Belated Valentine for Pierre Laclede

Cher Monsieur Laclede, Dear Pierre,

On this the 249th anniversary of the founding of La Poste de Saint Louis, I want to thank you.

And to tell you  how much has been accomplished in your absence – knowing how great a failure you thought yourself when you were dying.

But Auguste, who you mentored and chose as your first lieutenant settled all of your accounts and he, and Jean Pierre, and all of your daughters flourished in the village that you so wisely laid out.

The streets of downtown St. Louis continue to this very day to run as you drew them out that first winter at Fort de Chartres, except in the village proper, which is now a beautiful park – and soon to become even better.

Because of your vision and foresight St. Louis never flooded until they began to cut away the bluffs for a proper landing. But by then it was necessary because we had become the great gateway to the Pacific Ocean with all trails west leading from Saint Louis.

And what a great port the Port of St. Louis became, the second largest in the nation in 1861! The third largest in tonnage of any inland river port in the United States today.

The block that you set aside for a village church is the only piece of land in the city which has never been bought or sold. Four lovely churches were erected there – the last has been standing since 1834. The saint for whom you named the fur trading post remains a guiding presence and thousands come every year to spend quiet time in that tranquil space above the river.

Once you could see covered wagons crossing Rue des Granges (today Memorial Drive) through the windows of the Basilica of St. Louis, King of France. But the village barns have long since disappeared along with the great earthen barns constructed by the native people who built here before you. There’s only a piece of one remaining on this side of the Mississippi, for the Americans who followed after you had little regard for the monumental works of the ancient culture who raised them.

St. Louis has long been a metropolis – not as large or grand as the Paris you recall but fine nevertheless; with great libraries, handsome architecture and whimsical art in the city parks where people love to gather, much as they did in La Place of old. The population is even more diverse than in the first years of the fur trading post. People have come and settled here from almost everywhere on earth.

It looked for a time as though the City of St. Louis was dying, had outlived its promise. But that has changed and great excitement has returned to the place you knew so well. There are many celebrations and customs that you would recognize. We still celebrate Carnival although we call it Mardi Gras. And St. Louis retains its reputation for hospitality. We remain an international port though far less dynamic and far-reaching an international port than we could be. There is much still to accomplish.

But before this anniversary date slips away,  I want to thank you once again, on behalf of all St. Louisans, for carving a home for us in the wilderness of the Mississippi River Valley, safely above the flood waters of the mighty river, where we could prosper, raise our families, and live in harmony with those around us.

There is more justice today in St. Louis than in Colonial times but I fear less tolerance – especially for those whose customs and traditions differ from the norm.

And so St. Louis remains – even as you left it – a work in progress.

Merci, merci, merci, Pierre Laclede!

You might not recognize your name if you heard it spoken here today  but rest assured – you are not forgotten.

Happy 249th Birthday to your City of  St. Louis!

Credits: Medieval Calligraphy – in the public domain at karenswhimsey.com, Map of St. Louis 1780 from the Archives of Spain – in the public domain at wikipedia.org., A Birdseye View of St. Louis c. 1896 by Fred Graf – Geography and Maps Division of the Library of Congress in the pubic domain at wikipedia.org. because its copyright has expired; Photo Cover for American City: St. Louis Architecture – Robert Sharoff and William Zbaren, Images Publishing, 2006. All other photographs: Maureen Kavanaugh, author of this blog.

Darkness and Light: October in The Lou

According to the ancient Celts of Ireland when the moon rises on Samhain (sow-en), to most of the world today Halloween, the doors between the worlds – this world and the Otherworld – swing wide open. The dead and all manner of faery creatures can mingle with mortals. So the wise did not go out after moonrise on November’s Eve except in disguise. Hence the tradition of guising (dressing up) for Halloween.

Samhain (literally Summer’s End in Gaelic) marked the end of the golden time of harvest and the beginning of the dark half of the year. From ancient times this festival of the dead was celebrated with great bonfires at the cross roads. In later centuries dances, divination (telling the future) and bobbing for apples became popular as well, of course, as storytelling. And the scarier, the more dramatic the story – the better!

Important events in Irish mythology often took place at Samhain – that time when perhaps more starkly than at any other – the forces of light and the forces of darkness came head to a head.

Ireland’s epic tale, Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) begins with the hero Cú Chulainn, riding into battle on Samhain.

