Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

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