

espoused the economic view of the Chicago 

School of Economics, led by noted economist 

Milton Friedman, that inflation is costly, 

increases the risk of recession and damages 

the economy’s productivity growth. 

The Bank’s president, Darryl Francis, along 

with its economists led by Research Director 

Homer Jones, were out front arguing that the 

current monetary policy was too accommodating 

and the cause of inflation, and urging 

drastic measures to tighten monetary policy 

and bring inflation under control. In the end, 

their view prevailed and became the accepted 

thinking. This “St. Louis Fed tradition” of 

scholarly macroeconomic research and challenging 

the status quo continues today. 

The Federal Reserve’s decentralized structure 

ensures that the economic conditions 

of communities and industries from all 

regions of the country are taken into 

account in monetary policy decision 

making. Proudly representing “Main Street,” 

the St. Louis Fed is responsive to its 

many district constituents, meeting frequently 

with local business, banking, civic and 

community leaders. 

The Bank is extensively involved in 

promoting financial literacy and economic 

education. The St. Louis Fed’s economic 

education materials reach thousands of 

students nationwide each year. Bank staff 

members also facilitate partnerships between 

lenders and their communities to advance 

issues pertaining to community development 

finance, neighborhood stabilization and 

household financial stability. 

In addition, the St. Louis Fed maintains 

one of the world’s most comprehensive 

online economic databases and promotes dialogue 

between the Fed and business leaders, 

bankers and the general public. 

As a corporate citizen, the Bank and its 

employees are very supportive of the community. 

For more than a decade, personal 

contributions by Bank employees distinguished 

the St. Louis Fed as the largest 

corporate donor to Operation Food Search, 

which supplies food for local pantries. 

Top and above: Bank employees stepped 

up in a major way to support the effort in 

World War I and World War II. In 1944 

the St. Louis Fed was presented with the 

Eisenhower Award for achieving the highest 

percentage of war bond sales quota for 

St. Louis companies with 501 or more 

employees. The following year, Bank 

employees raised nearly $190,000 in war 

bond sales and payroll deductions, more 

than three times the quota established by 

the Missouri War Finance Committee. 

The Bank also sold war bonds to the 

general public in both World Wars. 

Left: Modern-day shot of the Federal 

Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ plaza and 

main entrance. 


2 4 3

ST. LOUIS 

REGIONAL 

CHAMBER 


244 

The St. Louis Regional Chamber, one of the 

oldest Chambers of Commerce in the nation, 

is synonymous with the growth and development 

of the bi-state St. Louis metropolitan 

area. The organization’s rich history includes 

projects as diverse as helping to secure 

funding for Charles Lindbergh’s historic 1927 

transatlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis, and 

rallying community support for construction 

of St. Louis’ famed Gateway Arch. 

Today, the St. Louis Regional Chamber, 

working together with its private and public 

sector partners throughout the fifteen county 

region, represents a strong team for St. Louis. 

Whether supporting public policy and infrastructure 

initiatives, or attracting new jobs, 

capital and talent, the Chamber is leading the 

way to a greater St. Louis. 

Recently, the Chamber asked CEOs, business 

owners and entrepreneurs what they 

needed to succeed and took a hard look at the 

Chamber’s approach to economic development 

and public policy. The Chamber then forged a 

new strategy summarized in this statement: 

We are a broad community of leaders 

united for economic prosperity throughout 

the entire St. Louis bi-state region. In fact, 

our aspiration is for St. Louis to be one of 

the Top Ten U.S. regions in prosperity. Our 

one purpose is to inspire a greater St. Louis. 

Together, we will make St. Louis a more 

attractive place for people to live, work and 

invest. We will win on today’s regional 

strengths in focused economic clusters. We 

will champion a better tomorrow through 

greater educational attainment, economic 

inclusion, innovation and entrepreneurship. 

The words chosen for this statement articulate 

clearly and concisely the Chamber’s way 

forward. The Chamber strategy is about winning 

today and recreating for tomorrow. 

The region will win today by following the 

lead of employers who are working together 

to develop St. Louis’ authentic, regional 

strengths in: 

• Financial & Information Services 

• Health Science & Services 

• Multimodal Logistics 

• Biosciences 

No factor is more critical to the St. Louis 

region’s competitive position than education. 

St. Louis ranks fourteenth among the nation’s 

twenty largest metros in the percentage of 

its adult population with bachelor’s and 

higher-level college degrees. The Chamber 

has launched a concerted, collaborative effort 

to advance its workforce from fourteenth 

place into the top ten of the nation’s largest 

metros by the year 2025—ensuring the talent 

pools that area companies need to innovate 

and grow, and attracting people, firms and 

investments from all over the world. 

The St. Louis Chamber of Commerce was 

founded in 1836. At the time, the State of 

Missouri was only fifteen years old, but 

St. Louis was one of the fastest growing cities 

in the nation. 

Edward Tracy, a partner in the firm of Tracy 

& Wahrendorff, is credited with the idea of 

starting an organization of men engaged in 

commerce to exchange information, coordinate 

business growth and regulate trade. Tracy 

was elected the first president of the Chamber 

and Henry Von Phul, owner of St. Louis’ first 

steamboats, was elected vice-president. 

A Merchant’s Exchange was established 

in 1848 as a center for merchants to meet, 

transact business and exchange ideas. The 

success of this organization led to the 

formation of other similar groups. 

By the 1890s the Business Men’s League 

was established to promote the interests of the 

city, while the Merchant’s Exchange continued 

to focus on trade. In 1916 the organization 

changed its name back to St. Louis Chamber 

of Commerce. The Chamber underwent 

reorganization at this time and hired its first 

full-time president, Walter B. Weisenberger. 

In 1963 the St. Louis County Chamber of 

Commerce merged with the St. Louis Chamber 

of Commerce to become the Chamber of 

Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis. The 

Chamber took on its current form in 1973 with 

the merger of three organizations: the Chamber 

of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis, the 

St. Louis Regional Industrial Development 

Corporation and the St. Louis Research Council. 

From its very beginnings, the Chamber 

organizations have been instrumental in 

promoting ideas and projects to improve and

enrich the St. Louis area. The Business Men’s 

League worked tirelessly to ensure success of 

the 1904 World’s Fair. In 1909 the League 

invited President Taft and other prominent 

government officials to tour the river from 

St. Louis to New Orleans. This on-site visit 

led to a commitment from President Taft 

and House Speaker Joe Cannon to make 

Mississippi River improvements a priority. 

The Chamber has fought for cleaner air 

in St. Louis since the 1940s and supported 

enactment of smoke abatement legislation. 

The Chamber proactively prepared for World 

War II by publishing a report containing 

detailed information about area manufacturers. 

This report was sent to defense contractors 

and helped St. Louis companies secure 

contacts for government contracts during 

the war. 

Transportation has always been a priority 

for the Chamber. The opening of the 

MetroLink light rail system in 1993 and the 

Alton Clark Bridge project in 1994 received 

strong Chamber backing. 

The Chamber also established a Sports 

Committee, which made a bid for the 1994 

U.S. Olympic Festival. St. Louis was selected 

as the host city, and the Olympics brought 

national coverage and millions of tourist 

dollars to the region. 


2 4 5

ST. LOUIS 

CARDINALS 

Right: Team photo composite of the 

1903 American League St. Louis Browns. 

Below: Cardinals Manager Branch Rickey 

posing for his portrait in 1922. 


246 

For more than a century, the St. Louis 

Cardinals and the game of baseball have been 

a source of excitement and civic pride. 

Throughout the mid-1800s, local athletic 

clubs played a number of stick and ball 

games for recreation. St. Louisans were 

introduced to the first uniform set of baseball 

rules, according to the Knickerbocker Baseball 

Club of New York, in 1859 by a man from 

Brooklyn named Merritt Griswold. 

The rules of baseball were fairly consistent, 

thus allowing clubs greater freedom and less 

frustration in playing one another. Many of 

these amateur teams played in Lafayette Park, 

not too far from the current home of the 

Cardinals, Busch Stadium. 

St. Louis had been committed to seeing 

its local teams remain amateur and of local 

talent; however, frustrations came to a head 

by 1874 after the professional Chicago White 

Stockings (one of the nation’s first professional 

teams following the lead of the 1869 

Cincinnati Red Stockings) had defeated 

St. Louis amateur teams in twenty consecutive 

matches dating back to 1870. 

Civic boosters led by J. B. C. Lucas, Jr., 

raised $20,000 to organize a professional 

baseball team called the Brown Stockings. 

A quality team was produced; however 

none of the players were from St. Louis. This 

led another local amateur club, the Red 

Stockings, to turn professional appealing to 

local sentiment. The Brown Stockings would 

prevail in the battle of gaining fans’ interest, 

though, as they defeated the Chicago White 

Stockings in the first professional game in 

St. Louis on May 6, 1875, by a score of 10-0. 

They repeated the feat two days later. The 

Red Stockings could not repeat the same 

success on the field as the Brown Stockings 

and would fold as a professional corporation 

by the end of July. 

The Brown Stockings played professionally 

through 1877, and then continued independently 

until Chris Von der Ahe, a local saloon 

owner, purchased the club’s stadium lease and 

placed them in the American Association, 

a major league of professional teams, as the 

St. Louis Browns. Interest in the club grew 

during his leadership, so he moved the team 

to a new ballpark in 1892, the same year that 

they began play in the National League after 

the American Association folded. 

The team changed ownership and names 

in 1899, briefly being known as the 

Perfectos, before adopting the Cardinals 

moniker in 1900, a name which would later 

inspire the birds on the bat logo, one of the 

most recognized in all of sports. In 1902 the 

American League would move another team 

to the city and take the Browns nickname 

in an attempt to quickly build a fan base. 

For over fifty years, St. Louis would play host 

to two major league franchises. 

By 1919, St. Louis’ teams had yet to win a 

championship. They had trouble competing 

with wealthier teams for the best players. 

The Cardinals’ Vice President, Branch Rickey, 

believed his team could protect and cultivate 

raw talent by owning minor league teams at 

different levels of play. The Cardinals sold 

their ballpark, became tenants of the St. Louis 

Browns at Sportsman’s Park in 1920, and 

bought the first minor league “farm teams” 

in Texas and Arkansas. The system quickly 

paid off. The Cardinals won their first World 

Series championship in 1926, defeating the 

New York Yankees, with fourteen farm-grown 

players on their roster. 

The success would continue for the 

Cardinals with four more trips to the World 

Series throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

The 1940s saw the Redbirds return to their winning 

ways, particularly with the help of a young 

player who made an indelible mark on the 

franchise and the city. Stan “The Man” Musial 

made his major league debut late in 1941 and 

“The Man” would return in 1942 to help the 

team to four World Series appearances during 

the decade on his way to becoming the greatest 

Cardinals player in team history. 

owned the St. Louis Browns. Under DeWitt’s 

guidance, the Cardinals have experienced a 

renaissance with four World Series appearances 

since 2004 and a new ballpark that 

opened in 2006, which consistently draws 

over 3 million fans annually. 

Today the Cardinals remain one of the 

most successful in baseball with 11 

World Championships, 19 National League 

Championships and over forty former players 

and managers enshrined in the National 

Baseball Hall of Fame. As St. Louis celebrates 

its 250th birthday in 2014, the Cardinals 

will dedicate the Cardinals Hall of Fame & 

Museum in Ballpark Village that will showcase 

the rich history of baseball’s best city-St. Louis. 

Left: Stan Musial posing in his batting 

stance, 1959. 

Below: Bill DeWitt, Jr., and Bill DeWitt III 

holding the 2011 World Series trophy 

during the on field celebration. 

1953 marked a new era in franchise history 

when Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based 

beer brewer, purchased the Cardinals. 

Recognizing they could not compete with the 

financial resources of one of the world’s largest 

brewers, the American League Browns left 

town for Baltimore following the season. The 

Busch ownership group immediately made 

upgrades to the club’s current ballpark and 

soon made plans for a new downtown stadium. 

Not too long after the team’s unexpected 

world championship in 1964, they began 

playing in Busch Memorial Stadium in 1966, 

not far from the shadow of the Gateway Arch. 

The club would return to the World Series 

twice in the late 1960s and again on three 

occasions in the 1980s. 

Anheuser-Busch sold the club in 1996 to 

a group led by Bill DeWitt, Jr., a former 

St. Louisan, whose father had worked for 

the Cardinals under Rickey and had later 


2 4 7

TRICORBRAUN 

Top: Home of the Northwestern Bottle 

Company, 1929-1966. 

Above: Samuel Kranzberg. 

Below: Left to right, Mickey, Maury and 

Jack Kranzberg at the entrance of office at 

3144 North Broadway, 1946. 


248 

Northwestern Bottle Company was founded 

in St. Louis in 1902 by Samuel Kranzberg 

as a used glass bottle company. Nearly 112 

years later, the company has evolved into the 

world’s largest supplier of glass and plastic 

containers, closures, dispensers and tubes. 

Bottles were still handmade when the 

company first opened, a slow and inefficient 

process that produced a tremendous demand 

for discarded bottles that could be recycled. 

Northwestern Bottle Company was one of 

hundreds of companies that scoured the 

countryside for used bottles and cleaned and 

sold them for reuse. Few of the used-bottle 

companies survived the economic depression 

of the 1930s but Samuel managed to hang 

on through innovation, imagination and 

hard work. 

Early in the company’s history, Samuel 

needed financing to purchase a partner’s 

share of the firm. According to his grandson, 

Ken Kranzberg, he had borrowed all the 

banks would lend him, but was still $5,000 

short of the purchase price. “At the time, the 

company’s biggest customer was Cook’s 

Champagne, so grandfather approached the 

owner about a loan,” he explains. “Without 

hesitation, the champagne bottler took out 

his checkbook and wrote a check for $5,000. 

When grandfather asked about signing a note 

for the loan, Mr. Cook replied that no note 

was required, he’d take his payments in 

champagne bottles. At the time, no champagne 

bottles were made in the U.S., so 

grandfather collected used bottles wherever 

he could find them. It was a good deal for 

both of them.” 

Samuel’s flair for innovation was also 

evident at the end of the prohibition era 

when he obtained the St. Louis franchise for 

Schlitz beer. When prohibition came to an 

end and thirsty beer drinkers were ready to 

celebrate, Samuel had two rail cars loaded 

with Schlitz waiting on the track. “My dad 

told me the line was two blocks long to buy 

a case of beer from grandfather,” says Ken. 

The company grew steadily through three 

generations of Kranzberg sons, beginning 

with Samuel and continuing with Mickey 

Kranzberg, who took over the business in 

1942, about the time the first plastic bottle 

was manufactured by Plax Corporation. 

Northwestern Bottle also became the first 

distributor for Owens-Illinois, the first 

company to manufacture glass bottles with 

a blow molding machine, as well as one of 

the first to sell plastic spray bottles for such 

products as deodorants. 

Mickey’s son, Ken, entered the business in 

1960 and opened Northwestern’s first branch

office seven years later in Memphis. This 

expansion made Northwestern a $2 million 

company. Revenues increased from $7 million 

in 1977 to $110 million in 1996, when the 

firm was acquired by a private equity firm. 

Ken and his father created Kranson 

Industries as a holding company prior to 

Mickey’s death in 1977. As president of 

Northwestern Bottle and Kranson Industries, 

Ken presided over the company’s national 

expansion, with branch offices opening in 

Indianapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, Boston, 

Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Omaha, 

Miami, Wilmington and Denver. 

Texberry Container Company, a distributor 

of rigid packaging products, became part of 

Kranson Industries in 1996, along with 

Caliber Packaging, the result of a successful 

merger of Calpac Container Company and 

Berman Brothers in 1995. 

In 1997, Northwestern Bottle Company, 

Caliber Packaging and Texberry Container 

merged to create Tricor Packaging. Then, 

in late 1998, Tricor Packaging and the 

W. Braun Company consolidated operations, 

forming TricorBraun, the packaging industry’s 

first super distributor. 

In addition to Texberry and Caliber, 

today’s TricorBraun includes the combined 

history, talents and resources of Packaging 

Plus, Packaging West, Smith Container, 

Cal-West Tool & Mold, Fenton, Weber & 

Jones, I-Pak, Ryco Packaging Corporation, 

Columbia Packaging, Penn Bottle and Supply 

Co., and Trilogy Glass and Packaging, Inc. 

TricorBraun Design & Innovation is an 

award-winning, fully-integrated design studio 

that combines package design and development 

and custom mold building within 

one organization. TricorBraun, with three 

locations nationwide, has earned a number 

of prestigious package awards. In addition, 

TricorBraun also has pre-qualified global 

sources through TricorBraun’s offices in 

Mexico City, London, China and Hong Kong, 

staffed with professionals who provide sourcing 

expertise, project management, factory 

qualification and engineering services. The firm 

also maintains strategic supplier relationships 

in Europe. 

Ken, who served the company for fiftythree 

years and is now chairman of the board, 

feels the success of TricorBraun over more 

than a century is the result of a “great 

management team and top-notch employees. 

Our core values of integrity, passion, value 

added and service are still very important 

to the company and this has resulted in a 

lot of longevity among our employees. 

Trust, respect, fairness and honesty are our 

guiding principles.” 

TricorBraun has more than 500 employees 

worldwide and the approximately one-third 

of the company is owned by the employees. 

Additional information on TricorBraun is 

available at www.tricorbraun.com. 

Ken Kranzberg, chairman and Keith Strope, 

president and CEO at TricorBraun’s 

corporate headquarters. 


2 4 9

EXPRESS SCRIPTS 

HOLDING 

COMPANY 


250 

Prescription drugs have transformed how 

healthcare is practiced and deadly diseases 

can now be managed as chronic conditions. 

Specifically targeted biotech therapies have 

cured patients. A pill or injection can 

eliminate burdensome hospitalization. 

The cost of these breakthroughs 

has challenged 

the companies and health 

plans that provide a pharmacy 

benefit, and for the 

patients who continuously 

balance their health needs 

against other costs. 

To address these challenges, 

a small group of 

passionate healthcare advocates 

banded together nearly 

thirty years ago to start a 

company that today manages the pharmacy 

benefit for some 90 million Americans, is 

responsible for more than 1 billion prescriptions 

and has 30,000 employees located 

worldwide. Today, no company does more to 

control costs, drive out waste and improve 

patient outcomes. 

Express Scripts Holding Company has a 

straightforward enough mission: to make the 

use of prescription drugs safer and more 

affordable. But when you consider 

the complicated healthcare 

environment, you can understand 

the complexity of the task, 

and just how vital the company’s 

success has been in making 

pharmacy care more accessible 

and affordable. 

To appreciate where this 

Fortune 25 company is today, 

you have to consider how it 

was created. 

By the mid-1980s, healthcare 

management in the United States 

was ripe for change. Costs 

escalated sharply. Medicare and 

Medicaid programs faced spiraling 

increases, and with an aging 

population, there was no end 

in sight. Corporations were 

alarmed by the rising cost of 

health benefits, as employees 

paid physicians on a fee-for-service basis 

without constraints of price competition to 

hold down expenses. 

This change also generated a flood of prescriptions 

in pharmacies, which grappled with 

growing problems of paperwork and claims 

processing. At the same time, business began 

to investigate new options aimed at controlling 

healthcare expenditures—PPOs and HMOs. 

Sanus Health Plan of St. Louis started in 

1985 by offering HMO services to 200,000 

members in five states. Needing drug coverage 

for their members, Sanus negotiated a 

relationship with a ninety store, three-state 

pharmacy chain, Medicare-Glaser Corporation. 

The Medicare-Glaser team proposed to 

do more than supply drugs by mail, a novel 

concept at the time. They also saw opportunities 

in managing the entire prescription 

drug benefit for clients. And so it was in 

1986 that a promising new company called 

Express Scripts was born. 

Over the next two decades, Express 

Scripts went from filling eleven prescriptions 

on its first day at a warehouse on Schuetz 

Road to processing more than 3.8 million 

prescriptions a day nationwide, including 

hundreds of thousands daily from its own 

home delivery pharmacies.

The company has a penchant for being 

inquisitive and acquisitive. Express Scripts 

has consistently challenged the status quo in 

pharmacy care with unconventional wisdom, 

taking behavioral science and applying it to 

healthcare to help drive lower costs and 

improve health outcomes. Express Scripts has 

grown with an eye toward the future of healthcare 

making significant acquisitions to become 

an industry leader with revenue of more than 

$100 billion. Over a ten year period, the size 

of the company doubled three times with 

the largest growth coming as a result of 

the company’s merger with Medco Health 

Solutions in 2012. It combined the industry’s 

two leading companies into a new entity 

that has even greater capabilities to control 

pharmacy costs and improve health outcomes. 

With each acquisition, Express Scripts 

grew locally in St. Louis (the company now 

employs 4,500 people here) and nationally. 

Express Scripts entered a unique partnership 

with the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 

2006 to build its headquarters on the UMSL 

campus. The company’s decision to expand 

over the years in North County has served as 

a catalyst for economic development. The 

modern buildings that host employees today 

are a far cry from the company’s humble 

beginnings, where Post-It notes were a hot 

commodity and masking tape on the floor 

marked workspace borders. 

With thousands of clients—the companies, 

labor unions, health plans and government 

agencies that offer pharmacy benefits—and 

tens of millions of members, Express Scripts 

is at the epicenter of the healthcare landscape, 

and has unprecedented opportunities to drive 

meaningful improvements in care. 

Express Scripts combines its leadership 

in behavioral science, actionable data and 

clinical specialization to help drive better 

decisions and healthier outcomes. In addition, 

the company’s mail order pharmacies 

conveniently deliver thousands of prescriptions 

each day to people across the country. 

It is the safest, most cost-effective way to 

access medications for chronic diseases like 

high cholesterol, high blood pressure and 

diabetes. With more than 4,000 pharmacists 

across the company, Express Scripts is also 

able to provide specialized care to patients 

in a way that other pharmacies cannot. 

In addition to its clinical expertise, the 

company’s philanthropy has helped deserving 

organizations do even more to help underserved 

and underprivileged St. Louisans get 

the assistance they need. From financial support 

of initiatives in science, technology, engineering 

and mathematics to volunteering time 

for worthy causes, Express Scripts employees 

play a broad role in the local community. 

Over nearly three decades, a great deal has 

changed in healthcare, but the need for 

Express Scripts’ expertise has remained the 

same. The company stands well prepared 

for continued growth and to be a part of the 

St. Louis landscape for years to come. 