In much of the world Halloween evolved into a night when children dress as the characters of their dreams and go trick-or-treating for sweets. For one magical night each year they may be whatever they wish.

It is also a time for revelry among adults, many of whom like to confront their secret fears, by being frightened half to death in haunted houses and amusement parks like The Lou’s The Darkness.*

October is a gorgeous month in St. Louis. Gardens, parks and street scapes burst into a riot of color even as much of nature goes dormant for the winter, appearing almost to die. Orchards are ripe with apples and patches brimming with pumpkins awaiting their transformations into the magical, the ghoulish, the delicious!

It’s great fun when October comes around, to introduce tourists from near and far, to some of The Lou’s most haunting sights – like the Campbell House Museum at 15th and Locust Streets, where someone unseen turns the furniture around at night.

Or the Morgan Street cold spot and legendary safe room on the Underground Railroad between Second and Third Street on Laclede’s Landing.

Or the eeriest room in The Lou’s most haunted house, the Lemp Mansion, perched atop  Arsenal Street on DeMenil Place.

But there is no story that I love telling more than that of a young teenager who was given shelter by the Jesuits at St. Louis University when no hospital in the country would accept him and his parents were at wit’s end.

A normal boy in all respects until one day he began to change – his body becoming distorted with welts and unable to digest the food that he ate. A boy who suddenly spoke foreign languages and could reveal secrets about strangers that no one outside of their families could have known.**

This anonymous boy’s story became fictionalized as one of the most chilling horror stories (later horror movies) of modern times, The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty.

How this boy made his way for treatment from his hometown of Cottage City, Maryland to St. Louis (fictionalized as Washington, DC), how a Lutheran family came to put their faith in a Catholic ritual and what the boy, when healed, was able to reveal about the triumph of good over evil, is without a doubt the best ending to any horror story I know.

The old wing of St. Alexius Hospital, where the boy was eventually admitted for medical treatment, is long gone.

And long before the building was demolished, the corridor that contained his hospital room remained so strange after his exorcism, that it had to be sealed from public use.

The corridor in the top story (that looks like an attic story) of the hallway between Verhagen and DuBourg Halls at St. Louis University is also sealed off. It was never the same after the boy, who some believed possessed by the devil, took up residence there. But you could never tell today from the tranquil little courtyard beneath the window of that third-story room, that such a disturbing presence had once permeated the area.

When the boy awoke he remembered none of the terrible illness that had wracked his body. Nor could he speak foreign languages.

But he told a wondrous story: of running through an endless dark and frightening tunnel, of becoming so weary that he just wanted to lie down and rest. But that something urged him on to the glimmer of light that he could see at the end of the tunnel.

How he had somehow known that he must keep going, that he could not stop until he reached the light. How upon reaching the tunnel’s end he had stepped out into an almost blinding light where a greatly-winged creature told him that he was St. Michael the Archangel. That he had been possessed by ten demons but that they (the angels) had fought for him and won. And that he need never be afraid again.

Whether at some point an angel with the wing-span the width of the College Church choir- loft really did appear inside St. Francis Xavier Church during the rite of exorcism, as one story goes, has not been confirmed.

That furniture in the rooms where the boy slept sometimes crashed into the ceilings and walls was also reported.

Whether the boy was actually possessed by demons or he suffered from a psychological phenomenon remains a mystery.

But that a child who became ill and emaciated almost to the point of death, was healed here in St. Louis, took the name Michael when he was baptized, graduated from a Jesuit high school not far from where he grew up, and went on to become an airline pilot – these are the facts.

We may never know his name. The record of his exorcism, diligently kept by the Rev. William Bowdern, SJ, pastor of St. Francis Xavier Church (the College Church at St. Louis University) when he performed the rite of exorcism, was sealed for the boy’s privacy and protection. Whether the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis will make it public when the man eventually dies is unknown.

What is known, and what is important to remember, not only at Halloween when the spectres of darkness take on sometimes enormous and frightening proportions, is that at the time of this child’s greatest vulnerability and weakness, angels had his back, and guided him safely to the light. Sometimes the truth is so much better than fiction!

As a waning but still glorious moon rises this Halloween night, may you delight in the glories of autumn, raise a glass to the beloved dead who went before you, and have a merry and magical All Hallow E’en.

Here in St. Louis streets will be lighted with jack-o-lanterns and ring with the laughter of children making their way from house to house on this still, magical night.