2 5 1

ST. LOUIS 

ECONOMIC 

DEVELOPMENT 

PARTNERSHIP 

St. Louis Economic Development Partnership 

is a major new regional partnership between 

the economic development teams of St. Louis 

County and the City of St. Louis. First 

announced in February 2013, the Partnership 

became effective August 1, 2013, following 

two years of behind-the-scenes discussion to 

find better ways of guiding the region’s joint 

efforts to support new and growing businesses. 

The Partnership creates a unified voice for 

the region, delivering services more efficiently 

while focusing on some of the most important 

areas of regional economic development: 

business development, entrepreneurship, 

international trade and business finance. 

“St. Louis Economic Development Partnership 

reflects the sentiment that our citizens and 

business community alike have championed 

for many years,” said Charlie A. Dooley, county 

executive for St. Louis County. “It focuses 

on greater collaboration between the city and 

county as a way to propel our region forward.” 

“We are enthusiastic that this collaboration 

makes us more effective and raises our national 

and global reputation,” said Mayor Francis 

Slay of the City of St. Louis. “By projecting 

one voice and making it easier to interact with 

our region, St. Louis Economic Development 

Partnership better positions us to attract new 

companies and investment in St. Louis.” 

Denny Coleman, previously president and 

CEO of St. Louis County Economic Council, 

serves as chief executive officer of the 

new agency. Rodney Crim, formerly the 

executive director of St. Louis Development 

Corporation, serves as president. Ten staff 

members from St. Louis Development 

Corporation joined the staff of St. Louis 

County Economic Council to form St. Louis 

Economic Development Partnership. The 

Partnership is headquartered in Clayton and 

serves the city and county of St. Louis. 

In an interview with a local newspaper, 

both County Executive Dooley and Mayor Slay 

emphasized that the new agency is a way to 

think regionally. 

“Boundaries will not define us. The 

Partnership brings us closer together and 

makes a difference in the St. Louis region. 

That’s what I’m excited about,” Dooley said. 

“When you combine friends working together, 

you enhance what you already have. So the 

municipalities in St. Louis County are going 

to do even better than they’ve done before.” 


252

“It’s about St. Louis County attracting business 

to the county, or St. Louis city trying 

to drive them to the city,” Slay said. “We’re 

working together to make sure that business 

lands in St. Louis. And whether its city or 

county, we all benefit. It’s a regional economy, 

and we have to stop competing against each 

other. We need to work together to make sure 

we land more businesses here. 

“The ultimate goal of the partnership is to 

grow the St. Louis region, to create jobs and 

opportunity and to create entrepreneurship as 

one,” said Dooley. 

In one of its first initiatives to attract new 

business, St. Louis Economic Development 

Partnership has embarked on the first-ever 

St. Louis City/County economic development 

strategic plan. This strategic planning process 

convenes St. Louis’ top economic development 

stakeholders and experts, elected officials, 

business leaders, young professionals 

and diverse community leaders to devise a 

shared agenda for business growth and 

development that advances a strong and 

prosperous regional economy. 

The St. Louis Economic Development 

Partnership provides a broader range of services 

than most agencies of its kind, boosting 

innovation and entrepreneurship, attracting 

and retaining companies, increasing the 

region’s international reach, and revitalization. 

The partnership has become a key facilitator 

of regional growth for businesses and 

communities throughout the St. Louis area. 


2 5 3

WELLS FARGO 

ADVISORS, 

LLC 

Wells Fargo Advisors LLC, the nation’s third 

largest brokerage firm, is part of the Wealth 

Brokerage and Retirement Division of Wells 

Fargo & Company, a diversified financial services 

company providing banking, insurance, 

investments, mortgage and consumer and 

commercial finance. St. Louis-based Wells 

Fargo Advisors is the largest brokerage firm 

headquartered outside New York. 

With $1.4 trillion in client assets as of 

December 31, 2013, Wells Fargo Advisors 

provides investment advice and guidance to 

clients through 15,280 full-service financial 

advisors and 3,328 licensed bankers. This 

vast network of advisors serves investors 

through locations in all fifty states and the 

District of Columbia. Advisors work with 

clients to understand their needs and life 

goals and help them develop individual 

investment plans and investment portfolios 

that are easy to understand and monitor. As 

part of Wells Fargo & Company, Wells Fargo 

Advisors has the ability to draw on extensive 

experience and products across the company 

to satisfy clients’ investment needs and help 

them succeed financially. 

Wells Fargo Advisors draws on a proud 

and colorful history that began in 1852 when 

Henry Wells and William G. Fargo founded 

the legendary Wells Fargo Company in New 

York City, with locations in San Francisco and 

Sacramento, California. 

In 1857, Wells Fargo joined other express 

companies to form the Overland Mail 

Company, establishing regular twice-a-week 

mail service between St. Louis and San 

Francisco. Prior to establishment of that 

stage line, communications east and west was 

twice a month by steamship. 

From April 1860 to October 1861, daring 

young horseback riders relayed mail across 

nearly 2,000 miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, 

to Sacramento, California, in only ten days. 

In its final months, the famed Pony Express 

became part of the stage lines’ U.S. Mail 

contracts. The Wells Fargo-run Overland Mail 

Company operated the Pony Express from 

California to Salt Lake City. 


254

Wells Fargo Advisors is the heir to many 

of the nation’s most respected brokerage 

firms, which merged over a period of many 

years to form the current brokerage firm. 

Predecessor organizations include St. Louisbased 

A. G. Edwards. In 2008, A. G. Edwards 

was acquired by Wachovia and merged 

with Wachovia Securities. The combined 

firm adopted as its headquarters the 

A. G. Edwards headquarters in St. Louis. 

At the time of the combination, several 

hundred Wachovia Securities employees 

moved to St. Louis. Wachovia, in turn, was 

acquired in 2009 by Wells Fargo & Company 

and the combined brokerage organization 

was renamed Wells Fargo Advisors. 

Wells Fargo Advisors is now one of the 

largest employers in the St. Louis area, with 

more than 5,000 team members. While the 

brokerage firm is the largest Wells Fargo 

business represented in the area, other Wells 

Fargo business units, including wholesale 

banking, commercial banking, community 

banking and Wells Fargo Mortgage are also 

present on the Wells Fargo Advisors campus 

at Market and Jefferson Streets in St. Louis. 

Wells Fargo is an active and engaged 

corporate citizen of St. Louis and other cities 

and towns across the United States. 

In 2013, Wells Fargo & Company contributed 

$275.5 million to 18,500 nonprofits, 

marking the fifth consecutive year of more than 

$200 million in total annual corporate giving. 

The company’s community investments 

included $81.6 million to 8,000 educational 

programs and schools around the U.S. 

and $84 million in grants to nonprofits 

focused on community development in 

distressed communities, including affordable 

housing, homeownership counseling, financial 

education, workforce development and 

job creation. 

Last year, Wells Fargo employees across the 

U.S. devoted 1.69 million volunteer hours in 

service to communities and Missouri ranked 

fourth four among all fifty states with the 

highest number of Wells Fargo team members 

recording volunteer hours. 

Wells Fargo was also recognized in 2013 

for its commitment to environmental stewardship 

by winning the St. Louis Business Journal’s 

“Heroes of the Planet” award. In addition, 

Wells Fargo was selected by its team members 

as one of the region’s “Top Workplaces” in an 

annual survey by the St. Louis Post Dispatch. 

Wells Fargo has partnered with the 

Missouri Council on economic Education 

to add the Hands On Banking course to 

the social studies curriculum at all eleven 

St. Louis public middle schools. 

The company and its employees also 

support the St. Louis Public School District 

with more than 200 mentoring and tutoring 

partnerships and also supported initiatives 

with the United Way of Greater St. Louis, 

Washington University, Big Brothers/Big 

Sisters of Eastern Missouri and the Susan G. 

Komen Race for the cure, among others. 

To learn more about Wells Fargo, please 

visit www.wellsfargoadvisors.com. 


2 5 5

SCOTTRADE, INC. 

Right: Scottrade Founder and CEO Rodger 

Riney’s fascination with the stock market 

started during his childhood with a few 

shares of stock he received as a gift. He 

founded Scottrade in 1980 and remains 

active in the firm’s day-to-day management. 

Below: Scottrade, Inc. has the largest branch 

network among online investing firms with 

more than 500 across the country. 

Scottrade’s mission is to improve lives by 

helping people overcome barriers to 

financial success. 


256 

Scottrade, Inc., may not have existed 

without a gift that Kirkwood native Rodger 

Riney received from his grandparents. That 

gift, shares of Bethlehem Steel stock, sparked 

in him a lifelong interest in the 

stock market. 

Celebrating its thirty-fifth 

anniversary in 2015, Scottrade is 

the online investing services 

company with the largest branch 

network. While the privatelyheld 

firm now has locations in 

forty-eight states, Rodger’s story 

and the Scottrade story is rooted 

in the Greater St. Louis area. 

Rodger founded Scottrade on 

his belief of “doing the right 

thing” for clients, associates 

and his community, which comes from 

his Midwestern roots and has been 

firmly engrained within Scottrade’s history 

and culture. 

Rodger graduated from Kirkwood High 

School in 1963 and spent his Christmas 

breaks at another St. Louis financial stalwart, 

Edward D. Jones & Co. After graduating 

from the University of Missouri–Columbia, he 

turned down higher-paying jobs to work fulltime 

for Jones. He spent the next ten years 

there, eventually becoming general partner. 

In 1980, as the discount brokerage concept 

gained momentum, Rodger and a partner 

formed Scottsdale Securities in Scottsdale, 

Arizona. In 1985, Rodger bought out his 

partner, moved the headquarters back to 

St. Louis and reduced commissions to 

prices unheard of at the time. His focus on 

driving commissions even lower led to 

higher trading volume, which 

kept the business growing. 

In 1996, Scottrade.com was 

launched, making Scottrade one 

of the first financial services 

companies to offer online stock 

trading. Soon after, Scottsdale 

Securities changed its name 

to Scottrade. 

Rodger remains active in the 

day-to-day management of the 

firm as it continues to focus on 

better serving traders, investors 

and registered investment advisors. 

The firm’s success is owed 

largely to the hard working 

people committed to maintaining 

the Scottrade culture, built on 

St. Louis values. 

So here is to you St. Louis on 

your 250th. Thank you for supporting 

American innovation and 

building a wealth of talent here in 

town, which many have labeled 

“The Wall Street of the Midwest.”

Above: Scottrade Founder and CEO Rodger 

Riney rings the NASDAQ closing bell 

in 2005. 

Left: Scottrade’s powerful technology with 

advanced charting and trading features 

ensures that clients are able to make 

quick decisions and take advantage of 

opportunities. The company relies on 

client usability testing to ensure its trading 

platforms are not only easy to use, but will 

also help them achieve their goals. 


2 5 7

ANHEUSER-BUSCH 

EMPLOYEES’ 

CREDIT UNION 


258 

Anheuser-Busch Employees’ Credit Union 

and its community division, American Eagle 

Credit Union, is an independent financial 

institution chartered by the State of Missouri 

and owned and operated by its members. 

The Credit Union was founded in 1939 

with only eight members and $55 in assets. 

Under the leadership of its first manager, 

Robert ‘Bob’ Hood and first president, 

Thomas ‘Tom’ Allen, the organization grew 

to 700 members and $37,000 in assets in 

only two years. Today, the Credit Union 

has 114,000 members, $1.3 billion in assets 

and is the second largest credit union in the 

St. Louis Metropolitan area. 

Originally, the Credit Union was developed 

to serve the financial needs of the employees 

and retirees of Anheuser-Busch companies, 

wholly-owned subsidiaries and select distributors, 

along with the immediate family of the 

members. The founders had three basic goals: 

(1) Provide credit to their co-workers at 

reasonable interest rates, 

(2) Encourage thrift through 

systematic savings, and 

(3) Offer sound financial 

advice. The organization’s 

core purpose continues to 

be to help its members 

achieve financial success 

through the core values 

of fairness, trust, ethical 

behavior, dignity and 

respect, excellence and a 

desire to serve. 

In the early days, the Credit Union was run 

by an all volunteer staff. Today, the staff 

totals more than 350 skilled professionals, 

led by J. David ‘Dave’ Osborn, who has been 

CEO since 1992. Other members of the 

senior management team include Executive 

Vice President Daniel Vogler; Senior Vice 

President–Finance Ron Kampwerth; Senior 

Vice President–Marketing Pier Y. Alsup; 

Senior Vice President–Operations Jack Fox; 

and Senior Vice President–Lending James 

Barrett. The Credit Union has an all-volunteer 

Board of Directors and both elected and 

appointed committees. 

Anheuser-Busch Employees’ Credit Union 

was one of the first Credit Unions to offer 

money market accounts and FHA home loans 

in Missouri. Today, the Credit Union is full 

service and offers a wide range of financial 

products such as free checking, consumer and 

real estate loans, business account services, 

savings and investments, as well as mobile 

banking and other online services. 

The Credit Union has always encouraged 

financial literacy for its members and the 

community and offers college planning seminars 

and financial education classes for 

members and non-members of all ages. 

These programs are available for an array of 

organizations, including Junior Achievement, 

private and public elementary schools and 

other community groups. College scholarships 

are awarded each year to young adult 

members. The Credit Union has also designed 

special programs to help make it easier and 

fun for young investors to begin saving and 

make the most of their funds. 

The Credit Union sponsors and supports 

several local community events and organizations 

such as the Boys Club, Kingdom House, 

Saint Louis University Lupus and Juvenile 

Arthritis Research, Homes for our Troops, 

United Way and many others. 

In 1962 the Anheuser-Busch Employees’ 

Credit Union occupied the Old Shipping 

Office on Broadway in South St. Louis City. 

The main office is now located at 1001 Lynch 

in South St. Louis’ historic Soulard area. The 

Credit Union now has twenty-eight locations 

around the nation, with eleven in the St. Louis 

metropolitan area.

Anheuser-Busch continues a tradition of 

brewing excellence and commitment to 

St. Louis! For more than 160 years, 

Anheuser-Busch and its world-class brewmasters 

have carried on a legacy of brewing 

America’s most popular beers. Starting with 

the finest, all-natural ingredients sourced 

from Anheuser-Busch’s family of Americanbased 

growers, every batch is crafted using 

the same exacting standards and timehonored 

traditions passed down through 

generations of proud Anheuser-Busch brewmasters 

and employees. 

Best known for its fine American-style 

lagers, the company’s beers lead numerous 

segments of the U.S. beer market. Anheuser- 

Busch operates twelve local breweries to ensure 

consumers have the freshest beer possible. 

The brewer’s flagship St. Louis Brewery 

traces its roots back to the Bavarian Brewery, 

which was opened in1852. In 1860, Eberhard 

Anheuser acquired the brewery and changed 

its name to E. Anheuser & Co. Soon after, 

Anheuser was joined in the business by his 

son-in-law, Adolphus Busch, and a legacy 

was born. 

With the help of his friend Carl Conrad, 

Busch would introduce Budweiser in 1876. 

Through Busch’s business acumen and 

several key innovations, including refrigerated 

railcars and pasteurization, Budweiser 

would quickly grow to be one of the first 

national beer brands. The time-honored 

recipe remains the same and is the only beer 

aged twice as long to achieve the perfect 

balance of flavor and refreshment. 

Through the years, the St. Louis Brewery 

has seen continued growth and currently sits 

on a 100 acre site. Its rich architecture and 

heritage have made the brewery one of the 

most popular tourist attractions in the region. 

The brewery has three national historic landmarks: 

the historic brewhouse (1891/1892), 

the Budweiser Clydesdales’ stable (1885) and 

the Old Lyons School House (1868). 

The brewhouse is one of the most iconic 

structures in the brewing industry. For generations, 

it has been meticulously cared for 

and while it remains true to its historic architecture, 

it is one of the most technologicallyadvanced 

brewhouses in the world. 

The Clydesdales’ stable was built by Busch 

in 1885 and housed the family’s horses and 

carriages when they lived on the property. 

Currently, the stables are the home of the 

Budweiser Clydesdale Midwest hitch and are one 

of the most popular stops on the brewery tour. 

The Old Lyons School House, where 

Adolphus Busch’s children attended school, 

was named after General Nathaniel Lyon, 

commander of Union forces in Missouri during 

the Civil War. It was sold to the brewery 

in 1907. The building served as the company’s 

main administrative building until 1982. 

Additionally, the Bevo Building, originally 

opened in 1918, is one of the world’s most stateof-the-art 

bottling and packaging operations. 

In 2008, Anheuser-Busch and InBev 

combined to become Anheuser-Busch InBev. 

St. Louis remains the North America zone 

headquarters of the home of Budweiser. 

ANHEUSER- 

BUSCH 


2 5 9

CONCORDIA 

PUBLISHING 

HOUSE 

Top: From the printing press to the everadvancing 

integration of tablet technology, 

CPH has published resources for church, 

home, and school for more than 140 years. 

Bottom: Dr. Bruce Kintz, Jonathan Schultz, 

and the Honorable Mayor Francis G. Slay 

stand with the Malcolm Baldrige National 

Quality Award. CPH is the only Christian 

publisher to have ever received the award. 


260 

From humble beginnings, nationally-recognized 

Concordia Publishing House has been a 

staple to the St. Louis community for more 

than 140 years. It all began in the first half of 

the nineteenth century before CPH’s cornerstone 

was even laid. In a quest for freedom of 

worship and church government, German 

Lutherans immigrated to America, many settling 

the Mississippi Valley. Lutheran churches, 

schools, and a seminary were formed, and a 

Lutheran church body grew. In response to a 

growing need for doctrinally-sound church 

resources, Concordia Publishing House (CPH) 

began on September 11, 1869. 

Much of the material that came off the first 

Concordia press was in German—preserving 

the cultural identity of Lutheran church 

members as they assimilated into an American 

society still trying to find itself. By 1880, CPH 

undertook the monumental task of issuing 

a modern German edition of Martin Luther’s 

works, with the St. Louis Edition receiving the 

Gold Medal for “excellence in book printing 

and typography” at the 1904 World’s Fair. 

As Lutheran churches and schools flourished 

at the turn of the century, so did the 

need for educational resources in English. 

CPH developed materials for Sunday School, 

Day School, Vacation Bible School, and Bible 

studies for Lutherans and other Christian 

denominations nationwide. The purpose was 

clear: CPH exists to strengthen pastors 

and congregations in their proclamation of 

the Gospel of Jesus Christ by publishing 

resources that are faithful to the Scriptures 

and the Lutheran Confessions. 

Through the years, Concordia 

Publishing House has produced 

more than 8,000 products. 

Notably in 1912, CPH began 

publishing The Lutheran Witness, 

the voice of the Lutheran church 

body. First published in 1937, 

today Portals of Prayer has 

800,000 subscribers and is also 

available in Spanish. CPH is well 

known for publishing Bibles. 

The Concordia Bible with Notes 

was published in 1947, leading 

to the 1986 publication of the 

Concordia Self-Study Bible. More 

recently, The Lutheran Study Bible 

was published in 2009 and is 

also available as a Kindle Edition. 

From the printing press to 

the ever-advancing integration 

of tablet technology, CPH is on 

the cutting edge of the publishing 

industry with digital media, 

e-books, and church management 

software. After receiving 

the Malcolm Baldrige National 

Quality Award in 2011, President 

and CEO Dr. Bruce Kintz said 

it best, “With God’s grace, CPH 

has achieved a level of excellence that few 

major corporations realize. As a Christian 

organization we are humbled by our 

achievements and as a thriving publishing 

house we are proud to represent both 

innovation and sustainability in this everchanging 

marketplace.”

Vi-Jon is a company whose name may not 

sound familiar to some, but it has been a part 

of the rich fabric of St. Louis for more than 

a hundred years. Founded in St. Louis in 

1908, Vi-Jon, which was called the Peroxide 

Specialty Company until 1933, was started 

by John Burgess Brunner and his wife, Viola. 

After a brief move to Cincinnati early on, 

the two brought the company back to its 

original home in St. Louis in 1912 where it 

has remained ever since, manufacturing 

private label health and beauty care products 

for retailers nationwide. 

The original Vi-Jon facility, still in use 

today, is located along the Wabash Railroad 

tracks just north of Skinker at 6300 Etzel 

Avenue. Set in the middle of the ever-growing 

St. Louis community, this area was used as 

the picnic grounds for the 1904 World’s Fair 

before construction of the plant. 

St. Louis proved to be the 

right home for Vi-Jon and, 

by 1942, the company’s sales 

exceeded $1.1 million, and about 

70 St. Louisans were employed 

by the company. In the 1960s, 

Vi-Jon began to move into the 

private label business, making 

products under various stores’ 

names rather than the Vi-Jon name 

itself. This change in business 

strategy led to sales of more than $5 million 

by 1979 with a team of 100 employees. 

By 1984, Vi-Jon had become the largest 

private label manufacturer of mouthwash, 

with nail polish remover and petroleum jelly 

close behind. As Vi-Jon continued to grow, 

a second manufacturing facility was added 

off Page Avenue, just a few miles away from 

the facility at Etzel. In 1992, anti-bacterial 

soap production began, which was the 

precursor to Vi-Jon’s popular Germ-X line of 

hand sanitizers. 

In 2006, Vi-Jon and Tennessee-based 

manufacturer Cumberland-Swan merged, 

instantly doubling the size of the company. 

With annual sales of approximately 

$500 million, five 

manufacturing and distribution 

centers and more than 1,300 

employees in St. Louis and 

Smyrna, Tennessee, Vi-Jon celebrated 

its 100th anniversary in 

2008. Today, the teamwork, 

innovation and success continue 

as the company strives to provide 

the best service, quality and cost 

in the industry. 

Throughout all the changes 

and growth Vi-Jon has seen 

during its 100 year plus history, 

St. Louis has always been at the 

center of it all. It is where Vi-Jon 

started and where two manufacturing 

plants and the corporate office remain 

today. It is also where Vi-Jon gives back; 

supporting local causes that center around 

family, education, health and well-being. 

Vi-Jon is proud to be headquartered in 

St. Louis and is looking forward to another 

100 years in this great city. 

Additional information on Vi-Jon may be 

found at www.vijon.com. 

VI-JON 


2 6 1

SCHNUCK 

MARKETS, INC. 

BOTTOM, LEFT: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY 

OF BILL GREENBLATT PHOTOGRAPHY. 

BOTTOM, RIGHT: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY 

OF ZBAREN ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY. 

Just like the delicious produce for which 

the company is known, Schnuck Markets, Inc. 

is truly homegrown. 