*http://www.scarefest.com/haunted_house_in_stlouis_missouri_thedarkness/home.cfm

** My source for much of the boy’s story was the Rev. John Walsh, SJ, beloved mentor and storyteller extraordinaire, whom Fr. Bowdern allowed to read his journal of the exorcism as he was recording it, and before it was sealed.

Illustration and Photographs Credits: all in the public domain, mostly at wikipedia.org with the exception of the photographs taken at St. Louis University, in the Missouri Botanical Garden and Le Petit Pierrot, which are the work of Maureen Kavanaugh, author of this blog. Dragon Pumpkin Carving by Tom Kavanugh, Jr., who kindly gave me permission to use the image.

Chatillon-DeMenil: Grande Dame of The Lou’s Great Houses

It’s not the oldest house in St. Louis. Nor the most prestigious. But the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion (
http://www.demenil.org/
) is the last of the great Creole houses – front and back – and it resonates St. Louis history from our founding through the Civil War and the World’s Fair of 1904 – in a way that no other place does, which makes it the treasure it was so worth fighting to save.

And it has been a long, hard fight since the early 1960s when the newly incorporated Landmarks Association of St. Louis (
http://www.landmarks-stl.org/about/about_landmarks_association_of_st_louis
) adopted the failing house as one of its earliest missions, allowing it to stay alive and retain its secrets.

That the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion is considered one of the finest examples of late Greek Revival architecture in the mid-Mississippi River Valley was of course a consideration.

The struggle continued even after the Union Electric Company made a significant enough contribution to preserve the house when the Ozark Expressway (Interstate 55) threatened its demolition and the Chatillon-DeMenil House Foundation was established in 1965 to govern it.* For old houses, particularly big, old houses are costly to maintain.

Why all the bother and expense when there are so many great, old houses in St. Louis?

Old houses can be valuable repositories of history. They help to sustain a community’s roots and provide a perspective on life in other eras that is important to reflect upon while shaping the present and the future.

The Chatillon-DeMenil House Foundation is especially good at providing 19th century perspectives with events like their October Month of Mourning, presenting learning opportunities in a highly engaging way. In this instance the mourning rituals of earlier generations and the insights they impart.

Throughout October all of the mirrors in the house are draped with black crepe, along with portraits, preventing (according to Victorian tradition) the spirit of one who has recently died from taking up residence in a mirror or a portrait. Caskets are brought into the mansion and displayed, a child-size casket among them. Toys are covered, fancy china is replaced with mourning china, and black clothing worn by the women of the family is displayed.

The DeMenil Craft Guild that meets monthly throughout the year with an emphasis on 19th century hand crafting and decorative art techniques**is an ongoing educational program that deepens understanding and preserves artistic traditions.

Many old houses have very distinct personalities, crafted by their architects and the artisans who embellished them from the outside in, developing these personalities. Old houses are further defined by the people who lived in them – laughed, danced and mourned in them.

Unlike the Campbell House Museum at 1510 Locust Street, that is overflowing with everything from furniture and crystal to clothing that actually belonged to the Campbell family, the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion is less a family museum than the decorative arts museum that the Landmarks Foundation conceived for its rescue; and in particular a repository of the French and Creole cultures that shaped St. Louis from the beginning. However it does contain personal artifacts that belonged to the two distinct families that most powerfully impacted it, the Chatillons and the DeMenils.

The Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion shares a block (DeMenil Place) with one of the most famously most haunted houses in America (the Lemp Mansion next door). And although it has gone through periods when from Hiway 55 it looked like a haunted house on a hill, I have never sensed anything haunting about it, over many visits.

It does however contain an aura of mystery that draws visitors like myself back, time and again. It is a house to which many people have become devoted like Facilities Director, Kevin O’Neill and Katherine Patterson, Board of Directors Member, who have diligently presided over it for fourteen years.

From whence does this aura of mystery emanate? From the DeMenils certainly – who lived in the house the longest, over three generations. Dr. Nicholas DeMenil, a native of Foug, France and his wife Emilie Sophie Chouteau, native St. Louisan and descendant of the  city’s founding family, enlarged it from a modest farmhouse to an elegant mansion. Emilie borrowed the concept for the front of the mansion from her cousin Henry Chouteau’s mansion that once stood beside Chouteau’s Pond.