The family-owned company has grown 

with the City of St. Louis, even sharing an 

anniversary year! In 2014, Schnucks celebrates 

seventy-five years of serving customers. 

A shared vision continues to link Schnucks 

and St. Louis now and into the future. 

Siblings Craig, Scott, Terry, Mark, Todd, 

Nancy and cousin, Stephanie, were born into 

the business. Modeling their fathers, Donald 

and Edward respectively, they have grown 

to be strong merchants and philanthropists 

dedicated to St. Louis owning its place among 

other world-class cities. 

They hold precious their grandparents’ 

legacy. Anna Donovan (Mom) and Edwin 

(Pop) Schnuck were driven by a strong sense 

of family and community as well as the food 

traditions that bonded them together. 

With the purchase of a 1,000 square foot confectionery 

in 1939, Schnucks’ partnership with 

St. Louis was born. It continues today with 100 

stores and 15,000 teammates in five states. As 

the company’s hometown, St. Louis has seen the 

company through expansions, acquisitions and 

construction. In return, Schnucks has been a 

strong partner in St. Louis’ revitalization efforts. 

In 2006, The DESCO Group, the Schnuck 

family realty company, renovated The Old 

Post Office. The historic building is now an 

office center drawing enterprise into the 

heart of the city. Eyes ever on innovation, 

Schnucks unveiled a new store concept in 

2009—Culinaria, A Schnucks Market. The 

urban prototype serving downtown residents, 

workers and visitors is a testament to the 

power of city partnerships. Schnucks also 

operates eight more full-service supermarkets 

in St Louis and a total of sixty-eight across 

the region. 

As customers’ needs change, Schnucks 

continues to reinvent itself. It has come a long 

way from its humble start as has St. Louis. 

Today, the company that began with Mom and 

Pop and one delivery boy is the area’s eighth 

largest employer with 11,000 teammates. 

And St. Louis is a growing city, home to 

successful regional and global companies that 

are drawing new opportunities each year. 

So, here’s to you St. Louis! Here’s to 250 

years of igniting advancements in business, 

culture, enterprise, education, science, medicine, 

sports, community attractions, arts and 

nurturing the entrepreneurial spirit! 

Thanks to you and all your citizens for 

making it possible for a family-owned grocer 

to celebrate seventy-five years and for enabling 

its third generation to achieve even more than 

their grandparents could have imagined. 

Thank you for holding up your promise of 

a good life to those families who have been 

proud to call St. Louis “home.” 


262

For more than a century, 

business owners and human 

resource staffs across Missouri and 

Illinois have depended on AAIM 

Employers’ Association for a wide 

range of services from supervisor 

training, to background checks, 

to on-site HR support, to affirmative 

action plans. Membership 

in AAIM also provides unlimited 

calls to HR experts, online resources, and 

access to survey data, and opportunities for 

business leaders to network with their peers. 

AAIM was founded in 1898 as the 

St. Louis branch of the National Metal Trades 

Association. The new association brought 

together the leaders of the metals, mining, 

manufacturing, and engineering industries. 

The founding objectives were to join forces 

and share ideas, communicate with one 

another, and resolve common problems such 

as skills training. The founders realized that 

they were stronger by banding together and 

that their association membership enhanced 

their ability to grow their respective markets. 

Today, AAIM still believes in: 

• Supporting local businesses with critical HR 

tools and advice, so they become stronger, 

more competitive, and stable employers. 

• Providing professional networking events, 

so that members become more efficient 

and productive, stay connected, and 

provide best practices for their employees. 

• Keeping employers current with business 

trends and communicating timely information 

on employment law. 

• Providing a wide variety of public and 

customized training solutions so members 

can develop high-functioning employees 

as well as, facilitate personal growth. 

Currently, AAIM serves 1,600 employers, 

representing 360,000 employees in Missouri 

and Illinois. The association provides 70,000 

background checks and drug screenings 

annually, conducts 26 annual Roundtables 

for 300 plus participants, and responds to 

7,000 annual Member Answer Center inquiries. 

AAIM offers a number of services that 

address the compliance and people needs 

of the HR community: HR consulting, 

compensation analysis, employee opinion 

and engagement surveys, talent acquisition, 

HR supervisory training, organizational 

development, and Affirmative Action Plans. 

AAIM has become a ‘one-stop shared 

services experience’ for business leaders 

and human resources managers. Members 

may take advantage of the buying power, 

pooled resources, and networking/idea 

sharing provided by the association. 

One of the fastest growing services provided 

by AAIM is background checking and drug 

screening. Many employers now believe it is 

better to spend the time and energy upfront 

to thoroughly screen potential candidates 

with criminal checks, reference checks, and 

drug screens. AAIM also specializes in pre-hire 

assessments to insure that candidates have the 

appropriate skills, attitude, and personality 

for the position. These tests range from basic 

assessments to comprehensive profiling. 

The St. Louis office of AAIM Employers’ 

Association is located at 1600 South 

Brentwood Boulevard. For more information, 

visit their website at www.aaimea.org. 

AAIM 

EMPLOYERS’ 

ASSOCIATION 

Above: AAIM has provided professional 

training and education, peer-to-peer 

roundtables, and networking opportunities 

to area employers since the founding of the 

association in 1898. Our ability to create 

and deploy practical solutions throughout 

decades of changing business trends, 

concepts, and initiatives, is the one constant 

for our members. Here, AAIM conducts a 

“Performance Appraisal” training course 

attended by supervisors and human 

resource managers from various 

St. Louis employers, in 1977. 

Below: The 2013 AAIM Leadership 

Conference attracted over 350 people, 

representing 128 organizations from 

Missouri and Illinois. The annual conference 

is designed to help area business leaders and 

HR professionals achieve organizational 

excellence by resolving these common 

challenges: leadership development, 

engagement, culture, talent acquisition, 

compensation, continuous learning, 

and healthcare reform. 


2 6 3

COMMERCE 

BANK 

Top: In 2009 the Commerce Bank banking 

center in O’Fallon, Missouri, was the first 

bank branch in Missouri to receive 

LEED ® certification. 

Above: Commerce Bancshares Chairman 

David Kemper rings the opening bell 

at NASDAQ, New York, during analyst 

presentations there on October 9, 2003. 


264 

Commerce Bancshares, Inc., the parent 

company of Commerce Bank, provides a full 

range of financial products to consumer and 

commercial customers. Commerce’s customer 

promise—We Ask, Listen and Solve—is not 

just a brand, but a corporate focus. 

Commerce Bank of St. Louis opened for 

business in the St. Louis area in 1969, but can 

trace its roots all the way back to 1865 

when Francis Reid Long founded the Kansas 

City Savings Association. 

Under the leadership 

of Dr. W. S. Wood, the 

bank was rechartered 

in 1882 under the 

name National Bank 

of Commerce and, by 

1900, was the largest 

bank west of Chicago, 

with deposits of $36 million. 

In 1906, Dr. Wood 

organized the Commerce 

Trust Company. 

Commerce has always 

been a leader in offering 

new products and the latest technology to 

its customers. In 1928 the bank began the 

first twenty-four hour transit department in 

the country, which helped speed up the 

transit of checks between banks and provided 

customers with faster access to their money. 

Commerce also began correspondent services, 

which allowed banks in smaller communities 

to turn to the larger banks for assistance in 

making large business loans. 

Commerce created the first full-scale 

international department in the Midwest in 

the 1960s. It was the first bank to expand 

in Missouri in the 1960s and became the 

first major credit card bank in the 1970s. 

Commerce Bancshares, Inc. was one of 

the first companies to be listed on NASDAQ 

when it was founded in 1971. 

In 1978, Commerce Bancshares, Inc., 

merged with Manchester Financial Corp., 

a St. Louis-based holding company. This 

merger made Commerce Bank the fourth 

largest banking entity in St. Louis. In 1983 

reorganization provided for the acquisition 

of County Tower Corporation and its 

subsidiaries and Commerce became the 

largest statewide banking company measured 

by number of banking offices. 

Today, Commerce operates more than 

200 branches in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, 

Oklahoma and Colorado, including fifty-four 

branches in the St. Louis area as well as 

commercial loan offices in Texas, Ohio, and 

Tennessee. Commerce is the third largest 

bank in St. Louis. 

As a member of the St. Louis community, 

Commerce is a key supporter of the 

United Way, the St. Louis Symphony 

Orchestra, Beyond Housing, the St. Louis 

Art Fair and numerous other organizations 

devoted to strengthening the region and 

helping youth succeed. Community Service 

committees composed of employees help 

to identify several Commerce-sponsored 

volunteer opportunities. 

Operating as a ‘super-community bank,’ 

Commerce Bank has grown from $4 billion 

in assets in 1983 to $22 billion in 2013. 

The bank employs more than 1,200 in the 

St. Louis area and 4,700 throughout is eightstate 

region.

On December 9, 1878, a thirty-one year 

old journalist and Hungarian immigrant 

purchased a bankrupt newspaper entitled 

the St. Louis Dispatch, on the steps of the 

St. Louis Courthouse for $2,500. Three days 

later, he merged this newspaper with another 

local paper, the struggling Evening Post. This 

young journalist and immigrant was Joseph 

Pulitzer, and this unified newspaper became 

known as the St. Louis Post and Dispatch. 

A commitment to progress, justice and 

accuracy were at the core of Pulitzer’s 

journalistic devotion. The newspaper made 

itself the talk of the town by exposing vice, 

corruption and the misdeeds of the wealthy. 

With the crusading spirit, Pulitzer reinvented 

the American newspaper. After poor health 

and failing eyesight forced Pulitzer to retire 

from active management of the paper, he 

continued to insure that his ideals were not 

forgotten. In addition to turning the paper 

over to his son, also named Joseph, he 

developed the Pulitzer Prize, the top award 

for journalistic excellence. The St. Louis Post- 

Dispatch has won a total of eighteen of the 

esteemed awards. 

Under the Pulitzer’s leadership, the Post- 

Dispatch reached some of the most prominent 

milestones in the history of journalism 

including; the first St. Louis newspaper to 

produce a color comic section and photographs; 

the first newspaper to report the sinking 

of the Titanic; and the first to use 

four-color reproduction in a newspaper. 

After 127 years in the newspaper 

publishing business, the Pulitzer family 

sold the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and all 

Pulitzer properties to Lee Enterprises 

on June 3, 2005. Although the sale 

brought an end to the Pulitzer publishing 

dynasty, the traditions and ideals of 

the Pulitzer name remain intact within 

Lee Enterprises. The Post-Dispatch is 

largest of fifty daily newspapers owned 

by Lee Enterprises, along with rapidly 

growing online services and more 

than 300 weekly newspapers and 

specialty publications. 

Today, the St. Louis 

Post-Dispatch is read 

by nearly 1 million 

St. Louis adults each 

week and combined 

with STLtoday.com, 

ranks the sixth bestreaching 

media combination 

in the largest 

U.S. markets. Seven out 

of ten St. Louis adults 

turn to the Post-Dispatch 

each week in print or 

digital form. As the largest 

news-gathering organization 

in the area, they are the dominate 

source for local news, 

information and advertising 

across a variety of multimedia 

platforms and brands, 

that enhancing the communities of the 

St. Louis metropolitan area. Each day, they 

work to serve the public interest by connecting 

people to credible information whenever and 

however they seek it. 

ST. LOUIS 

POST-DISPATCH 

Left: The St. Louis Post and Dispatch, 

December 12, 1878. 

Below: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 

April 19, 1912. 


2 6 5

EDWARD JONES 

Top: Edward Jones’ St. Louis headquarters. 

Above: Edward Jones financial 

advisors deliver personal service to 

individual investors. 


266 

Since its humble beginnings in 1922, 

Edward Jones has stood for one thing: doing 

what is right for investors. That involves a 

steadfast commitment to personal service, a 

long-term investment philosophy, working in 

partnership and respect for individuals. 

Throughout its 

ninety-year history, 

the firm has called 

St. Louis home, 

even as it expanded 

to serve investors 

throughout North 

America. It was 

Edward Jones that 

broke tradition in 

the 1940s and 

moved beyond metropolitan 

areas to 

serve investors in 

rural communities who otherwise had no 

access to personal financial service. It was 

Edward Jones that pioneered the one-financial 

advisor branch model in communities across 

the country so financial advisors could work 

and live near the investors they serve. The 

firm’s first use of technology, a telegraph wire 

from Pueblo, Colorado, to the St. Louis home 

office, served simply to ensure that investors 

in Colorado had quick access to the Edward 

Jones information center and trading floor. It 

is still how the firm uses technology—as an 

enhancement to, rather than a replacement 

for, personal one-on-one service. 

From an investment standpoint, 

Edward Jones remains highly committed 

to the well-being of its clients. 

The firm embraces a long-term, quality-oriented 

investment philosophy. 

Investment fads come and go, but 

the firm’s investment philosophy— 

invest in quality, diversify your holdings, 

and retain a long-term perspective—has 

stayed the same. This helps 

clients build an investment strategy 

with the potential to weather various 

market environments. 

This investment philosophy has 

stood the test of time. In 1956, 

Edward Jones was one of more than 

285 financial services firms participating 

in the initial public offering for 

Ford Motor Company common stock. 

Due to the ever-changing and competitive 

nature of the financial services 

industry, only a dozen of those firms 

remain, among them Edward Jones. 

Today, Edward Jones is the only privately 

held investment firm on Wall Street. As such, 

the firm is solely responsible to its clients 

rather than to stockholders. 

More than 12,000 Edward Jones financial 

advisors work directly with nearly 7 million 

clients in the United States and Canada to 

understand their personal goals—from college 

savings to retirement to leaving a legacy—and 

create long-term investment solutions that 

emphasize a well-balanced portfolio and a 

buy-and-hold strategy. The firm embraces 

the importance of building long-term, faceto-face 

relationships with clients, helping 

them to understand and make sense of the 

investment options available today. 

Edward Jones is headquartered in St. Louis. 

The firm’s website is www.edwardjones.com, 

and www.careers.edwardjones.com is the 

recruiting website.

Residence Inn by Marriott St. Louis 

Downtown sums up its goal neatly in a 

unique mission statement that declares, 

“Our passion is to provide service so 

memorable our guests tell stories about it.” 

The stories—and compliments—have 

been many since the extended stay facility 

opened at 525 South Jefferson Avenue in 

2006. Visitors love the way they can make 

themselves at home in one of the 188 rooms 

featuring kitchens, complimentary Internet 

access, and 70 cable channels. Other conveniences 

include concierge services and Market, 

as well as a hot buffet breakfast. Guests also 

enjoy the twenty-four hour fitness center, 

sport court, indoor pool, hot tub, fully 

equipped business center and lobby bar. 

Pets are welcome at Residence Inn and 

guests appreciate the secure parking facility. 

has sixty employees, including many of 

the hotel’s original team members. 

The hotel participates in the St. Louis 

Convention and Hospitality Commission’s 

annual Hospitality Hero award ceremony, 

which recognizes and rewards managers and 

hospitality associates for a job well done. 

Most of the winners have gone above and 

beyond the expectations of a client or guest. 

Residence Inn has been honored for six 

“Super Hero” award winners and numerous 

“Hero” award winners over the years. 

RESIDENCE INN 

BY MARRIOTT 

ST. LOUIS 

DOWNTOWN 

If you are planning an event, Residence 

Inn offers more than 1,600 square feet 

of meeting space consisting of small 

meeting rooms equipped with the latest 

audiovisual equipment. 

The family-friendly Residence Inn is convenient 

to Chaifetz Arena, Busch Stadium, 

Edward Jones Dome, City Museum, Peabody 

Opera House, Scottrade Center, Fox Theatre 

and many other attractions. Getting to nearby 

attractions is a breeze with a complimentary 

area shuttle that operates within a three 

mile radius. 

Residence Inn by Marriott St. Louis 

Downtown is the leading brand in extended 

stay. The hotel is owned and operated 

by EQUIS Hospitality headquartered in 

Brentwood, Missouri. General Manager 

Robert Swehla opened the hotel in 2006 

and continues to lead the facility. The hotel 

Employees of the hotel are active in a 

number of community activities and EQUIS 

Hospitality is a partner of Rankin Jordan, a 

children’s hospital, and The Giving Tree, a 

seasonal charity that collects gifts for the 

Missouri Foster Care and Adoption Association. 

For reservations, or to learn more about 

Residence Inn St. Louis Downtown, check the 

website at www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/stlrdresidence-inn-st-louis-downtown. 


2 6 7

MARITZ 

Right: The Maritz Fenton headquarters— 

present day. 

Below: In the 1920s, Maritz resided in the 

Columbia Building at Eighth and Locust 

Streets in downtown St. Louis. 


268 

In 1894 thirty-one year-old jewelry 

engraver Edward Maritz went into business 

for himself and started the E. Maritz Jewelry 

Manufacturing Company, which he operated 

out of his home at 3213 Magnolia in 

St. Louis, Missouri. Maritz gradually 

built up his business by doing 

quality work and earning a solid 

reputation. At sixteen, James, his 

son, joined the company and 

helped his father establish offices 

in downtown St. Louis and other 

Midwestern cities, with a focus on 

importing Swiss watches for women. 

During WWI, pilots began wearing 

wristwatches and James started 

wearing them around St. Louis. 

Soon, Maritz was importing men’s 

wristwatches and they were a hit. 

But when the stock market crashed 

in 1929, demand for jewelry declined 

and the Maritz company came close 

to folding. James and his brother 

Lloyd began selling their merchandise 

to companies as sales awards. 

It was the birth of modern-day 

incentive programs. 

Since the Great Depression, Maritz 

has been operating as a sales and marketing 

services company, helping corporations 

understand, engage and motivate their people. 

The company has branched out, acquired 

and created new businesses, and now boasts a 

diverse portfolio, including Maritz Travel, 

Maritz Research, Maritz Loyalty Marketing, 

Maritz Motivation, Maritz Canada, and several 

other non-Maritz-branded companies. 

In 1968 the company moved from its 

Forest Park Boulevard location to its current 

headquarters in Fenton. Within the St. Louis 

community, Maritz is renowned for its highlyrecognizable 

campus off of I-44 just west of 

270, and the nation’s only private, enclosed 

walking bridge that spans a highway. 

Today, Maritz is a $1.2 billion dollar, familyowned 

company, employing approximately 

2,000 people in the St. Louis area and 3,500 

people worldwide. Steve Maritz currently 

serves as chairman and CEO, succeeding 

his father Bill Maritz who took over from 

his father James, Sr. Collectively, Maritz 

companies offer a wide-array of peoplefocused 

solutions, including sales incentive 

programs, employee rewards and recognition, 

marketing and customer satisfaction 

research, loyalty marketing campaigns, and 

meetings, events, and incentive trips. The 

company boasts long-term relationships 

with some of the world’s top companies 

in the automotive, hospitality, technology 

and financial industries, and is considered a 

leader in each of its industries. 

Helping Fortune 100 clients understand 

and motivate their employees, sales partners 

and customers, is both inspiring and thrilling 

for Maritz people, who tap into the latest 

human sciences, their own creativity and 

business acumen to build the best solutions 

for Maritz’ clients. The family atmosphere 

and Steve’s “work hard, have fun, get the 

job done” mantra have created a strong 

people-centered culture within the company. 

That people focus extends to Maritz’ corporate 

giving program, which strives to 

improve education in the communities we 

serve. Through financial support, employee 

service and Maritz’ people solutions and 

expertise, Maritz and its philanthropic partners 

empower people of all ages to reach their 

full potential.

Care-Tech ® Laboratories, Inc., a leader in 

non-toxic antiseptic technology, began nearly 

120 years ago in Sedalia, Missouri, as a 

manufacturer of Vermingo, the first liquid 

bug killer to replace the use of kerosene oil 

as an insect spray. 

The firm was first organized in 1895 by 

N. L. Worrell as the Worrell Manufacturing 

Company, and was purchased in 1905 by J. H. 

Rodes, who moved the business to St. Louis. 

The company’s first address was 112 South 

Main Street on the Mississippi River, a site 

that later became the famous Gateway Arch. 

Worrell Manufacturing was merged in 1923 

with Germo Manufacturing Company, which 

produced CHOLERINE, a product used to 

disinfect chickens and other fowl of ticks and 

lice. This firm later evolved into Consolidated 

Chemical, headed by Henry Arthur Brereton, 

Walter Hensley and William H. Allen. 

From 1925 until 1957, Consolidated 

Chemical manufactured cresylic disinfectants 

and insecticides as well as maintenance 

products for schools, hospitals and industry. 

By 1957, Consolidated had formulated 

and manufactured a hundred different 

niche chemical products for nursing homes, 

hospitals, schools and other institutions. 

Brereton bought out his partners during 

the early depression days of the 1930s. A son 

John Arthur Brereton joined the firm in 1946 

after earning an MBA degree from Harvard. 

In 1964, Consolidated Chemical expanded 

into the new field that would become its 

single most important field of growth. The 

new series of products was designed for 

patients in nursing homes and hospitals 

and consisted of skin care products with 

special bactericides to handle the many skin 

problems associated with elderly patients. 

The company was located on South 

Vandeventer Avenue from 1940 until 1979 

when it moved to its current address at 3224 

South Kingshighway Boulevard in St. Louis. 

Through the years, Consolidated Chemical 

emphasized research and development and led 

the way in development of better products for 

schools, hospitals and industry. The company 

is responsible for a number of ‘firsts’ including 

first in development of air spray deodorizers— 

RENOVET ® ; first in development of synthetic 

wax—SKIDPROOF ® ; and first in development 

of hospital and geriatric care programs, 

or infection control systems. The firm was 

also a pioneer in development of the use of 

aerosol sprays with its product line. 

In 1985, Consolidated Chemicals changed 

its trade name to CARE-TECH ® Laboratories, 

Inc., and reorganized its sales efforts to better 

focus on developing new and innovative 

products for the healthcare and geriatric 

marketplace. These efforts accelerated in 1988 

with a more aggressive sales and marketing 

strategy that introduced CARE-TECH ® products 

to a national market. 

In 1987, John C. and Sherry L. Brereton 

purchased all shares of outstanding stock in 

the company from numerous family members, 

making CARE-TECH ® a third-generation firm. 

CARE-TECH ® Laboratories continues to 

emphasize research and development in 

order to provide more efficient topical, 

antimicrobial technology for the healthcare 

industry. Markets have expanded to include 

physician supply, clinics, home healthcare, 

dental supply and veterinarian supply and 

the hospital marketplace. 

CARE-TECH ® 

LABORATORIES, 

INC. 

O-T-C 

PHARMACEUTICALS 

Below: CEO John C. Brereton and Executive 

Vice President, Sherry L. Brereton. 


2 6 9

The new National Archives and Records Administration building that expands the region’s resources for historical research. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY LENIN HURTADO PROVIDED COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES AT ST. LOUIS. 


270

BUILDING A GREATER ST. LOUIS 

S t . L o u i s ’ s r e a l e s t a t e d e v e l o p e r s , 

c o n s t r u c t i o n c o m p a n i e s , h e a v y i n d u s t r i e s , 

a n d m a n u f a c t u r e r s p r o v i d e 

t h e e c o n o m i c f o u n d a t i o n o f t h e c i t y 

Ameren Corporation ...................................................................2 7 2 

BSI Constructors .......................................................................2 7 6 

American Water 

Missouri American Water 

Illinois American Water .......................................................2 8 0 

CIC Group, Inc. ........................................................................2 8 4 

McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. ..............................................2 8 6 

Associated General Contractors of St. Louis ...................................2 8 8 

U.S. Custom House and Post Office (Old Post Office) 

Developers: The DESCO Group and DFC Group ...........................2 9 0 

Sheet Metal Workers Local Union 36 ............................................2 9 2 

Watlow Electric Manufacturing Company .......................................2 9 4 

Monsanto .................................................................................2 9 6 

PARIC Corporation ....................................................................2 9 8 

Hunter Engineering Company ......................................................3 0 0 

American Radiolabeled Chemicals, Inc. (ARC) ................................3 0 2 

Tarlton Corporation ...................................................................3 0 4 

Graybar Electric Company, Inc. ...................................................3 0 5 

Sansone Group ..........................................................................3 0 6 

Peabody Energy .........................................................................3 0 7 

St. Louis Development Corporation ...............................................3 0 8 

B U I L D I N G A G R E A T E R S T . L O U I S 

2 7 1

AMEREN 

CORPORATION 

Above: Two years after Union Electric was 

formed, the company lit up eight palaces 

and the grounds of Forest Park during the 

1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Today, Ameren 

Corporation continues the strong tradition 

of providing reliable, safe, low-cost energy 

to its customers and communities. 

Below: A 1931 shot of the nearly-completed 

construction of the Osage Hydroelectric 

Energy Center at Lake of the Ozarks. 

Missouri Hydro-Electric Power started the 

project in 1924, but halted work in 1926. 

On July 27, 1929, Union Electric purchased 

the facilities, and construction resumed on 

August 6. The New York Stock Exchange 

“crashed” two months later, bringing on the 

Great Depression, but work on the project 

continued. It became the only major 

construction project in the nation at the 

time. Records show more than twenty 

thousand people worked on the project at 

one time or another. 


272 

St. Louis-based Ameren Corporation is a 

Fortune 500 energy provider and the parent of 

utility subsidiaries Ameren Missouri and Ameren 

Illinois, as well as Ameren Transmission 

Company. In 2013 the company announced the 

divestiture of its merchant generation subsidiary 

Ameren Energy Resources. Our electric 

companies all date back to the introduction of 

Edison’s light bulb and founding of the grid 

more than one hundred years ago. Today, 

Focused Energy. For Life. is our promise to 

power the quality of life for the next century. 

Ameren’s predecessor, Union Electric, was 

founded on May 20, 1902. With 2,000 

customers, a handful of employees, and 

generation capacity of 6 megawatts, Union 

Electric (UE) faced the daunting challenge 

of electrifying an event of international 

significance: the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. 

Better known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, the 

exposition opened in 1904, with its eight large 

palaces and fairgrounds blazing with light. 

Our first power plant (now called Energy 

Center)—the Ashley Plant, located in 

downtown St. Louis along the Mississippi 

River—supplied energy for the fair. As the 

first broad-scale demonstration of electricity, 

the event became known as “the electric fair.” 

This new enthusiasm for electricity created 

growing demand for power in St. Louis. In the 

midst of the flurry of home wiring activity, 

UE turned up the current that began our 

long-standing record of providing reliable, 

low-cost, energy. 

To keep up with escalating demand, Union 

Electric added new generating sources by 

expanding its territory and acquiring energy 

centers in neighboring states. 

That expansion included the Keokuk Energy 

Center, which opened in 1913 and celebrated 

its hundredth anniversary in June 2013. The 

hydroelectric energy center is located about 

180 miles north of St. Louis, in Keokuk, Iowa. 

At the time of its opening, Keokuk broke 

records for the highest transmission line, 

longest line and largest transformers. 

UE’s first renewable energy center 

continues to harvest the natural force of the 

Mississippi River. On an average day of 

operation, it saves the equivalent of burning 

1,000 tons of coal. 

The next major development occurred 

during the Great Depression. On July 27, 1929, 

the utility purchased facilities and resumed 

construction of a dam near tiny Bagnell, 

Missouri. This was the last major dam to be built 

in the United States with private funds. As 

the largest construction project of its time, 

it attracted workers from around the country. 

Although there were some steam shovels and 

other powered equipment, most labor was done 

by hand.

The project was truly massive: 

• Records show that more than 20,000 

people worked on Bagnell Dam. 

• The structure is a half-mile long and 

rises a towering 148 feet from the 

bedrock—comparable to a building twelve 

stories high and seven blocks long. 

• Nearly 60,000 acres of land had to be 

acquired to make way for the structure. 

• The dam retains 600 billion gallons of 

water from the Osage River. This stored 

water serves as “fuel” for the Osage Energy 

Center, located inside the dam. 

• In a typical year, the energy center 

produces more than 500 million kilowatthours 

of electricity—enough to supply the 

needs of nearly 42,000 households. 

Construction was completed two years 

after work began, at a cost of $30 million, and 

commercial operation of Osage Energy Center 

began October 16, 1931. At the time, 

Bagnell Dam was truly an engineering marvel, 

and dignitaries from around the world came 

to see it. This project also created the manmade 

Lake of the Ozarks, a well-known 

recreation area that lures almost five million 

visitors annually. 

Since initial construction at Osage, more 

than $100 million has been spent to add 

generators, anchor the dam to the bedrock to 

ensure protection against a “maximum” flood, 

modernize the energy center’s control facilities 

and replace six turbines. 

Ameren’s other hydroelectric energy center, 

the Taum Sauk Energy Center near Lesterville, 

began operation in 1963. The 440-megawatt 

pumped-storage energy center acts like a 

giant battery, primarily used on a peaking 

basis and put into operation when the demand 

for electricity is greatest. In 2010 the upper 

reservoir was rebuilt at a cost of $490 million. 

By the 1940s, UE’s production outstripped 

demand, so along with other power 

companies, we built a multistate system of 

power transmission lines linking Union 

Electric with thirty other energy providers 

and making the company the second-most 

connected utility in the nation. 

Expansion continued over the next several 

years, including a move into the natural gas 

market. In the 1950s our company owned 

gas operations in and around Alton, Illinois. 

In 1983, Missouri Power and Light, Missouri 

Utilities and Missouri Edison merged with 

Union Electric. It was important to our 

company to have a balance of generation 

sources for producing electricity. 

In 2013, Ameren had four coal-fired 

energy centers: 

• Meramec (1953) 836 megawatts 

• Sioux (1967) 986 megawatts 

• Labadie (1970) 2,047 megawatts 

• Rush Island (1976) 1,204 megawatts 

Today, Labadie is our largest coal-fired 

energy center and a recognized leader in 

emissions control and operating efficiency. 

Above: Early line crews ready to hitch a 

wagon to horses and head out for a 

day’s work. Today, Ameren linemen 

maintain more than 86,000 electric circuit 

miles. By investing in infrastructure, 

Ameren can support jobs and 

economic growth. 

Below: Central Illinois Public Service 

Company’s Canton Ice Plant, c. 1924. 

In 1997 our company officially became 

Ameren Corporation with the merging of 

Union Electric and neighboring CIPSCO Inc. 


2 7 3

Above: Ameren is more than an energy 

company—it is a catalyst for growth and a 

resource for life. Ameren is deploying the 

latest in Smart Grid technology to enhance 

reliability in Missouri and Illinois. This 

technology allows the company to remotely 

control substation switches to isolate damage, 

and in many cases, automatically restore 

power by switching to an alternate supply. 

Below: Ameren gas workers help to ensure 

the safety and reliability of 21,000 miles of 

Ameren’s transmission and distribution 

mains in Missouri and Illinois. 

By the mid-1980s, UE was looking to 

nuclear as a clean, safe and economical 

alternative for meeting customers’ growing 

energy needs. At a cost of $3 billion, the 

Callaway Energy Center was launched in 

1984, becoming the company’s first and only 

nuclear energy center. Callaway produces 

1,190 megawatts of electricity each year, 

enough to power 780,000 households. It is 

the state of Missouri’s only nuclear energy 

center. Reliable, low-cost nuclear power has 

been a key factor in keeping the price of 

electricity affordable for our customers. 

As Union Electric’s generation capacity grew, 

so did the need to expand our service area. 

In 1977 the acquisition of Missouri 

Utilities made Union Electric the state’s thirdlargest 

distributor of natural gas. 

In 1997 our company officially became 

Ameren Corporation, with the merging of 

Union Electric and neighboring CIPSCO Inc. 

(the parent company of Central Illinois 

Public Service Company, which later became 

known as AmerenCIPS). The name “Ameren” 

comes from combining the words “American” 

and “Energy.” 

Following the merger, Union Electric 

began doing business as AmerenUE and is 

now known as Ameren Missouri. 

In 2003, Ameren grew even more with 

the acquisition of CILCORP Inc. (parent of 

Central Illinois Light Company, which later 

became AmerenCILCO). 

In 2004, Ameren acquired Illinois Power 

Company (which became AmerenIP). 

In 2010, AmerenCIPS, AmerenCILCO and 

AmerenIP officially merged to become 

Ameren Illinois, one of Ameren’s utility 

operating companies. 

The corporation’s other business segments 

include Ameren Transmission and 

Ameren Services. 

Ameren has more than 86,000 miles of 

electric circuit lines and more than 21,000 

miles of natural gas transmission and 

distribution mains over a 64,000 square 

mile service territory. Behind our successful 

generation, transmission and distribution 

infrastructure are dedicated employees with a 

wealth of expertise. Our company’s growth 

and success is due largely to the more than 

9,000 men and women whose daily work 

powers the lives of millions of people. For 

some employees, it is a family affair with 

third- or even fourth-generation family 

members working at Ameren. 

One reason Ameren remains an attractive 

local employer is because we are committed to 

protecting our employees—their safety is our 

“bluest of blue chip priorities.” In 2012 the 

company saw the lowest rate of lost workday 

away incidents in our history. The rate was 

also among the best in the industry. 

Both our employees and our corporation 

are deeply committed to community 

involvement. Ameren employees are highly 


274

active in the cities and towns we serve, 

and volunteer countless hours to make our 

communities better places to live, work, learn 

and play. Meanwhile, the Ameren Corporation 

Charitable Trust (established in 1944) donates 

millions of dollars annually to support 

education programs, services for the youth 

and elderly, social services and civic and 

cultural organizations. At Ameren, we believe 

that it takes more than energy to power the 

quality of life in the communities we serve; 

it takes hands-on support of those in need. 

Helping our customers manage their 

energy use is equally important. Each year, 

Ameren Illinois offers about $75 million 

worth of energy-saving tools and incentives 

for our business and residential customers. 

In 2013, Ameren Missouri launched a threeyear, 

nearly $150 million suite of similar 

programs—the most ambitious energysavings 

portfolio in state history. 

Just as our utility expanded to meet the 

needs of twentieth century customers, 

Ameren continues to evolve for the twentyfirst 

century. This is reflected in our 

promise—Focused Energy. For Life. The energy 

Ameren provides powers the lives of millions 

of people and the strength of our regional 

economy. So we are focused on ensuring that 

our service remains safe, reliable, efficient and 

affordable for generations to come. 

In June 2012, Ameren Missouri made a 

bold investment in a cleaner future by 

opening the Maryland Heights Renewable 

Energy Center. Located northwest of 

St. Louis, this energy center captures an 

otherwise unused resource: methane gas from 

a local landfill. With a generating capacity of 

15 megawatts, the energy center produces 

enough power to serve about 10,000 homes. 

This facility is the first of its kind in Missouri 

and among the largest in the nation. 

Ameren’s transmission investments also are 

helping to integrate renewable energy onto 

the grid, while providing customer benefits 

and creating jobs. Through the end of 2019, 

Ameren has multibillion-dollar plans to 

strengthen its transmission system within 

Illinois and Missouri. Nearly five hundred 

miles of new high-voltage lines will not only 

enhance regional reliability and efficiency, 

but also serve as an “energy superhighway,” 

to carry power where it is needed most. 

In addition, Ameren Missouri and Ameren 

Illinois are making reliability enhancements 

and building a “smarter grid,” which 

incorporates technology to reduce the 

duration and frequency of outages. Both 

utilities are involved in local and regional 

initiatives aimed at protecting and conserving 

our environment, as well as efforts to help 

our communities prosper and grow. 

From Union Electric, CIPS, CILCO and 

IP to Ameren Corporation we are proud of 

our history. As we celebrate this heritage, 

our employees are leading the way to a 

secure energy future—with strong capacity, 

affordable rates, a commitment to continuos 

improvement and exceptional customer 

service—for life. 

Above: In 1984, nuclear energy was added 

to Union Electric’s energy mix. Callaway 

Energy Center is Missouri’s only nuclear 

energy center. Reliable, low-cost nuclear 

power has been a key factor in keeping the 

price of electricity affordable for Ameren 

Missouri customers. 

Below: Ameren is a Fortune 500 energy 

company. We work with local leaders and 

communities in our service territory to 

attract and retain job-generating businesses. 

We help Missouri and Illinois build the 

capacity to compete for industry so our 

region and company can thrive. 


2 7 5

BSI 

CONSTRUCTORS 

Below: BSI’s President Paul Shaughnessy, 

Co-Founder Joe Shaughnessy, and Executive 

Vice President Jim Shaughnessy stand in 

front of the company headquarters at 

6767 Southwest Avenue. 

Bottom: BSI’s first $20 million project, 

Washington University McDonnell Hall, 

awarded in 1991. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE WASHINGTON 

UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES. ARCHITECT: KALLMANN, 

MCKINNELL, & WOOD. 


276 

Just two weeks before Christmas in 1972, 

Lorenz (Lorry) Bannes and Joseph (Joe) 

Shaughnessy, both thirty-seven years old, 

were suddenly, although voluntarily, unemployed. 

They had served as president and 

vice president, respectively, for the fifty-five 

year old Gamble Construction Company, 

but had become uncomfortable with the 

direction of the firm after it had been sold 

to outside investors a few years earlier. 

If they were going to do things ‘their way,’ 

it would have to be at a new company. 

Lorry and Joe had first met when they 

were classmates at the St. Louis University 

IT School studying civil engineering. Upon 

graduation in 1957, Lorry served three years 

as a base engineer in the U.S. Air Force, while 

Joe headed to Guam for a three year tour 

as project manager in the U.S. Navy Civil 

Engineer Corps. The two renewed their 

friendship at a class reunion in 1962 and a year 

later Joe joined Lorry at Gamble Construction. 

While they had not really planned on starting 

their own company, once the path became 

clear they were determined to proceed in 

a manner consistent with their principles. 

They incorporated as ‘Bannes-Shaughnessy, Inc.’ 

on December 18, 1972. But unlike many 

startups in the industry, they were determined 

not to grow at the expense of their prior 

employer. Although not constrained by a 

non-compete agreement, they would pursue 

neither the personnel nor the clients of 

Gamble Construction. Even if it would take 

longer to establish their presence in the 

market, they vowed to develop their own 

clients and build their own team. 

Capitalizing the new company with their 

own personal savings, the two founders developed 

a vision for the new firm that included 

seven key points: 1) Be a builder of all kinds of 

quality buildings; 2) Focus on customer value 

and service; 3) Operate according to sound 

business principles, never compromising 

integrity; 4) Maintain exceptional construction 

‘know how’ and competence; 5) Practice fiscal 

discipline; retain earnings for sound growth 

and the ability to fulfill all commitments; 6) Be 

a company of opportunity for its people by 

sharing the company’s success with them; and 

7) Share the company success with the local 

community and worthy charitable organizations. 

So with a big vision and some significant 

self-imposed constraints, they began searching 

for opportunities. They started small— 

real small. Their first project came from a 

competitive bid they submitted to Parkway 

West Senior High School for a new press box. 

Bannes-Shaughnessy, Inc., was the low bidder 

at $3,988. Auspiciously they completed 

it ahead of schedule while earning a tidy 

$737 profit. 

Opportunities and successes came slowly, 

but surely. In 1976, they were awarded their 

first $1 million project for Hazelwood Central 

Senior High School. In 1981 they broke 

the $5 million barrier with a six-story office 

building for Roosevelt Federal Savings in 

Chesterfield, Missouri. By 1984, Bannes- 

Shaughnessy, Inc., had made the Engineering 

News Record (ENR) Top 400 Contractors for the 

first time of many times. But more important 

than the revenues or recognition that had

come with them, was that success was being 

built on the same principles that formed the 

basis for the company’s founding in 1972. 

The company’s reputation for delivering 

challenging projects continued to grow, 

opening up new opportunities in the 

St. Louis market. 1987 was a significant year. 

Bannes-Shaughnessy was hired for its first 

major project at the Missouri Botanical 

Garden, the restoration and renovation of 

the world famous Climatron. A little later in 

the same year, the company acquired its first 

$10 million project, the new Medical Library 

for the Washington University School of 

Medicine. The increased staff required to 

address the expanding opportunities had 

begun to put a strain on space at the company 

headquarters at 6780 Southwest Avenue. 

Determined to stay in the City of St. Louis, 

the answer to their needs was found right 

across the street. They purchased three 

mostly vacant, neglected, but structurally 

sound buildings at 6767 Southwest. Aided 

by the creative design of noted architect 

Ray Maritz, they were able to transform 

them into a modern office and warehouse 

complex that continues to serve as company 

headquarters today. 

In 1988, after sixteen years of successful 

partnership, Lorry elected to pursue other 

interests. The company purchased his half 

interest and Joe became sole owner. The new 

company name ‘BSI Constructors’ melded 

the firm’s already well known acronym (BSI) 

with the word best describing its services: 

‘Constructors’—a combination of construction 

managers and general contractors. 

In early 1989, full of optimism for the 

future of the restructured company, Joe 

looked to supplement his already strong team 

of professionals. He did not have to look far. 

Coincidentally, his oldest son, Paul, had been 

contemplating a career change. Paul had 

worked for three summers as a carpenter 

apprentice at BSI while pursuing his civil 

engineering degree from the University of 

Missouri. From there, he went on to obtain 

an MBA from Washington University, going 

on to work in the financial industry for four 

years. The suggestion from his dad in early 

1989 that he “Give the construction industry 

a try” came at an opportune time. 

He decided to join the company 

in March. A similar conversation 

with Jim Shaughnessy, who 

graduated Summa Cum Laude 

from St. Louis University that 

spring, was also productive. Jim 

joined the company in May of 

1989. After stints in project 

management, estimating and preconstruction, 

Paul was named 

president in 2000, later adding 

the chief executive officer title. 

Jim, following a similar experience 

path, currently serves as 

executive vice president and COO. 

BSI’s next big milestone project was a new 

$22 million, 100,000 square foot teaching and 

lab building for Washington University named 

McDonnell Hall. It marked a return to the 

collegiate gothic style of architecture for 

Washington University. It was BSI’s first 

project of more than $20 million and was 

especially welcome in the very slow construction 

economy of 1990. While the McDonnell 

Hall project was awarded on a competitive 

bid basis, BSI began to see more and more 

work come from negotiated contracts and the 

construction management process. With its 

track record of performance and knowledge 

of costs, BSI was well positioned to take 

advantage of this new trend in the marketplace. 

BSI’s customers were learning—more 

and more—that they could pick the firm they 

wanted and get the advantage of early builder 

input during the design process, as well. 

Above: The Laurel, originally constructed as 

a department store in 1905, BSI managed a 

dramatic conversion of this 635,000 square 

foot building into a hotel, apartments, 

retail, and the National Blues Museum. 

ARCHITECT: TRIVERS ASSOCIATES. 

Below: The renovation of the famous 

Climatron was BSI’s first of many projects 

for the Missouri Botanical Garden. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PAUL STRAATMANN. 

ARCHITECT: MACKEY & ASSOCIATES. 


2 7 7

Above: The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, 

an all-concrete building. BSI self-performed 

the concrete work on this internationally 

acclaimed building designed by the noted 

architect, Tadao Ando. 

Below: BSI’s largest single project was a 

1.2 million square foot office and learning 

center for A. G. Edwards. 

ARCHITECT: RAYMOND E. MARITZ & SONS. 

Opposite top: St. Louis Central Library, one 

of world’s great public libraries, the major 

renovation/restoration reopened in 2012, 

100 years after its original dedication. 

ARCHITECT: CANNON DESIGN. 

Opposite, bottom: Citygarden, 

BSI completed this award winning 

three-acre urban oasis in the heart of 

downtown St. Louis. 

ARCHITECTS: NELSON BYRD WOLTZ + STUDIO DURHAM. 


278 

Construction companies tend to be defined 

by their projects. On that basis, BSI has been 

defined, according to the St. Louis Business 

Journal, as “the go-to contractor for some of 

the most impressive structures in St. Louis.” 

Some examples from the past twenty years: 

• The Parking Spot—A 1,500 car parking 

structure near Lambert International Airport. 

When completed in the mid-1990s, it represented 

the area’s first major precast 

garage in many years. Precast, where major 

structural concrete components are cast 

off-site and set by a large crane, soon 

became the method of choice for local 

developers on their parking garages. 

• Missouri History Museum Expansion— 

This 100,000 square foot Gyo Obatadesigned 

addition in Forest Park also 

included the renovation and restoration 

of the historic Jefferson Memorial. 

• Enterprise Rent-a-Car Building—The 

144,000 square foot office building is 

in Weldon Springs, Missouri. BSI has 

always taken pride in working for some 

of the area’s most respected institutions 

and corporations. 

• Monsanto Research Center—Built primarily 

for the preservation, storage, and study of 

over 5 million plant specimens, some of 

which are extinct. The first building in 

the region to utilize seismic base isolators, 

designed to protect the priceless collection 

even in a major earthquake. 