In fact Emilie may have borrowed more than a concept. Docents Katherine Patterson and Lynn Josse (Director of the Chatillon-DeMenil House Foundation), who kindly gave me a private tour last Saturday morning told me that it’s now believed the columns that support the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion’s handsome portico actually came from her cousin Henry Chouteau’s mansion at Clark and 12th Streets, after it was demolished.

Photographs and paintings of Emilie and Nicholas De Menil and their son Alexander hang inside the mansion along with copies of paintings of Emilie’s great-uncle, Auguste Chouteau and her great-grandmother, Marie Bourgeois Chouteau, la mere de Saint Louis (the mother of St. Louis).

In a twist of irony which I find delightful, a commemorative portrait of Emilie’s great-grandfather, Pierre Laclede Liguest (founder of St. Louis in 1764) hangs in the drawing room. Ironic because, according to the museum’s docents, the scholarly Alexander De Menil, who inherited the house from his parents “fiercely denied his great-great grandmother’s relationship to Laclede.”***

But the house’s mystery may even more powerfully emanate from Henri Chatillon, who built the original farmhouse, the one visible from DeMenil Place.

A hunter and guide for the American Fur Company, Chatillon guided Francis Parkman along the Oregon Trail in 1846, a journey that Parkman immortalized in a book by that title.

After the death of his first wife, an Oglala Sioux woman named She Who Wears a Bear Robe, Henri Chatillon married his first cousin, Odile Delor Lux in 1848, and built this house for her on land she owned that had been part of the St. Louis Common Fields.

Sometime between 1846 and 1848 Chatillon is believed to have commissioned the oil painting of Bear Robe that hangs in a hallway of the mansion. Whether his second wife ever saw it is unknown. It is unlikely that it hung in the house while she was living there. But in 1967 an electrician working in the house found it under the floorboards of an unfinished attic room. The canvas was wrapped in leather around a Hawken rifle.

Did Henri Chatillon forget about the painting when he and Odile sold the house in 1856? Or did he purposely leave it behind for someone to uncover in the future?

Closing the book on a chapter of his life but perhaps hoping that it would eventually be discovered and be forever associated with him and the house he built at the top of Arsenal Hill?

The painting is unsigned and the artist unknown. Yet another mystery. Was it painted here in St. Louis? Did the artist leave it unsigned because it was such an unusual commission?

A  spirit painting as opposed to the sort of classical portrait fashionable St. Louisans hung in their parlors?

In this enigmatic painting Bear Robe is depicted twice against the background of a bearskin. Both images of her are in profile. In the larger image her head is bowed. The suggestion of a white horse is painted in front of her. Bear Robe was lame and is said to have ridden a white horse. According to the burial customs of her tribe, her horse was sent to the afterlife with her.*****

Below the larger image of Bear Robe is the image of a bearded man believed to be Henri Chatillon. She appears to be watching over him. His eyes are open and he looks sad. In the upper left corner of the painting is a softer, almost dreamlike image of what may be a younger Bear Robe. Or perhaps her spirit?

Katherine Patterson explained that the pine tree in the painting is believed to be a reference to a Native American tradition “that the spirit stays on the earth for a while before going to the land beyond the pines”.***

According to Irma R. Miller, author of French-Indian Families in America’s West, Bear Robe bore Henri Chatillon two daughters, one named Emilie and the other, unnamed. She quotes Francis Parkman’s having recorded in The Oregon Trail that Chatillon left the expedition briefly upon learning that his wife and one of his children was very ill. He arrived at the Indian encampment “only to find a child dead and Bear Robe, his wife, near death.” She rallied upon seeing him and they talked through the night but in the morning she died.****

Henri left his five year old daughter, Emilie, in the care of his close friend Joseph Bissonette, whose wife belonged to the same nation as Bear Robe. As an old woman, Emilie Chatillon Lessert, fondly recalled her father, Henri’s visits.*****

When she  was seventeen years old, Henri bright Emilie to Carondelet, Missouri where she was baptized on December 31, 1858 at Saints Mary and Joseph Catholic Church. Three days later in the same church, January 3, 1859 she married Benjamin Lessert, whom her father had introduced to her in Wyoming.***** Theirs was a happy marriage.

Two French-Creole families – the Chatillons and the DeMenils – and one great house. A beautiful restoration of the exterior of the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion has recently been completed, with work to resume on the interior. The old manse looks really glorious.