• Pulitzer Foundation—The first public 

building in the United States designed by 

the internationally acclaimed architect 

Tadao Ando. Recognized as one of the 

finest examples of smooth face as-cast 

architectural concrete in the world. 

• The Coronado—Conversion of a 240,000 

square foot, vacant hotel into the prime 

off-campus housing option for St. Louis 

University students. The multiphase project 

also included a 750 car precast parking 

garage as well as the conversion of the 

old Moolah Temple into apartments, and 

a movie theater. 

• A. G. Edwards Office Building and 

Learning Center—BSI’s largest single 

project at $150 million and 1.2 million 

square feet. Currently part of the Wells 

Fargo Advisors headquarters. 

• Forest Park Restoration—As construction 

manager for Forest Park Forever, BSI 

helped lead a major overhaul and 

updating of one of the nation’s largest and 

best municipal parks. 

• The Boulevard—Home to the region’s 

first Crate & Barrel, it was St. Louis’ 

first mixed-use retail development built 

according to the ‘Lifestyle Center’ model. 

• SEMO River Campus—While most of 

their work is in the St. Louis metro 

area, BSI periodically ventures to other 

markets. The River Campus, in Cape 

Girardeau, was an all new campus that 

included an 850 seat performing arts 

grade auditorium. 

• Citygarden—Located across two city 

blocks in the heart of downtown St. Louis 

and funded by the Gateway Foundation, 

Citygarden is an urban oasis of art, 

fountains and landscape features. It has 

received several national awards. 

• The Chase Park Plaza—BSI performed 

an $85 million renovation to the iconic 

hotel that included the transformation

of the upper floors of the twenty-six 

story Park Plaza into St. Louis’ premier 

luxury condominiums. 

• St. Louis Public Central Library—Built in 

1913 with a major donation from Andrew 

Carnegie, Central Library is the St. Louis 

Public Library’s flagship branch. It 

reopened to rave reviews 100 years later, 

after a complete overhaul by BSI, which 

included meticulous historic restoration, 

and the creative transformation of former 

‘back of the house’ areas into stunning 

new public space. It is widely considered 

one of the world’s great libraries. 

• CityArchRiver 2015—BSI was retained 

in 2013 to provide comprehensive 

preconstruction services for the major 

reconfiguration of the Arch grounds, 

downtown connection and riverfront. 

Asked to look back on the last forty plus 

years since he founded BSI, Joe reflects, 

“When we say this is a family business, we’re 

not just talking the three of us. It is more 

about the sense of family that permeates the 

company, the way we work together, back 

each other up, and share together in the 

success of the company. I take satisfaction in 

all of the lives we have touched in a positive 

way: our great people, our many wonderful 

clients, and the many worthy charities we have 

been able to support due to the fact that we 

are a well-run and profitable company. I truly 

believe this company has been a force for 

good in our community, and that’s why I’d 

like to see it continue for many years to come.” 


2 7 9

AMERICAN WATER 

MISSOURI 


ILLINOIS 


Above: Missouri American Water invests 

approximately $70 to $100 million per year 

in water infrastructure improvements 

throughout the state. 

Right: A large water storage tank was 

erected as part of the construction of 

Missouri American Water’s Central Water 

Treatment Plant off Hog Hollow Road 

in west St. Louis County in the 1920s. 

Below: Work on Missouri American Water’s 

Central Water Treatment Plant off 

Hog Hollow Road in west St. Louis County, 

in the 1920s. 


280 

In his classic 1883 river memoir, Life on 

the Mississippi, Mark Twain paints a vivid 

picture of drinking water in the St. Louis 

region in the late nineteenth century. “If you 

will let your glass stand half an hour, you 

can separate the land from the water as easy 

as Genesis,” he wrote. What Twain meant was 

that residents had to ‘wait for the mud to 

settle’ in their glass for a drink of water. 

A supply of safe potable water is essential 

for the establishment and growth of any 

community and American Water has provided 

quality drinking water service for the Greater 

St. Louis region for more than a hundred 

years through two local regulated subsidiaries 

on both sides of the river: Missouri American 

Water and Illinois American Water. 

In the late nineteenth century, life 

expectancy at birth was forty-seven years and 

about forty-four percent of all deaths were 

caused by infectious disease. In some U.S. 

cities, up to thirty percent of infants died 

before their first birthday. Although there 

were many causes for low life expectancy 

and high infant death rate, including lack of 

medical knowledge at the time, unhealthy 

drinking water no doubt played a role. 

Medical and scientific journals of the era 

noted the dramatic improvements in public 

health as water filtration and disinfection 

became common practice. In 1900 about 

35,000 people died from typhoid fever, the 

most common waterborne disease. A U.S. 

Geological report in 1915 announced the 

steady reduction in the typhoid fever death 

rate was “undoubtedly due to a very large 

measure to new water filtration works.” 

At the time the City of St. Louis was preparing 

for the World’s Fair and making advancements 

in its water system, St. Louis County 

was also developing its first water system to 

serve a population of about 50,000 residents. 

In 1904 a new water treatment plant serving 

the country drew water from the Missouri 

River, pumped it into settling basins and 

incorporated the concept of water filtration

that local resident James Kirkwood had 

proposed at the turn of the century. Just in 

time for the 1904 World’s Fair, filtered water 

flowed to the growing cities of Kirkwood, 

Webster Groves, University City and Ferguson. 

By 1920 most residents of both St. Louis 

City and St. Louis County, as well as residents 

of the Metro East on the east side of the river, 

were drinking filtered and disinfected water. 

Mortality rates fell by 40 percent and life 

expectancy at birth rose from 47 to 63 years. 

M I S S O U R I A M E R I C A N W A T E R 

Today, Missouri American Water is the 

largest water utility in the state, providing 

high-quality water and/or wastewater services 

to approximately 1.5 million people in 150 

plus communities. Missouri American Water’s 

St. Louis County District serves ninety-three 

municipalities and approximately 370,000 

homes and businesses. Outside the City of 

St. Louis boundaries, most people get their 

water service from Missouri American Water. 

Missouri American Water and its predecessors 

have provided water and wastewater 

services in Missouri for more than a century. 

The roots of the St. Louis County operation 

date from 1904 with the West St. Louis Water 

and Light Company. The company grew 

steadily as St. Louis County developed and, in 

1942, it became the St. Louis County Water. 

American Water acquired the system in 1999. 

The Missouri and Meramec Rivers are the 

sources of water supply for St. Louis County 

customers. The company’s four water plants 

have received Directors Awards from the 

Partnership for Safe Water Program—a national, 

voluntary initiative developed by the EPA 

and other water organizations that recognize 

water suppliers that consistently meet standards 

that surpass national standards. The Central 

Plant is one of the largest in the state. 

Missouri American Water also has operating 

districts in Joplin, St. Joseph, Jefferson 

City, Mexico, Warrensburg, Platte County, 

the Branson area and Brunswick. The nearby 

St. Charles County District provides water 

service to about 30,000 homes and businesses. 

“Our professionals are committed to customer 

service, operational excellence and the 

delivery of high quality, reliable drinking 

water and safe, effective wastewater treatment 

and release,” says Frank Kartmann, president 

of Missouri American Water. “It’s been exciting 

to play a critical role in the growth and expansion 

of St. Louis County.” 

I L L I N O I S A M E R I C A N W A T E R 

Illinois American Water has provided 

quality water service in the Metro East and 

Alton areas for more than 110 years. It is the 

largest investor-owned water utility in the 

state of Illinois, providing quality water and 

wastewater service to approximately 1.2 million 

residents. In addition to the Interurban 

Top, left: The annual “Missouri American 

Water 340” kayak/canoe race starts on the 

Missouri River near Kansas City and ends 

in St. Charles County every summer. 

Top, right: Missouri American Water’s 

community education program focuses on 

environmental issues. 

Below: A photograph from the early 1900s 

of the construction of Illinois American 

Water’s original water intake on the 

Mississippi River. That is the City of 

St. Louis in the background, across the 

Mississippi River. 


2 8 1

Top: An aerial view of Illinois 

American Water’s water treatment plant 

in East St. Louis in 1935. The original 

plant still provides water to most of 

Southwestern Illinois. 

Above: Illinois American Water employees 

install a pipe in the French Village area of 

East St. Louis in the 1940s. 


282 

(Metro East) and Alton Districts, the company 

has operating districts in Peoria, Pekin, Lincoln, 

Champaign, Sterling, Streator, Pontiac, Cairo, 

South Beloit and Chicago Metro. 

Illinois American Water is the main regional 

water provider in Southwest Illinois. The 

company’s Interurban District includes the 

Metro East region, including three direct service 

communities: Belleville, East St. Louis and 

Granite City. The district serves a population 

of about 250,000 persons in Metro East. The 

company also provides water to several communities 

on a wholesale (sale-for-resale) basis, 

including O’Fallon, Caseyville, Waterloo, 

Millstadt, Columbia, Scott Air Force base 

and Bond Madison Water Company, as well 

as many large industrial customers in the 

Sauget and Granite City areas. 

Two water treatment facilities are located 

in the Interurban District: East St. Louis and 

Granite City. Both treatment facilities are located 

on the Mississippi River, the source of water for 

customers on the east side. The East St. Louis 

Treatment Plant was built in 1886 to provide 

potable water in the East St. Louis area. Over 

the next century, the water treatment plant 

grew to become a regional plant serving the 

majority of Southwest Illinois. 

A new Alton District Treatment Facility 

went into service in December 2000, replacing 

an old facility that was built in the 1890s 

and flooded often, most recently in 1993. 

Before the new Alton plant went online, 

the company wanted to make sure local customers 

had input by conducting a ‘taste test.’ 

Several prominent members of the community, 

including the mayor, were asked to participate 

in a formal ‘taste test’ in which they were 

asked to taste water treated and delivered 

from the old plant and water samples from the 

new plant. Overwhelmingly, the participants 

voted that the new plant had better water 

than the old plant. 

The East St. Louis, Granite City and Alton 

Treatment Plants have received awards from 

the national Partnership for Safe Water program, 

a voluntary initiative developed by EPA 

and other water organizations to recognize 

community water suppliers that consistently 

achieve water treatment standards that 

surpass EPA quality standards. As a member 

of the program, water utilities pledge to continually 

improve their treatment operations 

and undergo a rigorous peer review process. 

“We focus on delivering high-quality, reliable 

water and wastewater services to our 

customers,” comments Karla Olson Teasley, 

president of Illinois American Water. “We are 

caretakers of water, life’s most essential 

resource, and we take our role very seriously.” 

Corporate offices for Illinois American 

Water are located in west Belleville. 

A M E R I C A N 

W A T E R 

American Water, the parent company of 

Missouri American Water and Illinois 

American Water, is the largest publicly traded 

water and wastewater utility company in the 

United States. American Water was founded in 

1886 as American Water Works & Guarantee 

in Pennsylvania. The company is listed on 

the New York Stock Exchange (AWK) and is 

headquartered in Voorhees, New Jersey. 

American Water, through its subsidiaries, 

provides high quality water and wastewater 

services to approximately 14 million people 

in more than thirty states, as well as parts 

of Canada. The company provides service 

to residential homes, businesses and municipalities 

through its regulated and marketbased 

business. 

American Water has a strong presence in the 

St. Louis region. The company’s national customer 

service center is located in Alton, Illinois 

and a national quality control and research 

laboratory in Belleville, Illinois. In 2001 a 

formal ribbon cutting celebrated the opening 

of the company’s new national Customer 

Service Center at New Alton Center Business 

Park in downtown Alton. The Alton site was

chosen after a national search by American 

Water of areas served by the company. 

American Water has more than 1,500 

employees in the St. Louis region, from laborers 

to scientists to accountants to engineers to 

attorneys to meter readers. “Fifty-one percent 

of all American Water employees are members 

of unions,” notes Nick Rowe, senior vice president 

for the Central Division. “Both Illinois 

American Water and Missouri American Water 

have legacies as strong union employees in the 

Greater St. Louis region. Our people—union 

and non-union—work hard each day and 

take seriously the responsibility of providing 

water and wastewater service to communities 

and their residents, large and small.” 

Both Illinois American Water and Missouri 

American Water are community partners in 

their respective service areas. The company’s 

core focus is education, environment and 

economic development and stability. American 

Water holds two national employee-giving 

campaigns annually, one for United Way 

and one for Water for People. The national 

American Water Charitable Foundation seeks 

to proactively engage with community partners 

and strategically invests it resources in order to 

empower American Water employees to make 

a positive difference in their communities. 

The biggest challenge facing the water and 

wastewater industry today is balancing the 

critical need to update and invest in its 

infrastructure with sensitivity to rising cost 

for customers. The EPA estimates that $384 

billion will be needed by 2030 to upgrade the 

nation’s water and wastewater infrastructure. 

Many of the underground water lines and 

pipes are fifty to 100 years old and need to 

be replaced. 

Nationally, American Water invests $800 

million to $1 billion per year on water and 

wastewater infrastructure, including pipes, 

pumps, filters, meters, and treatment facilities 

upgrades. In the St. Louis Region, Missouri 

American Water and Illinois American Water 

continue to take a proactive approach to 

water infrastructure improvements, in balance 

with customer rates. Between the two 

states, approximately $100 million or more is 

invested annually in the St. Louis region’s 

water infrastructure. 

Water is essential to life and to regional 

economic development. The St. Louis region 

is fortunate to have plentiful and abundant 

sources of water from the Mississippi, 

Missouri and Meramec Rivers. The rivers 

have been essential to the region’s settlement 

and development and will be a key to 

future growth and development. Dependable, 

reliable and plentiful water supports and 

attracts economic growth and development, 

business/industry relocations and expansion 

and new business startups. Missouri 

American Water and Illinois American Water 

are committed to providing top quality 

water and wastewater services for the 

decades ahead. 

Above: In August 1993 the old Alton 

Water Treatment Plant was flooded and 

water service was interrupted for several 

days. In December 2000 a new Alton 

District Treatment Facility went into service 

and replaced the old facility, which had been 

built in the 1890s. The new plant was built 

on the bluffs, high above flood levels. 

Below: American Water’s national water 

testing laboratory is located in Belleville, 

Illinois. The national lab tests water 

samples from many states and is considered 

one of the industry's leading waterbased 

laboratories. 


2 8 3

CIC GROUP, 

INC. 

Left: John Nooter Boiler Works (original 

company name) was founded in 1896. 

From humble beginnings riveting and 

repairing tanks on the St. Louis riverfront 

serving customers within “a day’s horsedrawn 

wagon trip of the shop”, the 

company has grown to see sales and product 

shipments from multiple locations, and 

expand around the globe with annual 

revenues exceeding one billion dollars. 

During World War II, John Nooter 

Boiler Works earned the Army-Navy “E” 

Award for Excellence in the production of 

equipment used in the manufacture of 

penicillin, synthetic rubber, gasoline, 

and explosives. 

Right: Located on seventy-five acres 

bordering south of downtown St. Louis, 

Nooter Corporation operated (for more than 

a century) one of the world’s largest custom 

steel and alloy plate fabrication/machine 

shops supplying customers with the highest 

quality processing equipment and services 

available. Many leading-edge metal working 

technologies, welding procedures and project 

execution skill sets were pioneered to meet 

customer’s needs. Among Nooter’s high 

profile projects were construction of vessels 

used to manufacture the new polio vaccine 

and the first nuclear reactor. Much of this 

expertise has been integrated into sister 

companies to accommodate reorganization 

and growth of CIC Group. Pictured is an 

aerial view of Nooter’s office, shop 

and yards. 

For more than 115 years, CIC Group, Inc. 

has operated diverse commercial and industrial 

businesses from its headquarters in 

St. Louis, earning worldwide industry respect 

and recognition for “best in class” products, 

services, safety results, and quality of work 

supplied. CIC’s 1500 employees are engineers 

and designers, constructors, laborers, entrepreneurs, 

project managers and business operators 

with both ‘blue collar’ and ‘white collar’ 

skills—serving many power, refining, chemical, 

printing, and specialty materials markets. 

The culture at CIC Group challenges every 

worker to carry out all aspects of their 

jobs with excellence, while at the same time 

management commits to providing them 

with the tools and guidance to make that 

possible. Words like integrity, safety, service, 

respect, excellence, trust, family, prudent 

risk, and opportunistic only begin to describe 

CIC’s cultural values. 

Twenty separate businesses operate under 

the auspices of seven major subsidiaries 

delivering core competencies in project 

management and execution, constructability 

solutions, engineering and heat transfer 

design, welding and metallurgy, and heavy 

rigging and lifting—all to add value in 

meeting customers’ needs. CIC Group, as 

the holding company, provides leadership, 

services, and resources so the ‘family’ of 

companies can achieve leading positions in 

targeted domestic and global markets and 

pursues new business opportunities. 

Nooter Construction Company provides 

capital project, major equipment erection, 

pressure vessel repair, and turnaround/outage 

‘union’ contractor services for heavy industrial 

customers. Regional offices in Philadelphia, 

Toledo (RMF), and Chicago (AMEX) allow for 

quick servicing at customers’ plants/refineries. 

Delta Nooter, Inc., performs mechanical 

heat exchanger cleaning and maintenance 

services. Wyatt Field Service Company and 

WFS Construction Company are ‘open shop’ 

construction and turnaround service contractors 

serving refining and petrochemical 

industries. RJTaylor-Wyatt, LLC, serves 

natural gas pipeline, gathering system, and 

separating station businesses. 

Nooter/Eriksen, Inc. is a world leader in 

design and supply of natural circulation heat 

recovery steam generators for combined cycle 

power plants and custom designed heat 

recovery systems. It operates from a main 

office in St. Louis, from remote sales/service 

offices in Korea, Thailand, Spain and Dubai, 

and through a full-service sales, design and 

supply subsidiary in Italy, Nooter/Eriksen S.r.l. 

Technology licensees in Canada, China, India, 

Korea, Mexico, Poland, Turkey, and Russia and 

manufacturing partners around the globe support 

deliveries of Nooter Eriksen’s equipment. 

St. Louis Metallizing Company is a fullservice 

metallic and ceramic coatings thermal 

spray and finishing shop. It provides expertise 

and production facilities for preparation, 

application, and finishing of parts for aerospace, 

power, chemical, printing, mining, and 

pulp and paper customers. ArcMelt Company, 

LC manufactures and distributes specialty 

thermal spray and welding materials used to 

protect equipment in corrosion, abrasion, and 

high temperature oxidation service environments. 

ArcMelt materials have proven to be 

the best solution against corrosion and erosion 

problems caused by the severe operating environments 

inside trash-to-energy boilers. 


284

Megamet Solid Metals, Inc. provides custom 

metal injection molding solutions for 

small, intricate, engineered components 

made from carbon and alloy steels as low 

cost, high quality alternatives to machining 

and casting processes. Parts are supplied to 

the food processing, commercial printing, 

sensor and control, medical instrument, aerospace, 

defense, and firearm industries. SPSI 

Company fabricates complex, high and low 

pressure piping for power, water treatment, 

chemical and petroleum processing, and 

nuclear applications. SPSI manages a state 

approved apprentice training program to 

teach piping ‘fit-up’ and ‘welding’ skills to 

supply tradesmen to industry. Pressline 

Services, Inc., provides designs, parts, and 

services to newspaper customers to rebuild 

pressroom equipment, reconfigure print formats, 

and modernize controls and instrumentation 

on printing presses—partnering 

to limit newsprint consumption, eliminate 

waste, and introduce alternative solutions 

that further improve pressroom operations 

to save cost. Pressline has completed major 

press upgrades for two local St. Louis papers, 

the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the Missourian. 

Superior Corporate Travel, Inc., provides 

travel services to all CIC Group businesses, 

including purchasing domestic and international 

airline tickets, making hotel and car 

rental reservations, and facilitating meetings. 

CIC Group’s foundation for daily activities 

is rooted in a commitment to honesty in 

everything it does, the safety and wellbeing 

of its employees, and a responsibility to 

community and environment. Much success 

comes, additionally, from attracting, retaining, 

and professionally developing workers 

who are technically capable, ‘fit’ culturally, 

and have potential to advance CIC Group’s 

initiatives and values. This important employee 

‘human capital’ is energized to identify and 

create opportunities for sustainability and 

innovation with customers—so CIC Group 

can achieve its vision ‘to be our customers’ 

preferred choice’! 

CIC Group’s portfolio of companies is 

more numerous, more diversified, and more 

capable to create value for its employee stockholders 

than ever before; the Group looks 

forward with confidence and determination to 

build on a 115 year history of success. 

Above: Refinery upgrades, to process 

heavier crudes, will produce cleaner fuels 

and feed stocks for countless commodities 

from plastics to fertilizers for distribution 

into the marketplace. Here, a six coke drum 

derrick lift (1,545 tons) is completed as part 

of a turnaround change-out to new, larger 

29 feet diameter by 112 feet high cokers 

weighing 435 tons each. 

Below: Because of plentiful gas supplies, low 

carbon emissions, economical designs and 

installations, abilities to provide base load 

power, as well as ramp-up and down 

quickly in response to varying demand, 

natural gas power generation provides 

excellent solutions to meet future power 

growth needs. Pictured is 1 of 9 N/E Heat 

Recovery Steam Generators installed at this 

USA’s largest, clean emission, gas fired 

combined cycle power plant operating at 

3,750 megawatts (enough to power three 

million family homes). 


2 8 5

MCCARTHY BUILDING COMPANIES, INC. 

Above: McCarthy’s presence in downtown 

can be seen in this Google Maps photo. 

Bottom, left: A group of McCarthy workers 

in the 1930s. 

Bottom, right: The complicated parabolic 

form and intricate specifications of the 

Priory Chapel helped established 

McCarthy’s reputation as a skilled builder 

with creative solutions. 

For nearly a century, McCarthy has called 

St. Louis home while earning a national 

reputation as a true builder. McCarthy got its 

start in 1864 when Irish immigrant Timothy 

McCarthy founded a small lumber and construction 

company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 

From the beginning, McCarthy focused on 

meeting each customer’s needs with integrity, 

delivering the highest quality results, and 

fostering those with the passion to build. 

Those simple principles have served the 

company well as McCarthy has grown to be 

one of the top ten builders in America 

with more than 2,600 employees and annual 

revenues of more than $3 billion. 

It all traces back to Timothy and his 

unique talents as a builder. Timothy and his 

wife had ten children. Two of them, John W. 

and Timothy, Jr., were taught the carpentry 

trade. A third son, Charles, became a bricklayer. 

They all shared a passion for building. 

In 1890, John fell in love with Hannah 

Bently and followed her to Farmington, 

Missouri when her family moved there. 

The two were married and John continued 

the building tradition. By 1903, John had 

helped build the Administration Building 

at State Hospital Number 4, a structure 

still in use today. Though headquartered in 

Farmington, John found work in St. Louis, 

which enjoyed a reputation as a thriving, 

modern city. 

When St. Louis hosted the Louisiana 

Purchase Exposition in 1904, nearly 20 million 

visitors descended on the city, sparking 

a building boom that John was eager to be a 

part of; so he sent for his brothers, Timothy, Jr., 

and Charles, who relocated from Ann Arbor 

to St. Louis. On March 16, 1907, the brothers 

incorporated their new business, McCarthy 

Construction Company. 

McCarthy began building commercial and 

government structures throughout Missouri. 

The willingness to take risks and pursue 

far-flung projects led them to their most 

distant contract when they built the 

Missouri Building at the 1915 Panama-Pacific 

International Exposition in San Francisco. 


286

In 1917 the company moved to St. Louis’ 

business district, opening its doors at 

604½ Chestnut Street, where the business 

continued to grow, causing a move once 

again in 1925 as they took over the Roosevelt 

Hotel building at 4908 Delmar. A year later, 

they changed the name of the company to 

McCarthy Brothers Construction Company. 

McCarthy continued to expand during 

the 1930s depression by taking on federal 

projects. During World War II, the company 

won government contracts in the Panama 

Canal Zone and an air base at Coco Solo. 

The firm diversified in 1951 purchasing the 

Rock Hill Quarries Company, an aggregate plant 

in St. Louis that would later become the site 

of McCarthy’s current corporate headquarters. 

By the 1960s, McCarthy-built structures 

could be found throughout the St. Louis 

region—from floodwalls on the city’s riverfront 

to the seventeen-story Queeny Tower 

at Barnes Hospital. Particularly important 

during this era was the construction of 

Priory Chapel, a unique structure that firmly 

established the company’s reputation as a 

skilled and innovative builder, willing to 

take on the most difficult challenges. 

In the 1970s, McCarthy was deeply 

involved in several major projects that helped 

rebuild the St. Louis skyline, including 

Boatmen’s Bank Tower, the Spanish Pavilion, 

and the new headquarters for General 

American Life Insurance Company. 

In 1982, the leading national construction 

magazine Engineering News-Record listed 

McCarthy as the St. Louis-area’s most successful 

contractor, with major projects ranging from 

airport construction and bridge and highway 

work to construction for major St. Louis 

corporations and institutions. The company’s 

reputation for building excellence had spread 

across the country as McCarthy had 275 

employees working in thirty-two different states. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, McCarthy became 

a national leader in building for the healthcare, 

bio-pharmaceutical, parking, higher 

education, and manufacturing markets. 

Moving into the twenty-first century, 

McCarthy also became a national leader 

in construction of complex research facilities, 

K-12 education and industrial projects. 

It recently formed an independent company, 

MC Industrial that specializes in the latter. 

“We love to hear people wonder how a 

difficult thing might be done, and then go 

figure out an innovative way to solve the 

problem,” said Mike Bolen, who was named 

CEO in 2000, becoming the first chief 

executive without the last name of McCarthy. 

“That is what builders do.” 

In April 2002, 138 years of McCarthy family 

ownership ended when Mike McCarthy 

sold his majority interest in the company to 

McCarthy employees who now have a personal 

stake in the company’s future. This ownership 

culture creates an empowering environment 

directed toward providing clients with innovative, 

value-oriented solutions. 

“We operate like a family—learning 

from each other, overcoming challenges 

and working together to achieve success 

for clients,” says Derek Glanvill, 

president and COO of McCarthy. 

McCarthy is proud of its St. Louis 

roots, proud of the more than $9 billion 

of work it has done in the metro 

area and the nearly $1 billion in work 

currently under contract in the region. 

Year after year, the company has been 

recognized as a Best Place to Work in 

both St. Louis and across the country. 

McCarthy’s never-ending goal is 

to be the Best Builder in America. 

“There’s no better place to make that 

happen than St. Louis,” says Glanvill. 

Above: Across the United States, 

McCarthy is proud to build buildings 

that make a difference—in healthcare, 

technology, government or higher education 

just to name a few categories. This is the 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 

in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Below: Almost anywhere you go in St. Louis, 

it is likely you will find a McCarthy-built 

structure nearby. This is the Ridgeway 

Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden. 


2 8 7

ASSOCIATED GENERAL CONTRACTORS 

Above: BJC HealthCare, Barnes-Jewish 

Center for Outpatient Health. 

Contractor: Tarlton/Interface Joint Venture. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JOHN LANGHOLZ 

AND CHRISTNER, INC. 

Below: Stan Musial Veterans Memorial 

Bridge. Contractor: MTA. 


THE MISSOURI DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION. 

OF ST. LOUIS 

Associated General Contractors of St. Louis, 

the leading voice of the St. Louis area’s construction 

industry, represents construction 

contractors and industry related companies 

dedicated to skill, integrity and responsibility. 

AGC of St. Louis serves its members with 

a wide array of services to help build their 

businesses, including governmental advocacy, 

labor relations services, training and education 

and networking opportunities. 

AGC of St. Louis was founded in 1949, an 

era when the commercial construction industry 

was dealing with the post-World War II building 

boom and needed better organized representation. 

This included a more coordinated 

approach to negotiations with labor unions, 

better governmental representation, and the 

need for development of a trained workforce. 

AGC of St. Louis was formed through a 

merger of the Master Builders Association, 

a building contractor’s organization founded 

in 1903, and the Municipal Contractors 

Association, which had been formed in 1917. 

Together, these two organizations represented 

building contractors and highway/infrastructure 

contractors respectively. The merger of the 

two associations and affiliation with Associated 

General Contractors of America created a more 

efficient and productive organization to serve 

the needs of St. Louis contractors. 

In an effort to recruit and train much needed 

skilled workers for the construction industry, 

AGC of St. Louis founded the Construction 

Training Advancement Foundation in 1963 

to fund, build and operate the Construction 

Training School. This was one of the first multicraft 

apprenticeship training centers in the 

nation and provided apprenticeship programs 

for carpenters, cement masons, ironworkers, 

laborers and operating engineers. 

AGC of St. Louis also started the first 

construction oriented charter high school in 

the U.S., the Construction Careers Center. 

This community activity has helped hundreds 

of young people to learn about construction 

career opportunities while earning a high 

school diploma. A vast majority of the 

students in this program are underprivileged 

and AGC of St. Louis has provided significant 

time and capital to support the Center. 

In addition, AGC of St. Louis founded and 

continues to operate one of the first local 

mobile safety van training programs, 

Operation SafeSite. This program provides 

on-site safety training on construction jobs 

throughout the St. Louis region. 

When labor jurisdictional issues were 

creating market problems for St. Louis, AGC 

of St. Louis was instrumental in formation 

of the PRIDE (Productivity and Responsibility 

Increase Development and Employment) 


288

organization and continues to provide 

labor relations service today. 

AGC of St. Louis also started the first 

mentor-protégé program for minority 

contractors in St. Louis and provided 

support services for the Contractors 

Assistance Program in the City of 

St. Louis, providing project information 

and mentoring for start-up firms. 

AGC of St. Louis hosts the only 

credentialing center for Building 

Information Modeling (BIM) in the 

region, allowing local construction firms 

to train and certify their construction 

professionals in computer aided building 

modeling and construction techniques. 

Membership in AGC of St. Louis has grown 

with the marketplace and the association 

currently represents 400 member companies 

performing approximately $1.5 billion of 

commercial construction work in the St. Louis 

region. The organization has fifteen employees 

who work in the areas of governmental advocacy, 

safety, professional development, labor 

relations, inclusion services, and networking 

and information. 

Looking to the future, AGC of St. Louis is 

working to expand into new service areas 

as the construction marketplace changes. 

New training programs for BIM and Lean 

Construction are now taking hold. Services to 

help the community build a more inclusive 

business base and workforce are becoming 

more important as the demographics of the 

St. Louis region evolve. As the regulatory 

requirements for development and construction 

continue to become more complex, 

governmental advocacy is playing a larger role 

in the association’s service model. 

As a member-driven organization, the members 

of AGC of St. Louis determine the direction 

of the association through the committees 

on which they serve and by the programs, 

policies, and priorities the committees recommend 

to the board of directors, composed 

entirely of members. The staff, led by President 

Len Toenjes, CAE, administers decisions made 

by the membership and board of directors. 

There are literally dozens of opportunities 

for contractors to network within the AGC of 

St. Louis and many members say that effective 

networking opportunities is the number one 

advantage of their membership. Membership 

also provides access to a national network of 

companies and an opportunity to exchange 

ideas and best practices, and to discuss problems 

and solutions. For those in the construction 

industry, the AGC of St. Louis offers the 

perfect environment in which to build new 

business relationships and strengthen existing 

ones. This is why companies that use the 

resources of AGC seem to thrive and grow. 

They have greater abilities and more options 

to take advantage of emerging opportunities 

and industry trends. 

AGC of St. Louis is headquartered at 6330 

Knox Industrial Drive in St. Louis. For more 

information, visit the website at www.agcstl.org. 

Above: Three Sixty Rooftop Bar. 

Contractor: Paric Corporation. 


© DEBBIE FRANKE PHOTOGRAPHY, 2012. 

Below: Ameren LFGTE Plant. 

Contractor: Guarantee Electrical Company. 


2 8 9

U.S. CUSTOM HOUSE AND POST OFFICE 

(OLD POST OFFICE) 

DEVELOPERS: THE DESCO GROUP 

TOP: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HEDRICH BLESSING. 

ABOVE: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF KAREN ELSHOUT. 

AND DFC GROUP 

The U.S. Custom House 

and Post Office building in 

St. Louis is one of the most 

historically and architecturally 

significant buildings in 

America. The building was 

one of five grand U.S. Custom 

Houses built after the Civil 

War in America’s fastest 

growing cities: St. Louis, 

Boston, Cincinnati, New York 

and Philadelphia. These 

masterpieces of design and 

construction were built to last, 

but by 1942, all but ours had been demolished. 

Alfred B. Mullett, Supervising Architect of 

the U.S. Treasury, designed this building in 

1871, inspired by the Louvre in Paris. The 

only other surviving example of his work in 

the Second Empire style is the Old Executive 

Office Building in Washington, D.C. 

The building’s construction used innovative 

heating and ventilation technologies, as well 

as elevators to move the people, mail, and 

gold (one of three national Sub-Treasuries 

occupied the lowest level). A moat surrounds 

the building, bringing light and air two floors 

below street level. 

Designed just after the Chicago fire of 

1871, fireproofing was of utmost importance. 

Iron was used in place of wood throughout 

the building, which offered an added benefit 

of making exceptional decorative detailing 

affordable, where hand-carved details would 

have been cost prohibitive. 

Construction began in 1872, and the first 

of many challenges arose. Quicksand was 

revealed beneath the corner of 8th Street & 

Locust. Quick thinking gave a sound solution: 

4,400 pine pilings and hundreds of cotton 

bales were forced into the mire, followed by 

an eight-foot-thick slab of concrete, forming 

a foundation so solid that 130 years later, 

no settlement cracking is found! 

The building’s completion in 1884 brought 

a surge in traffic to the area, setting off a 

flurry of new developments. The new center 

of downtown, “The New Post Office” served 

as conduit for commerce and correspondence 

to and from all points west. The building was 

home to the following tenants: 

• Federal 8th Circuit Court, covering ten 

states and four territories, and spanning 

1,000 miles east to west 

• U.S. Post Office 

• Collector of Customs 

• U.S. Secret Service 

• U.S. Marshals Service 

• Inspector of Steamboats 

• Inspector of Lighthouses 

• Inspector of Signal Service 

One of the building’s best-known features 

is its monumental sculpture Peace and 

Vigilance by Daniel Chester French. It was 

one of his first public commissions (his later 

work includes the massive seated portrait of 

Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial 

in Washington, D.C.). Installed on the dome 

in 1882, Peace and Vigilance was removed 

for restoration in 1990; soon after, a cement 


290

eplica took its place on the dome. The 

restored original now graces the light-filled 

central atrium. 

When the U.S. Post Office was relocated 

to a newer building in 1935, this building 

became known as the “Old Post Office.” 

After 1935 the building fell into disuse 

and disrepair over subsequent years. St. Louis’ 

preservation efforts in 1967-1971 saved the 

building from demolition under the Federal 

Government’s watch. As a result of those 

efforts, it was designated a National Historic 

Landmark. However, the building was 

practically vacant by the mid-1990s. It stood 

like a “hulking shadow of unfulfilled 

promise”—a hole in the heart of downtown. 

In 1998, Downtown NOW! presented a 

detailed action plan to revive the Old Post 

Office and the entire district, which at the 

time included over 2.5 million vacant square 

feet on Old Post Office Square. Webster 

University expressed interest in the building 

for its downtown campus, and The DESCO 

Group and DFC Group joined forces to 

redevelop it through a public-private 

partnership, acknowledging the importance 

of a solution to the parking needs of the entire 

area to empower its development, as well as 

other surrounding historic buildings. 

With Webster University and the Missouri 

Court of Appeals, Eastern District as the 

building’s anchor tenants, the redevelopment 

was off and running—a uniquely collaborative 

effort. With the support and cooperation of 

federal, state and city government officials, 

and private and corporate contributors, 

the restoration of the Old Post Office 

($47 million) and creation of the new Ninth 

Street Garage ($33 million) were completed 

in time to rededicate the building on 

March 15, 2006 (122 years to the day since 

General William Sherman had presided over 

the original dedication). 

The building is 100 percent leased and 

restored. Today’s tenants include: 

• Webster University 

• St. Louis Business Journal 

• St. Louis Public Library 

• FOCUS St. Louis 

• Teach For America 

• Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District 

• Missouri Attorney General 

• Missouri Secretary of State 

• Missouri Department of Health & Senior 

Services 

• Missouri Arts Council 

Culinaria, a Schnucks urban market 

focused on fine food and a unique culinary 

experience, is situated across the street 

from the Old Post Office at 

the Ninth Street Garage 

street level. 

Following completion of 

the Old Post Office, over 

$300 million was immediately 

invested in surrounding 

buildings and outdoor plaza. 

That scale of investment 

continues today, as plans for 

the Arcade and Chemical 

Buildings (over 700,000 total 

square feet) are underway. The 

Old Post Office was not only 

restored to its original beauty, 

but to its usefulness and power 

as a catalyst for further 

development of downtown 


ABOVE: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF KAREN ELSHOUT. 

BELOW: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ALISE O’BRIEN. 


2 9 1

SHEET METAL 

WORKERS 

LOCAL UNION 36 

The development of the sheet metal industry 

owes much to a legacy of craftsmanship and 

trade union commitment began by coppersmiths, 

braziers and tin plate workers in 

Great Britain. The roots of the trade and the 

organization of craftsmen go back more than 

five centuries. 

The second half of the nineteenth century 

saw the dream of a national union in the 

United States become a reality. The formation 

of the General Tramping Union of Tin Plate 

Workers’ in 1861 evolved eventually into 

the Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers 

International Association. Sheet Metal Workers 

Local 36 received its first charter from the 

International Association on January 1, 1891. 

The first recorded wages for local sheet 

metal workers was 37½ cents an hour in 1903. 

Since it was founded 123 years ago, Local 36 

has been devoted to building value for the 

area’s signatory contractors. Encompassing 

three-fourths of the State of Missouri, as well 

as all of Arkansas, Local 36 has a membership 

of more than 3,000 and serves more than 180 

contractors. Local 36 encompasses the greater 

St. Louis metropolitan area, Eastern Missouri, 

and Columbia, Jefferson City, and Springfield, 

Missouri. Local 36 is an affiliate 

of the International Association 

of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and 

Transportation (SMART) workers 

with membership in the AFL-CIO 

and the Canadian Labor Council. 

Local 36’s elected officials 

help members in obtaining 

employment and managing daily 

operations, including the important 

role of recruiting new members 

and organizing contractors. 

Representatives cooperate closely with the 

Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee in 

providing education and promoting safety. 

The foundation of Local 36 is built on six 

cornerstones: integrity, value, flexibility, respect, 

teamwork and accountability for results. 

The skilled craftsmen of Local 36 touch a 

project at every point of construction and play 

a major role in regional development. Their 

skills cut across all trades as members fabricate, 

install, manufacture and service residential 

HVAC systems, are integrally involved 

with commercial and industrial projects, and 

work with architectural sheet metal applications 

and specialty sheet metal products. 

Sheet metal is the only craft on a job site 

that still measures, fabricates, and installs 

and all working members are required to 

have a good working knowledge of Algebra, 

Geometry and Trigonometry. “All our members 

have to be available to go out and 

measure a project and understand what’s 

going on,” comments President and Business 

Manager of Local 36 David Zimmermann. 

St. Louis area members are required to 

have city and county mechanical licenses, 

which require completion of twelve PEU 

(Professional Education Units) of industry 

training each year. To keep up-to-date with 

industry practices and stay on the cutting 

edge of technology, apprentices receive 

10,000 hours of training with 160 hours of 

classroom instruction a year for four years. 

Recognizing the need for maintaining a 

skilled and educated workforce, Local 36 and 

its contractor partners, SMACNA/St. Louis, 

invest more than $2 million in training 

annually through a Joint Apprenticeship and 

Training Committee. 


292

In 2012, Local 36 invested $23 million in 

a new facility to serve all its training, benefit 

and administrative operations. The facilities, 

at 2319 Chouteau Avenue in St. Louis, 

brought together the administrative and 

benefit offices that were formerly located on 

South Ewing Avenue and a training center on 

Spruce Street. The new facility is built on 

the site of an old boiler factory, which had 

been vacant for decades and represents a 

tremendous contribution to the revitalization 

of an area on the edge of downtown St. Louis. 

The project was also an opportunity to 

showcase the architecture, skills, craftsmanship 

and technology used by sheet metal 

workers. The 96,000 square foot building utilizes 

the region’s most advanced sustainable 

technology and energy efficient procedures 

and practices. It is the region’s highest rated 

LEED Platinum Building, receiving sixty-two 

out of a possible sixty-nine LEED points for 

sustainable technology and energy efficient 

products and practices by the U.S. Green 

Building Council. Among the building’s 

many energy conservation features are twelve 

different HVAC systems including solar, wind 

turbine, geothermal and conventional. 

The facility in the new building is 

a working educational resource 

with state-of-the-art technology and 

advanced systems designed to train 

thousands of craftsmen in skills that will 

have a far-reaching economic impact. 

The facility has been designated as one 

of only eight centers in the nation that 

can provide Testing Adjusting Balancing 

Bureau (TABB) certifications developed 

by the National Energy Management 

Institute Committee (NEMIC). 

“Technology is improving all the time 

and with this new training facility we’ve 

committed 56,000 square feet to state-ofthe-art 

training to keep our membership on 

the cutting edge of technology so we can 

produce the best craftsmen in the industry,” 

says Zimmermann. 

Local 36 operates with a staff of about 

forty people, including thirty in St. Louis. 

Members of Local 36 contribute more 

than $200,000 each year to such charitable 

organizations as St. Vincent Home for 

Children, Habitat for Humanity, Rebuilding 

Together, United Way and the American 

Red Cross. 

SMART Local 36 has a strong tradition of 

striving to be the best at whatever it sets out 

to do. Members embrace new technology 

and endeavor to be on the cutting edge of 

changes and advancements in its trade. With 

a mission statement focused on integrity, 

value, and flexibility, Local 36 will continue 

to build strong relationships between its 

members and the contractors they serve, and 

promote a work environment that invites 

respect and rewards excellence. 


2 9 3

WATLOW 

ELECTRIC 

MANUFACTURING 

COMPANY 

Right: Since 1922, Watlow has been 

owned and operated by the Desloge family. 

Clockwise, starting from the top right, 

leaders have included founder Louis, Sr., 

(seated); sons George and Louis, Jr.; 

and grandson and current Chairman 

and CEO Peter Desloge. 

Below: Watlow’s trade show display from 

the 1950s. George Desloge and fellow 

engineers invented many innovative 

low wattage electric heaters including the 

groundbreaking FIREROD ® cartridge 

heater, still in use today. 


294 

A passion for enriching lives through 

inspired innovation has energized the evolution 

and growth of Watlow Electric Manufacturing 

Company since Louis Desloge, Sr., first began 

manufacturing electrical heating elements in 

1922 for shoe manufacturers. 

From its original space at 1409 Pine Street, 

the St. Louis-based company has grown to 

rank among the world’s largest thermal 

engineering companies, delivering solutions 

and technical support globally. Today, Watlow 

employs more than 2,000 team members 

(400 in St. Louis), operates 12 manufacturing 

facilities and technology centers in the U.S. 

and around the world, and serves clients from 

sales offices in 15 countries. 

Watlow now applies its innovative thermal 

technologies to various applications for customers 

in key industries all over the world. 

For example, Watlow’s 

temperature sensing 

solutions help cut 

harmful emissions from 

diesel engines. The 

company’s unique heating 

devices are applied 

in numerous medical 

applications to increase 

patient comfort and 

make care more accessible. 

Watlow’s industry-leading 

solutions 

are used in many 

processes to help make 

energy production cleaner and more affordable. 

The company’s advanced solutions are 

improving thermal management of semiconductor 

manufacturing which, in turn, 

creates faster, smaller, less expensive and 

more powerful computer chips. 

Watlow team members are committed to 

being the best at applying their collective 

knowledge of heaters, sensors and controllers 

to create a positive impact for Watlow 

customers and for the world. 

The name ‘Watlow’ was coined by 

Desloge, Sr., to express the low wattage 

custom heating elements he manufactured, 

an idea decades ahead of its time. He was a 

classic entrepreneur with technical prowess 

in electrical engineering. 

The new company soon was developing 

electric heaters for brick presses that replaced 

the more costly steam process. Consumer 

products followed in 1924, then custom 

heating units to fit the dies used in making 

hats. By 1931, Watlow was providing 

customers with electric immersion heaters 

to replace steam pipes and flammable gas. 

Watlow relocated to its first bona fide 

factory near downtown St. Louis in 1924. 

Growth necessitated moves to new manufacturing 

facilities in St. Louis County. The first 

in Pagedale (1952) was followed in 1961 by 

a new facility at 12001 Lackland Road, where 

groundbreaking product innovation spurred 

several expansions. The world headquarters 

remains there today. 