Since Halloween approaches and the house is creped for its Month of Mourning, this is an especially atmospheric time to pay a visit. Special activities are planned for this Sunday, October 14, 2012: A Death in the Family – Death and Mourning in the 19th Century – from 12:00 noon until 5:00 pm.

Admission to the event is $10 per guest and $5 for children under 12. Tarot card readings will be given for $5.

All proceeds from this event will contribute to the care and restoration of the lovely Greek Revival mansion that was once home to Henri Chatillon and the DeMenil family.

If the mourning event is not quite spooky enough for you, Paranormal Investigation Tours will also be offered in the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion on October 12th, 19th and 26th. (For the uninitiated – that’s ghost-hunting!)

References: *St. Louis: Landmarks & Historic Districts – Carolyn Hewes Toft with Lynn Josse, Copyright 2002, Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Inc.; **Chatillon-DeMenil House Brochure;***Katherine Patterson – Chatillon-DeMenil House Foundation; ****The Oregon Trail – Francis Parkman, Knickerbocker’s Magazine, 1847-1849, published as a book 1849;*****French-Indian Families in America’s West – Irma R. Miller, Copyright 1988, Irma R. Miller, Parkville, Missouri, then Trafford Publishing, Victoria, BC.

Illustrations & Paintings: Victorian Fashions – in the public domain at karenswhimsey.com; Portrait of Emilie Sophie Chouteau – the Chatillon-DeMenil Museum; Bear Robe Painting – artist unknown, circa 1846-1848, oil on canvas the Chatillon-DeMenil Museum.

Photographs: DeMenil Family Photographs – the Chatillon-DeMenil Museum; Francis Parkman, Jr. – author unknown, in the public domain at wikipedia.org; Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion Circa 1938 – in the public domain an wilikpedia.org; Oglala Sioux Child, Pine Ridge Reservation – author John C. Grabill, in the public domain at wikipedia.org. All other photographs – Maureen O’Connor Kavanaugh, author of this blog.

St. Louis: Gateway to the West

Two generations after its founding St. Louis became central to the most ambitious, overland expedition in U.S. history. Its leaders were past military comrades with diverse talents that complemented each other brilliantly. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left lasting impressions on the nation and transformed St. Louis into the Gateway to the West. For anyone wishing to pick up their historic trail in the mid-Mississippi River Valley, St. Louis is an excellent place to begin and to end, even as they did in 1803 and 1806.

Although in truth, the end of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1806 marked new beginnings for both men in St. Louis.

William Clark lived the rest ( latter half ) of his life here. Meriwether Lewis governed the Louisiana Territory from St. Louis.

Following his tragic death, Clark was appointed by President Jefferson to govern the Missouri Territory. These were enormous areas that Jefferson believed Lewis and Clark  uniquely qualified to govern, for they had mapped a great part of them and grasped their complexities – of terrain, people, languages, life styles, and cultures.

President Jefferson also appointed William Clark the Superintendent of Indian Affairs of Upper Louisiana. Pioneers who wanted free land out the Oregon Trail had to obtain permission for it, in person, from William Clark in St. Louis, opening St. Louis to a flood of adventurers from the East.

Everything needed for the journey west could be purchased in St. Louis – wagons, cutlery, sugar and flour, clothing  – which marked the start of the Oregon Trail for thousands.

William Clark witnessed enormous changes in St. Louis – from a French-speaking village of over one hundred dwellings (including Creole mansions), to a bustling river port with limestone bluffs carved out to create a proper levee, finally a rapidly expanding city. But he would barely recognize it today, there is so little left of the St. Louis he governed from.

Market Street (originally Rue de La Place), which Lewis and Clark climbed to reach St. Louis from the river, has long since disappeared into a national park below Third Street/Memorial Drive.

The gleaming leg of a steel arch stands where Auguste Chouteau’s elegant mansion  welcomed him and St. Louis now stretches in places all the way to the Missouri River.

There is still a Catholic Church in the original church block. The Greek Revival cathedral of limestone that replaced the vertical post church standing when he and Lewis arrived, has stood the test of time; completed just four years before Clark died. But St. Louis’ French colonial churches and first cemetery are gone.

To get a sense of that earlier church and the handsome, Federal-style home that Clark built in the grassy area just north of the Gateway Arch, you must cross the Mississippi and visit Holy Family Log Church and Nicholas Jarrot’s Mansion in Cahokia, Illinois, which have survived into the 21st century ten minutes from the Gateway Arch.