The founder’s search for a successor led 

him to his son, George Burdeau Desloge. 

After service in the U.S. Navy as a Catapult 

Officer during World War II, George joined 

Watlow as a design engineer in 1948. 

With a fervor sustained by his drive to be 

the best in meeting customers’ needs, he 

expressed simplicity and reliability in his 

product design work. 

By 1950, George had invented the narrow 

band cylindrical heater with its patented 

clamping strap for use in plastics processing. 

In 1954, he invented and later patented the 

FIREROD ® cartridge heater that outperformed 

all competing heaters by a factor of at least 

ten times. He remained a prolific inventor 

throughout his career.

He was joined at Watlow in 1963 by his 

brother, Louis Desloge, Jr., in the role of sales 

manager. With a degree in Foreign Service 

from Georgetown University, Louis, Jr., 

added strong sales management expertise. 

When their father retired in 1965, George 

became president of Watlow, focused on engineering, 

operations and innovation. Louis, Jr., 

was promoted to vice president, committed 

to developing an exemplary global sales 

organization. Together, they built a team that 

was prepared and inspired to be the best in 

solving problems with Watlow products. 

Their joint efforts shaped Watlow into a 

total thermal solutions provider. Over their 

thirty year span of joint leadership (1963 

to 1993), Watlow grew into a global provider 

known for innovative thermal solutions 

as annual revenues skyrocketed from $1.8 

million in 1963 to $143.6 million in 1993. 

From this position of strength, Watlow 

was led by President Gary Neal beginning 

in 1991 while George remained chairman 

and Louis, Jr., served as vice chairman. 

Growth through the 1990s was accomplished 

via strategic acquisitions and global expansion 

in North America, Europe, Asia and 

Latin America. 

Third-generation family members were 

attracted to Watlow in the early 1990s. Peter, 

a mechanical engineer blessed with the 

hands-on style, strong inventive streak and 

drive to develop client-focused solutions 

expressed by his father, George, joined 

Watlow in 1990. His cousin, Steve Desloge, 

brought complementary strengths upon 

becoming chief financial officer in 1996. 

In 1999, Peter became chairman of the 

board, and he was joined on the board in 

2001 by Steve, who today oversees IT and 

legal operations as well. They were 

joined by Tom LaMantia, who served 

as chief operating officer from 2002- 

2007 and as president of Watlow 

starting in 2007. 

Under Peter’s leadership, the company 

adopted the Watlow Way in 

2003. This instilled a continuous 

improvement and people-centric culture 

worldwide. The firm excels in 

solving some of the world’s most 

challenging thermal problems and 

serving humanity via its market focus 

discipline, a strategy that establishes 

deep roots in particular industries to 

create much richer value for customers. 

Today, the company holds more than 200 

patents and annual sales have grown to $330 

million. Watlow’s focus on product leadership 

that meets the thermal needs of the 

world’s leading companies continues to fuel 

its growth and success, as it has since 1922. 

Left: Watlow solves some of the world’s most 

challenging thermal problems with unique 

thermal technologies serving key industries. 

In Watlow’s Class 10,000 cleanroom, 

products are tested before delivery to 

customers in the semiconductor industry. 

Below: Today, Watlow develops and 

manufactures complete thermal systems 

including industrial heaters, temperature 

sensors, wire and cable, temperature 

controllers, power controllers and 

supporting software. 


2 9 5

MONSANTO 

The vast majority of our nation’s agricultural 

production takes place within a five-hundredmile 

radius of St. Louis. Supported by tens of 

thousands of farmers and livestock producers, 

this work is essential to meeting the demands 

of our country as well as a world population 

that is growing by 200,000 people daily. 

The challenges facing agriculture and food 

production are staggering. Collectively, the 

agriculture industry, all production practices 

and literally millions of farmers and agriculture 

producers around the world will be called on 

to do more to meet the growing demands for 

more food, feed, energy, and water. 

These global demands mean that the 

companies that focus on serving farmers must 

also focus on discovering and delivering 

innovations that can help them farm better 

each year. This is central to the work of 

St. Louis’ leading agricultural business, 

Monsanto Company. 

The Monsanto name has a long history in 

business, and in the St. Louis area, with its 

origin dating back to 1901. However, the 

Monsanto Company that exists today was 

incorporated in 2000 and is focused solely on 

agriculture. In 2002, following a period of 

mergers and reorganizations, its old corporate 

parent spun off Monsanto Company, a move 

that established it as an independent, publicly 

held agricultural company. Since that time, 

the agriculture company has realized strong 

financial performance with year-after-year 

growth of more than twenty percent for eight 

of the last ten years. 

Today, Monsanto focuses on helping 

farmers meet the demands of our society 

and planet. Monsanto applies modern-day 

agriculture sciences such as plant-breeding, 

biotechnology and other agronomic practices 

to develop and support products for farmers 

around the world. This work helps enable 

both small-holder and large-scale farmers 

to produce more from their land while 

conserving more of our world’s natural 

resources such as water and energy. 

The company sells corn, soybean, cotton 

and vegetable seeds as well as crop protection 

products to farmers around the world. Seed 

offerings are marketed through national and 

regional brands that include DEKALB, Asgrow, 

Deltapine, Channel, Seminis and DeRuiter. 

Monsanto also broadly licenses its technologies 

to approximately 160 independent seed 

companies and distributors so farmers can 

access the products they prefer in the brands 


296

they prefer. The company’s portfolio also 

includes leading brands such as Roundup 

herbicides, which have a long history of safe 

use in more than one hundred countries. 

Monsanto is “Proud to be St. Louis Grown” 

and operates its world headquarters in Creve 

Coeur, Missouri, and its global research 

headquarters in Chesterfield, Missouri. The 

company employs more than 23,000 people 

in 60 countries around the world, including 

more than 4,000 in the St. Louis region. 

Monsanto recently announced that it will 

invest $400 million to expand its research 

headquarters in Chesterfield, a move that will 

create 675 new jobs over the next three years. 

In 2013, Monsanto spent $1.5 billion on 

research and development (R&D) with primary 

focus on improving yield through crop 

breeding, biotechnology and improved 

agronomic practices. More than twenty percent 

of the company’s employees are involved in 

R&D to improve crops such as corn, soybeans, 

cotton, canola, alfalfa, sugarcane, wheat, 

tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, melons, 

broccoli, and lettuce. The company also 

partners with many leaders throughout the 

public/private sector, including more than 3,900 

technology-related agreements with public and 

private institutions around the world. 

As an agricultural company, Monsanto 

recognizes that the company and its employees 

can make an important contribution to 

improving the productivity and environmental 

footprint of food production and the company 

is committed to doing just that. In 2008, 

Monsanto was one of the first companies to 

set a series of goals to make agriculture more 

sustainable. The company is committed to the 

development improved seeds by 2030 that 

will double yields from 2000 levels for corn, 

soybeans, cotton and spring-planted canola; 

and support efforts to use one-third fewer 

key resources such as land, water and energy 

per unit of output. 

Monsanto is not only one of the region’s 

top employers, but is also routinely recognized 

as one of the best companies for which to 

work. The company has been named one 

of the “World’s Top 25 Best Multinational 

Workplaces,” and in 2013 was named one 

of the “Top 100 Best Corporate Citizens” 

by Corporate Responsibility Magazine. The 

company was also ranked among the “Top 

100 Sustainable Companies” by Corporate 

Knights Capital, a leading index recognizing 

sustainability in business. 

Monsanto continues to focus on 

strengthening the communities where its 

employees live and work. The company 

provides basic education support designed to 

improve education in farming communities 

throughout the world through support of 

schools, libraries, science centers and training 

programs. The company’s philanthropic work 

includes support of nonprofit organizations 

that help in such areas as food security, 

sanitation, and access to clean water, public 

safety and other local needs. In 2013 the 

company’s philanthropic arm, Monsanto 

Fund, contributed more than $24 million to 

support communities around the world. 

Monsanto is proud to support farmers and 

farming communities throughout the world. 

The problems facing agriculture and our world 

are common, but the solutions that can make a 

difference are as varied as the many regions 

where the company’s employees live and work. 


2 9 7

PARIC 

CORPORATION 

PARIC Corporation is the leading general 

contractor, construction manager and designbuild 

firm in the St. Louis region and is one 

of the largest privately held companies in 

the Midwest. The company specializes in 

senior living, healthcare, historic renovation, 

hospitality and multifamily residential, public 

and academic projects, as well as interior 

specialty projects. PARIC manages construction 

projects for long-term and repeat clients 

ranging from universities and banks to hotels, 

restaurants and warehouses. 

PARIC Corporation was founded in April 

1979 as a partnership between Paul J. McKee, 

Jr., and his wife, Midge, and Richard F. Jordan 

and his wife, LaVona. After much discussion 

and brainstorming, the partners agreed on a 

clear vision for a unique type of construction 

company specializing in design-build projects. 

The name PARIC is an acronym for the 

combination of the first names of the company 

founders: Paul and Rick’s company. 

Paul and Rick began business in a small, 

1,200 square foot office in the Westport area 

of St. Louis with the credo of “People Make 

the Difference.” During the early days, the 

founders’ families took turns cleaning the 

company office and warehouse with help 

from their children, one of whom, Joe McKee 

is PARIC’s owner and CEO today. 

When they started PARIC, Paul and Rick 

made a decision to invest heavily in information 

technology rather than construction 

equipment. Accurate, timely cost and scheduling 

information was considered far more 

important to project owners than “who 

owned the backhoe.” This was in the very 

early days of computer technology and all 

programs had to be developed in-house. 

When Compac introduced the first portable 

computer, PARIC bought them for its major 

development customers, equipping them with 

PARIC’s proprietary proforma program. This 

made it possible for customers to expeditiously 

analyze many project variations without 

having to wait on analysis by their accountants. 

This accelerated the preconstruction 

process while lowering project risks for 

customers. This approach also made PARIC 

the preferred contractor for many developers. 

Paul and Rick’s entrepreneurial, values-based 

business model took hold quickly and, in 1980, 

PARIC built its first office building. By 1982 the 

firm had developed relationships with many 

major national corporations and many of the 

region’s most successful commercial developers. 


298

In 1995, PARIC was featured in 

a cover story in Building Design and 

Construction magazine, which heralded 

the company’s unique processes 

and systems based on the use of 

information technology. Paul and 

Rick believed that the integration of 

accurate, easily accessible designcost 

and scheduling information 

would be a valuable tool for developers 

and facility owners when 

planning a project. 

As PARIC moved into the twentyfirst 

century, the company was 

hailed by the St. Louis Regional Chamber 

and Growth Association as the champions of 

the design/build model. Meanwhile, company 

leadership was transitioning to the next 

generation, with Joe becoming president and 

Greg Frick chief operating officer. 

Joe grew up in the business, beginning as a 

laborer while still in high school and working 

later as a carpenter, assistant estimator and 

assistant project engineer. He joined the company 

full-time in 1993 after graduating from 

Vanderbilt University and earning a master’s 

degree in business administration from 

Washington University. 

In 2002, Joe purchased the company from 

Paul and Rick and moved the headquarters to 

O’Fallon. That same year, PARIC cracked the 

Top 200 of the Engineering News-Record’s Top 

400 Contractors list, coming in at number 178. 

The company was also ranked as fiftieth among 

the largest design/build firms in America. 

Rather than going after a wide range of projects 

PARIC started to focus on a few key markets 

that showed the most opportunity for future 

growth. This niche focus allowed PARIC to 

become the experts for these key markets. 

Over the next ten years, PARIC would receive 

various accolades for projects in the region. 

From AGC Keystone Awards and CNR 

Regional Excellence Awards, to Best Practices 

Awards and various safety and quality awards. 

In 2012, PARIC embarked on a leadership 

transition that included the ascension of Keith 

Wolkoff to president and a move into a new 

headquarters location in St. Louis County. 

The year 2012 also brought the culmination 

of a thorough evaluation of the PARIC 

brand that led to an evolution of the brand 

strategy and a recommitment to the company’s 

core values. The rebranding resulted in 

a complete redesign of visual identity, codification 

of PARIC’s brand attributes and the 

slogan, Experience. Excellence. 

“We work hard to take our services to the 

next level,” comments Joe. “We’re very committed 

and intimately involved with our customers 

and, as such, become partners and deliver our 

services in a way that is simply unparalleled.” 

During its thirty-five years in business, 

PARIC has worked to create a fulfilling work 

experience by offering a variety of benefits 

to its employees and creating a fulfilling, 

family-focused atmosphere. As a result, more 

than thirty percent of PARIC employees 

have remained with the company for more 

than ten years. In 2013, PARIC was named 

a finalist for Best Places To Work by the 

St. Louis Business Journal. 

One of PARIC’s core values is enhancing 

the community. As part of that effort, PARIC 

encourages and recognizes the philanthropic 

efforts of its employees by making a 

contribution to a charity of the employee’s 

choice. These organizations have included 

Habitat for Humanity, Stray Rescue, the 

National Children’s Cancer Society, National 

Multiple Sclerosis Society, Cystic Fibrosis 

Foundation, and the United Way. 

As PARIC moves forward into the future it 

looks to continue the stable growth, while 

remembering where it got its start. This is 

clearly defined in the company’s new brand 

promise of “Building Excellence to Move our 

Community Forward.” 


2 9 9

HUNTER 

ENGINEERING 

COMPANY 

Right: Hunter’s Bridgeton, Missouri 

international headquarters spans 

thirty acres. 

Below: Lee Hunter, Jr., founded Hunter 

Engineering Company by challenging 

conventional theories. 

Opposite, clockwise starting from the top: 

Hunter’s patented HawkEye Elite 

alignment system is the No. 1 selling 

wheel aligner in the world. 

Hunter’s commitment to product quality is 

unmatched. Prior to shipment, Hunter 

inspects 100 percent of products for 

performance and accuracy. 

Over 350 Hunter Service Representatives 

serve Hunter customers in North America. 

The Road Force Touch ® wheel balancer 

guides the technician with live 3D graphics. 


300 

Founded in 1946, Hunter Engineering 

Company is the global leader in automotive 

service equipment. While Hunter is now 

known for its complete line of top-quality 

service equipment, the company began with 

a single breakthrough. 

In the 1930s, Washington University 

student Lee Hunter, Jr., became increasingly 

frustrated with car batteries of the era, 

which frequently died and took days to 

recharge. Defying engineering experts, Hunter 

designed the “Kwikurent”—the world’s first 

quick-charge battery changer, reducing 

battery recharge time to hours. 

After returning from 

World War II, Hunter founded 

Hunter Engineering 

Company to concentrate on 

new automotive challenges. 

Today, Hunter Engineering 

designs computerized wheel 

alignment systems, lift racks, 

wheel balancers, brake 

lathes and inspection lane 

equipment for the world’s 

top automotive manufacturers, 

including Volkswagen 

Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, 

Ford, Toyota and General 

Motors, as well as for leading 

service providers such as 

Goodyear, Firestone and 

Sears Automotive. 

Hunter’s thirty acre Bridgeton campus 

hosts the largest research and development 

team in the automotive service equipment 

industry. Over seventy dedicated electrical, 

computer science and mechanical engineers 

develop solutions to the latest automotive 

problems. With over 

100 patents in force 

today and growing, 

Hunter’s engineering 

team earns close to one 

new patent per month. 

Beyond Hunter’s 

lead manufacturing 

plant in Bridgeton, 

Hunter equipment is 

manufactured in four 

additional company 

plants in Mississippi. 

With products ranging 

from intricate circuit 

boards to 16,000 pound 

capacity alignment lifts, 

Hunter’s plants produce 

a full line of automotive service 

equipment for shipment around the world. 

Hunter customers in North America are 

served by an industry-leading field organization 

of over 650 independent Sales 

and Service Representatives. Hunter Sales 

Representatives provide automotive dealers 

and independent shop owners with on-site

product demonstrations and sales support. 

Hunter Service Representatives provide 

same-day or next-day service to all Hunter 

customers. Regional training centers in 

forty-five locations help Hunter customers 

maximize their equipment investment with 

local, ASE-certified training. 

Growing demand for Hunter’s products 

has led to a network of over 100 franchised 

distributors in more than ninety countries. 

Hunter also manages wholly owned 

subsidiaries in Canada, Germany and China 

to give auto manufacturers and large 

customers the same support found in the 


Following Lee Hunter’s commitment to 

innovation and progress, Hunter Engineering 

continues to provide revolutionary equipment 

to customers around the world. 


3 0 1

AMERICAN 

RADIOLABELED 

CHEMICALS, INC. 

(ARC) 

Above: ARC’s main building. 

Below: Some of ARC’s employees at its 

thirty year anniversary party. Left to right, 

back row: Chang Wang (ARC Canada), 

Ajay Gupta (ARC India), Bary Stephenson, 

Jensen Estrada, Nick Rice, Phani 

Veeramachaneni, Donald J Lite III, and 

Janardhanam Selvasekaran. Left to right, 

front row: Jason Yu (Shin), Kristina Lafser, 

Subhash Bansal (ARC UK), Radhey Gupta, 

Surendra Gupta, Phil Korb, Kamal Das, 

Chandranan Vora, Sunil Gupta, 

and Salesh Gupta. 


302 

Since its inception in 1983, American 

Radiolabeled Chemicals, Inc. (ARC) has 

established itself as one of the world’s leading 

suppliers of high quality radiolabeled and 

unlabeled chemicals. ARC’s 2014 catalog, 

the largest in the world, contains more than 

5,000 radiolabeled and unlabeled chemicals 

for life science research. More than eighty-five 

percent of the products in the catalog are 

available exclusively through ARC. Through 

a network of distributors in more than 

twenty countries and its own offices in 

Canada, India, and the United Kingdom, ARC 

sells its products worldwide. 

As the name implies, radiochemicals are 

chemicals in which one or more atoms have 

been replaced with a radioactive isotope. 

These research tools are used for tracking 

pharmaceuticals and other compounds as they 

work their way through living things and are 

used for life science research by pharmaceutical 

industries and universities worldwide. 

The founder and president of ARC is 

Surendra Gupta who came to America from his 

native India in 1963 to earn his Ph.D. at Wayne 

State University (Detroit, Michigan) in 1968. 

He had already earned his Bachelors and 

Masters Degrees from Delhi University and his 

Master of Technology Degree from the Indian 

Institute of Technology (I.I.T.) in Mumbai. 

Surendra came to Wayne State on the recommendation 

of one of his professors from I.I.T. 

Two key events happened at Wayne State 

that would forever change Surendra’s life: a 

dissertation topic focused on carbohydrate 

chemistry and meeting Karen, the woman 

who would eventually become his wife. 

After receiving his Ph.D. and completing 

research at Western Michigan University in 

Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1974, Surendra applied 

to one of only two radioactive carbohydrate 

chemical companies in the world at the time, 

New England Nuclear Corporation (NEN) in 

Boston. Because of his unique specialization, 

he joined NEN as a group leader of seven 

chemists in the carbohydrate group. While 

working there, he gained immense knowledge 

of radioactive chemicals and how profitable 

they can be. 

In 1981, NEN was about to be acquired 

by Dupont, Surendra left NEN and joined 

Pathfinder Labs in St. Louis as a group leader 

involved not only in R&D and production of 

radiochemicals, but also marketing. When the 

company experienced financial difficulties 

during the 1983 recession, Surendra decided 

to start his own company. 

Surendra comes from a family of business 

owners and understands the importance of 

operating with a tight budget and debt-free.

Surendra and Karen started American 

Radiolabeled Chemicals, Inc. in 1983 with a 

SBA guaranteed loan of $60,000, which they 

were able to pay off within the first year. They 

were able to rent a small building at 4545 Shaw 

Avenue in St. Louis for $300 per month and 

acquired the necessary license from the U.S. 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). They 

purchased most of the required lab equipment 

and supplies for $5,000 from Missouri 

Biochemical Labs operated in St. Louis by 

Masters and Johnson, the renowned sex therapists. 

ARC’s first employee was a former colleague 

and friend who had vast experience in 

synthesizing radiochemicals and was able to set 

up the new labs. Due to the low cost of living, 

St. Louis was an ideal place to start a high-tech 

company at low cost. The production started in 

1984 and the customer base began to increase 

as the word spread quickly about ARC. Some of 

the key customers of ARC were a group of neuroscientists 

at Washington University, who used 

ARC’s products for brain mapping. They were 

also instrumental in spreading the word about 

ARC’s high quality products at very low prices. 

In 1985, Surendra and Karen moved their 

company from downtown St. Louis to a 2,400 

square foot building in St. Louis County, 

which was later annexed by Maryland Heights. 

In 2003, Maryland Heights redeveloped the 

area and offered ARC its own five-acre campus 

and street name (ARC Drive) where it has a 

25,000 square foot office building and 10,000 

square feet production facilities. 

Over the years, ARC has grown into a world 

leader by acquiring the inventories of several 

companies which closed their radiochemical 

divisions: Wizard Labs’ (Sacramento, California) 

radiochemical business and inventory in 

2002, Tocris Cookson’s (United Kingdom) 

radiochemical business and inventory in 

2005, Sigma’s (St. Louis, Missouri) radiochemical 

inventory in 2008, GE’s radiochemical 

inventory from Quotient Bioresearch (United 

Kingdom) in 2011, and Aptuit’s (Lenexa, 

Kansas) radiochemical inventory in 2012. 

In 2003, ARC also acquired Precision 

Biochemicals in Vancouver, Canada and 

established its Canadian headquarters there. 

All of these acquisitions were made without 

borrowing any money. 

ARC is a family-owned, debt-free organization. 

ARC is the recipient of numerous awards 

and citations. It was the recipient of RCGA’s Fast 

50 Technology Award in the St. Louis Region in 

1996 and 2004; in 1998, India Abroad 100 

Award; in 2004, the Export Achievement Award 

from the U.S. Department of Commerce; and 

the Bharat Jyoti Award in 2013. 

Surendra and Karen Gupta ARC Foundation 

(formerly GAEA Foundation) has established 

several educational scholarships at UMSL, 

Wayne State University, I.I.T. Mumbai, Hindu 

College (Delhi, India), and Delhi University. 

The foundation also is actively involved in 

charitable contributions to various environmental, 

human welfare, and animal protection 

agencies in the St. Louis region and abroad. 

In 2013, ARC celebrated its thirtieth 

anniversary and Surendra celebrated fifty years 

of being in the United States. Surendra, Karen, 

and ARC employees are very proud to be part 

of the 250 year celebration of St. Louis. 

Above: ARC’s chemists Janardhanam 

Selvasekaran, Ph.D. and Sadras Ganeshraj, 

Ph.D. reviewing a product’s 

HPLC chromatogram. 

Below: Surendra and Karen Gupta, 

founders of ARC. 


3 0 3

TARLTON 

CORPORATION 

Top: Pet Inc. Headquarters in construction, 

the Arch is behind it. 

Above: Washington University Seigle Hall 

(Social Sciences and Law). 

Bottom, left: Saint Louis Art Museum 

New East Building. 

Bottom, right: Metropolitan St. Louis 

Sewer District Lemay Expansion. 


304 

Tarlton Corporation general contractors 

and construction managers have been 

helping build St. Louis since 1946, when 

Arthur Elsperman and three partners bought 

G. L. Tarlton Contractor Incorporated. In 

1972, Robert Elsperman succeeded his 

father as company president, the firm 

assuming its present-day name in 1978. The 

third generation took over in 1999, when 

Tracy Elsperman Hart was named president 

and Dirk Elsperman, chief operating officer. 

Today, with Let’s Build as its motto, Tarlton 

is an Engineering News-Record Top 400 

Contractor and nationally certified Women’s 

Business Enterprise that employs 275 people 

and excels in complex new construction 

and renovation. Tarlton is deeply rooted in 

St. Louis and remains committed to making 

the region a better place to live and work, taking 

pride in its enduring relationships, 

community service and contributions to the 

built landscape. The firm is humbled by the 

history it has helped shape and motivated by 

the exciting frontiers St. Louis is embracing. 

Following is a snapshot of Tarlton landmark 

projects and notable firsts in the city 

Tarlton proudly calls home: 

• 1940s–provided a post-war surplus of 

construction equipment and marked the 

beginning of Tarlton’s long-lasting relationships 

with Ameren, Anheuser-Busch 

and McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, 

among others. 

• 1950s–Wohl and Renard Hospitals. Pope 

Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis 

University; Steinberg Addition to Jewish 

Hospital. Art Elsperman elected first chairman 

of the Associated General Contractors 

of St. Louis. 

• 1960s–Pet Inc. Headquarters—city’s first 

architectural concrete project; first tower 

crane used in St. Louis. Steinberg Hall 

at Washington University; Brown Shoe 

Company Headquarters; Bissell Point 

Primary Water Treatment Facility; and 

Busch Stadium West Parking Garage. 

• 1970s–Southwestern Bell Olive Toll Street 

Building. McDonnell-Douglas harpoon 

missile facility—early design-build. Multiple 

hospital projects. WU Mudd Law Building. 

Monsanto Queeny Plant renovations. Kiel 

Parking Garage. 

• 1980s–St. Louis Centre. Anheuser-Busch 

projects. Laclede’s Landing projects, 

including Witte Hardware Building. 

St. Louis County Water Treatment Facility. 

St. Anthony’s Medical Center. Interior 

renovations at Mart (now Robert A. 

Young) Building. 

• 1990s–Additions to St. Louis County 

Library headquarters. Novus Research and 

Development Facility. Famous-Barr at 

Jamestown Mall. Lincoln University Library. 

• 2000s–First LEED project in city— 

Washington University: Earth and Planetary 

Sciences Building; Knight Executive 

Education Center. First LEED Silver 

project in city—Tarlton headquarters. 

Contemporary Art Museum. Nordstrom at 

West County. Cross County MetroLink 

Extension. Muny and Saint Louis Zoo 

projects. Multiple Ameren projects. 

Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District Wet 

Weather Expansion. Wexford BRDG Park 1 

at Danforth Center. Tracy E. Hart: first 

woman chairman of the AGC of St. Louis. 

• 2010 and beyond–National Personnel 

Records Center. Nordstrom at Saint 

Louis Galleria. Barnes- 

Jewish Center for Outpatient 

Health. Saint Louis Art 

Museum Expansion. Wexford 

@4240 in CORTEX 

District. Under construction: 

BioGenerator expansion in 

CORTEX. WU Olin Business 

School Expansion. Monsanto 

Chesterfield Expansion parking 

garage. New firsts… 

history in the making.

GRAYBAR 

ELECTRIC 

COMPANY, INC. 

Graybar is a Fortune 500 company and 

a leading North American distributor of 

electrical, communications and data networking 

products and related supply-chain 

management services. 

Graybar traces its beginnings to Gray & 

Barton, a telegraph equipment manufacturer 

founded in 1869 by entrepreneur Enos Barton 

and inventor Elisha Gray. Gray & Barton was 

renamed Western Electric in 1872, and 

later spun off its supply department in 1925. 

This subsidiary was named Graybar Electric 

Company, Inc., or Graybar, as it is generally 

known today. In 1929, Graybar employees 

made history by purchasing the company from 

Western Electric for $9 million. Graybar has 

since thrived as an employee-owned company. 

In 1982, Graybar moved its headquarters 

from New York City to St. Louis to take 

advantage of the central location, reasonable 

cost of living and high quality of life for 

employees. Today, Graybar is a multibillion 

dollar organization that employs more than 

7,500 people at more than 240 North 

American locations, including nearly 1,000 

people across three locations in the St. Louis 

metropolitan area. 

Graybar is widely known to the manufacturers, 

customers, employees and the communities 

it serves as a company with the highest 

ethical and business standards. Graybar takes 

pride in being an industry leader and working 

to its customers’ advantage in a variety of 

markets including construction, commercial, 

government, industrial and utility. Graybar’s 

knowledgeable employees and extensive service 

capabilities can help customers increase 

productivity, upgrade and maintain their 

facilities, lower energy costs, streamline processes 

and ultimately improve their profitability. 

As customers’ needs and technologies have 

evolved over the years, Graybar has also 

focused on providing sustainable solutions 

that help facility managers reduce overhead 

costs and their carbon footprint. 

That same approach to sustainability can 

also be found within Graybar’s operations as 

many locations are ENERGY STAR ® certified 

and practice sustainable stewardship. In 2012, 

Graybar built its first LEED Goldcertified 

facility in Tucson, Arizona, 

illustrating the company’s longterm 

commitment to improving the 

triple bottom line of people, planet 

and profits. From lighting and 

lighting controls, renewable power, 

building automation and controls 

and power management, Graybar 

has continued to lead by example. 

As one of the largest employeeowned 

companies in North America, 

Graybar invests in its employees, 

recognizes their achievements and 

provides them opportunities to 

build successful careers. Likewise, 

Graybar encourages its employees 

to get involved and make a difference 

in their communities. 

Graybar has been a St. Louis 

institution for more than thirty 

years. It is a company rooted in 

timeless values that has a passion 

for innovatively working to its 

customers’ advantage, which is 

what being the vital link in the 

supply chain is about. 

Above: The company’s original founders 

in 1873. 

Below: The Clayton-based headquarters. 


3 0 5

SANSONE GROUP 

Above: Founder Anthony F. Sansone, Sr., 

pictured in 1957. 

Below: Anthony is joined by four of his sons 

as principals of the firm. 

Bottom: Sansone Group is headquartered 

at PNC Center. 


306 

Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri 

Sansone Group is nationally recognized as a 

leading commercial real estate firm in the 

Midwest, South, and Southeastern United 

States. Sansone Group specializes in leasing 

and sales, brokerage, tenant representation, 

development and redevelopment, investment 

and acquisition and property and facility management. 

Currently, Sansone has eight offices 

in five states overseeing more than twenty 

million square feet of property in twelve states 

throughout the Midwest, Texas, and Florida. 

The company was founded in 1957 by 

Anthony F. Sansone, Sr., who is well known in 

the St. Louis business community for his success 

in commercial real estate and his devotion to 

civic and charitable causes. Anthony is joined by 

four of his sons—James, Timothy, Douglas and 

Nicholas as equal principals of the firm. Each 

is specialized in a different area of commercial 

real estate and all are proactive in the firm’s 

daily activities. Like their father, they are deeply 

involved in community and charitable activities. 

Anthony’s entrepreneurial spirit catapulted 

the firm into the heavily competitive development 

industry with its first retail development, 

Inn Village, in 1972. Over the next fifty plus 

years, under his leadership, the company has 

gone on to develop or redevelop thirty-two 

shopping centers in Missouri, Iowa, Florida, 

Illinois and Texas. Other developments include 

twenty-three free-standing Walgreens, four 

office/industrial buildings and several other 

free-standing businesses. 

The firm made history in 1987 by becoming 

the first developer in Missouri to implement 

the use of Tax Increment Financing (TIF). This 

resulted in development of a 211,000 square 

foot shopping center in Florissant, Missouri. 

Though the company was experiencing 

great success in its retail development efforts, 

Anthony saw an underserved niche in the 

residential community in the City of St. Louis. 

This led to the development of nine multifamily 

and assisted living facilities beginning 

in 1976. The company continues to manage 

and staff all of these apartment buildings, 

along with a large portfolio of third party residential 

properties nearing 5,000 total units. In 

2013, Sansone was chosen for the “Shine the 

Light” Award from Paraquad, a nonprofit 

organization whose mission is to empower 

people with disabilities to increase their independence 

through choice and opportunity. 

Sansone was honored for the services they 

provide and dedication to making all of its 

properties accessible to those with disabilities. 

When the 2007 recession hit and development 

slowed, Sansone focused on diversification 

of its services in order to retain its entire staff. In 

2013, Sansone continues its efforts to expand 

and diversify by acquiring stabilized groceryanchored 

and/or regional power centers in primary 

and secondary markets in the Midwest 

and Southeast. Since 2007, Sansone has grown 

from 160 employees to over 200. 

Following the example of its founder and 

his sons, Sansone has implemented a unique 

Charitable Fund to aid nonprofit organizations 

throughout the area. Each employee is asked 

annually to choose a charity to receive a 

contribution in their name. Charities receiving 

substantial donations from this program include 

The Humane Society, Juvenile Diabetes Research 

Foundation, St. Jude’s Children Research, Make 

A Wish Foundation, American Heart Association 

and Animal Protection Association. In addition, 

the firm and its employees help support such 

organizations as Multiple Sclerosis Society, 

Backstoppers, St. Agnes Home, St. Louis Zoo, 

Missouri Botanical Gardens and many others. 

As a unique tribute to its St. Louis heritage, 

each year Sansone holds popular summer 

events and Christmas parties for its employees, 

which are always located at a St. Louis landmark. 

Locations for these events have included the 

Lemp Mansion, Becky Thatcher Riverboat, 

St. Louis Zoo and Busch Memorial Stadium in 

its final year before it was rebuilt. 

Sansone continues to be involved in community, 

civic and charitable causes. The company 

and its principals are dedicated to their family 

of employees, providing them the opportunity 

for growth, advancement and benefits to ensure 

a sustainable and enjoyable career. 

Sansone Group’s Mission Statement reads: 

We are a purpose-driven organization dedicated 

to providing superior commercial real estate 

services for our customers through teamwork, 

creativity, hard work, faith and professionalism. 

For more information, please visit 

www.sansonegroup.com.

More than half a century ago, Peabody 

Energy moved into a handsome three-story 

headquarters in the shadow of the St. Louis 

Gateway Arch…and a great partnership 

was born. 

By then, the company had grown from a 

one-room Chicago coal brokerage established 

in 1883 to a household name. But the best 

was yet to come. From its headquarters in 

St. Louis, Peabody became the world’s largest 

private-sector coal company with customers 

in twenty-five nations on six continents. 

Peabody has thrived for 130 years by 

recognizing the power of coal to achieve its 

mission: To be a leading worldwide producer 

and supplier of sustainable energy solutions 

that enable economic prosperity and a better 

quality of life. 

Reliable, abundant and affordable 

energy from coal has played an 

essential role in the St. Louis region’s 

development. In fact, St. Louisans were 

using coal-fueled electricity around the 

same time Peabody began mining it. 

Shortly after Peabody Energy founder 

Francis S. Peabody began traveling 

Chicago’s cobbled streets selling coal, 

St. Louis streetlamps were blazing with 

incandescent light powered by the fuel. 

Today, Missouri’s residents enjoy 

some of the lowest electricity rates in 

the nation precisely because eighty 

percent of the state’s electricity is 

fueled by coal. St. Louis is also home 

to multiple coal companies. Peabody 

continues to give back to the communities 

it serves. In 2012 alone, Peabody 

created $21.5 billion in direct and 

indirect economic benefits and 

contributed more than $7.2 million to 

philanthropic causes around the world. 

At Peabody Energy, we believe 

energy poverty is the greatest crisis the 

world confronts, and increasing access 

to all forms of affordable energy— 

including coal—is essential. Coal is the 

world’s fastest growing major fuel and 

projected to overtake oil in coming 

years, because coal is the only fuel 

with the scale and low cost to meet 

enormous international need. 

Advanced supercritical coal technologies 

make economic and environmental objectives 

compatible and achievable with coal. Peabody 

is a global leader in sustainable mining 

and clean coal technologies. Our company 

has advanced projects and partnerships on 

multiple continents to develop low-carbon 

and near-zero emissions electricity generation 

from coal, including the Consortium for Clean 

Coal Utilization at Washington University in 


Peabody Energy is St. Louis-based and 

St. Louis proud. We salute the spirit of 

innovation and remarkable energy that has 

enabled the people of St. Louis to prosper 

for 250 years, and we look forward to many 

years to come in St. Louis. 

PEABODY ENERGY 

Top: Gregory H. Boyce, Chairman and CEO. 


3 0 7

ST. LOUIS 

DEVELOPMENT 

CORPORATION 

Above: Rendering of the future IKEA store 

that will be located in the CORTEX 

Innovation Community. 

Below: Ballpark Village. 


308 

In 1991 the St. Louis Development 

Corporation (SLDC) was formed as the 

“front door” for doing business in the City 

of St. Louis. More than twenty years later, 

SLDC is well-positioned to continue its role 

as a team player in stimulating economic 

development in the St. Louis region. 

As the economic development agency for the 

City of St. Louis government, SLDC facilitates 

any development in the city and administers 

local, state, and federal developments incentives 

that may be required to make it happen. 

During the building boom of the 1990s 

through the recession of the new millennium, 

many plans and ideas developed as concepts 

became reality as a result of SLDC working with 

people that shared its commitment to the city. 

These public and private sector partners and 

the local development community recognized 

our city’s potential and acted on it, utilizing 

SLDC incentives to jumpstart long-stalled 

projects, reuse historic buildings, demolish 

derelict buildings to make room for creative 

in-fill projects, and upgrade housing stock with 

LEED-certified rehabs and new construction 

all around the city. 

This early entrepreneurial spirit showed 

developers from around the country that the city 

offered a great opportunity to develop quality 

homes, retail, and entertainment, commercial 

and industrial space and realize a positive return. 

Downtown is vibrant again with new entertainment 

venues and is home to more than 

14,000 people living in new and rehabbed residential 

units. Longtime businesses are staying 

downtown and new entrepreneurs are moving 

in. After being “dark” for twenty years, the 

Peabody Opera House was restored to its original 

splendor. The City of 

St. Louis is now a major 

competitor for convention 

business thanks in 

part to the completion of 

the Renaissance Grand 

convention hotel. The 

downtown riverfront has 

grown from a one-docked 

casino boat to home of 

the world-class Lumiere Place Casino and 

Four Seasons Hotel, raising the bar for riverfront 

gaming and entertainment in our region. 

The vision to create a campus that would 

position the city as a leader in the life 

science industry, coined “Technopolis” in the 

1990s, is now the $500 million, 187 acre 

CORTEX Innovation Community biotech and 

medical district. 

Companies have located to and stabilized 

city neighborhoods, adding jobs and convincing 

other entrepreneurs to follow suit in 

popular areas such as The Grove, The Ville, 

and the North Riverfront. 

The city has worked to make neighborhood 

streets and government itself green and 

sustainable, implementing recycling programs 

and creating public spaces that encourage 

citizens to make “green” a way of life. 

The momentum continues with nearly 

$10 billion in new development underway or 

planned to add 24/7 excitement to downtown 

and our neighborhoods. 

All of this activity is no accident: it is the 

product of partnerships SLDC built over the 

years that kept working together to move our 

city forward. 

The progress has changed the way the 

world looks at St. Louis—and how we look 

at ourselves. 

As the city continues working for a better and 

brighter St. Louis, SLDC staff knows a regional 

approach is key to growing the economy. In 

partnership with neighborhood organizations, 

the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis, 

St. Louis Economic Development Partnership, 

and the St. Louis Regional Chamber, SLDC is 

exploring new initiatives to foster entrepreneurialism, 

immigration, and foreign trade to 

help grow our regional economy and make the 

region competitive in the global market. 

SLDC appreciates the continuing support 

of our dedicated regional, public, and private 

sector partners, who have made it possible 

to overcome obstacles and transform the 

city into a sustainable, diverse, and vibrant 

regional core where more and more people 

and businesses are making their homes.

St. Louis at night, January 27, 2008. 

BY PHOTOGRAPHER DANIEL SCHWEN; PERMISSION FOR 

FREE USE GRANTED UNDER WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. 


3 0 9

SPONSORS 

AAIM Employers’ Association ...............................................................................................263 

Ameren Corporation .............................................................................................................272 

American Radiolabeled Chemicals, Inc. (ARC) ......................................................................302 

American Water 

Missouri American Water 

Illinois American Water..................................................................................................280 

American Red Cross..............................................................................................................199 

Anheuser-Busch ....................................................................................................................259 

Anheuser-Busch Employees’ Credit Union.............................................................................258 

Archdiocese of St. Louis........................................................................................................188 

Ascension .............................................................................................................................214 

Associated General Contractors of St. Louis ..........................................................................288 

Best Western Airport Plaza Inn..............................................................................................233 

Bi-State Development Agency................................................................................................184 

BJC HealthCare.....................................................................................................................206 

BSI Constructors...................................................................................................................276 

Care-Tech ® Laboratories, Inc. 

O-T-C Pharmaceuticals ......................................................................................................269 

Central Bureau of the Catholic Central Verein of America .....................................................227 

CIC Group, Inc.....................................................................................................................284 

Commemoration Committee for the Battle of Fort San Carlos ...............................................228 

Commerce Bank....................................................................................................................264 

Concordia Publishing House.................................................................................................260 

Delta Dental of Missouri .......................................................................................................208 

Edward Jones........................................................................................................................266 

Express Scripts Holding Company ........................................................................................250 

Fabulous Fox Theatre ...........................................................................................................238 

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis..........................................................................................242 

Fontbonne University ...........................................................................................................203 

Graybar Electric Company, Inc..............................................................................................305 

Greater Saint Louis Community Foundation .........................................................................224 

Harris-Stowe State University................................................................................................223 

Hunter Engineering Company...............................................................................................300 

JCI........................................................................................................................................196 

Kaestner Lawn Care LLC.......................................................................................................233 

Max Kaiser, Jr........................................................................................................................167 

Lindenwood University.........................................................................................................168 

Lowenhaupt Global Advisors, LLC........................................................................................241 

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod..................................................................................212 

Maritz ...................................................................................................................................268 

Maryville University..............................................................................................................210 

Mathews-Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club.....................................................................................222 


310

McCarthy Building Companies, Inc.......................................................................................286 

Mercy Health ........................................................................................................................229 

Missouri Botanical Garden ....................................................................................................216 

Missouri Humanities Council................................................................................................230 

Monsanto..............................................................................................................................296 

The Muny .............................................................................................................................200 

PARIC Corporation ...............................................................................................................298 

Parkway Hotel ......................................................................................................................234 

Peabody Energy ....................................................................................................................307 

Residence Inn by Marriott St. Louis Downtown ....................................................................267 

Saint Louis Science Center ....................................................................................................218 

Saint Louis Zoo.....................................................................................................................220 

Sansone Group .....................................................................................................................306 

Schnuck Markets, Inc. ..........................................................................................................262 

Scottrade, Inc........................................................................................................................256 

Sheet Metal Workers Local Union 36 ....................................................................................292 

Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.........................................................................................226 

SSM Health Care...................................................................................................................176 

St. Andrew’s Resources for Seniors System ............................................................................167 

St. Louis Cardinals................................................................................................................246 

St. Louis Community College................................................................................................191 

St. Louis Development Corporation ......................................................................................308 

St. Louis Economic Development Partnership .......................................................................252 

St. Louis Post-Dispatch .........................................................................................................265 

St. Louis Public Library.........................................................................................................231 

St. Louis Regional Chamber ..................................................................................................244 

St. Luke’s Hospital ................................................................................................................195 

St. Mary of Victories Church (1843) .....................................................................................225 

Tarlton Corporation ..............................................................................................................304 

TricorBraun...........................................................................................................................248 

The University of Missouri-St. Louis .....................................................................................180 

St. Louis Mercantile Library and UMSL..............................................................................182 

Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center ....................................................................183 

U.S. Custom House and Post Office (Old Post Office) 

Developers: The DESCO Group and DFC Group ...............................................................290 

Vi-Jon ...................................................................................................................................261 

Washington University in St. Louis .......................................................................................172 

Watlow Electric Manufacturing Company .............................................................................294 

Webster University........................................................................................................167, 192 

Wells Fargo Advisors, LLC ....................................................................................................254 

World Affairs Council of St. Louis.........................................................................................204 

S P O N S O R S 

3 1 1

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

J . F R E D E R I C K 

F A U S Z 

Fred Fausz is a history professor and former dean of the 

Pierre Laclede Honors College at the University of Missouri– 

St. Louis, specializing in the ethnohistory of Indian-European 

relations in colonial America. He received an AB degree in 

European history from Thomas More College in his native 

Kentucky; earned his PhD in early American history from the 

College of William and Mary, with Phi Beta Kappa honors; and 

was a fellow of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of 

the American Indian at the Newberry Library, Chicago. Three 

of his many publications have won “best of the year” awards 

from historical societies in Missouri, Virginia, and Maryland, and in May 2007, Time magazine 

cited his research on early Jamestown. Committed to sharing historical knowledge with the 

general public, he was a consultant on Kevin Costner’s eight-hour Indian documentary, 

500 Nations, and has exhibited his extensive collection of fur trade artifacts in major museums and 

at other sites in seven Midwestern states. In 2006 he was the lead organizer and program chair 

for the Ninth North American Fur Trade Conference in St. Louis and received the 2007 Missouri 

Governor’s Award in the Humanities for Enhancing Community Heritage. In 2011, he received the 

UMSL Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence and published Founding St. Louis: First City of 

the New West, now in its third printing. 


312

LEADERSHIP SPONSORS 

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ISBN: 978-1-939300-61-4

Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

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