Cahokia was a much earlier settlement than St. Louis. But its situation in a flood plain of the Great American Bottom prevented it from flourishing as did Pierre Laclede’s fur trading post, which he set high above the mighty Mississippi, safe from its flood waters.

The Courthouse in Cahokia, now a marvelously atmospheric museum, was the post office from which Meriwether Lewis mailed reports back to President Jefferson in Washington, D.C. before the expedition started out.

Jefferson had personally mentored Lewis and knew well the measure of the gentleman soldier he dispatched to the furthest, western reaches of the continent – not only as scientist and explorer but as presidential emissary to tribal nations whose spoken languages and traditions were unknown in the East.

You don’t get a sense of the immensity of that task from downtown St. Louis or even from Cahokia, which have been settled for hundreds of years. For that you must travel to Camp River Dubois, Illinois – a twenty-five minute drive from the Poplar Street Bridge.

There on a bright, summer’s day like today cicadas and songbirds drown out the sounds of cars and buses. Only the occasional train whistle, heard from near or far across the drought-ridden cornfields, overpowers them.

For this rural area of Wood River, Illinois remains almost as bucolic as it did when Meriwether Lewis secured permission from Nicholas Jarrot to establish a winter camp on property he owned near the mouth of the Missouri River, some thirty miles north of his Cahokia home.

Here, in the middle of nowhere, a crew of forty-four workmen built a winter encampment under the direction of Capt. William Clark, who trained and shaped them into a corps while Capt. Meriwether Lewis conducted business critical to the expedition in St. Louis.

This included procuring medical supplies from Dr. Antoine Saugrain, whose garden included many healing plants.

Camp River Dubois became the point of departure for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, whose instructions from President Jefferson were daunting: to chart a route to the Pacific Ocean from the Missouri River, to establish friendly relations with native peoples along the way, to record observations of plant and animal life with particular emphasis on species unknown in the eastern United States and to send samples of plant and animal life along with progress reports back to Washington, D.C.; all of which they accomplished in varying degrees.

The most stunning exhibit at the Camp River Dubois Historic Site is a life-size/fifty-five foot model of the keel boat on which the Corps of Discovery ascended the Missouri River to the Great Plains.

It is ingeniously crafted with a cross-section that allows visitors to see how the keel boat was packed, along with a sampling of the boat’s contents, sleeping quarters, abbreviated upper deck and towering canvas mast.

To the tribal people who caught sight of it plying its course over the Missouri, it must have seemed like something out of a dream.

Recreations of a settlers’ cabin with its kitchen garden and the fort which housed the Corps until they embarked for the Pacific Ocean on May 14, 1804 are other wonderful features of the Lewis & Clark State Historic Site, which has suffered from a lack of funding during the nation’s and the State of Illinois’ economic hard times.

But volunteer docents and crafts people do an excellent job of maintaining Camp River Dubois and telling its wonderful stories. This is a great place for a class or a family outing, with a small but very fine gift shop and a theater in which a film is shown about the Corps of Discovery and their winter encampment near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers.

Just before their departure, Captain Clark and his crew rendezvoused with Captain Lewis in St. Charles, Missouri where they had been entertained at dinners and dances. Lewis made his way overland from St. Louis arriving on St. Charles Rock Road. His visits to St. Louis were marked by hospitality and the acquisition of maps and information from the Chouteaus that would prove invaluable to the expedition. Main Street in St. Charles, Missouri is a charming place to explore with its shops, restaurants and early capitol building of the State of Missouri.

The Corps would close up camp and depart the next day. On their first night after leaving Camp River Dubois , they camped on an island near the site of Fort Bellefontaine (beautiful fountain, named for a nearby spring) which was lost when the Missouri River shifted its channel. On the final night of their return journey over two years later, they stayed at a fort which had been constructed in 1805 and shopped at the trading post before returning to “civilization” in St. Louis the following day. The overlook from the bluffs in Fort Bellefontaine Park ( located on the south side of the Missouri River) is lovely. During the 1930s a great staircase was constructed on the site by WPA workers. It has the reputation of being haunted because of bloodstains that appear in photos taken of it, that cannot be erased. There is a good hiking trail in this rustic, river park frequented by deer and other wildlife.

Lewis and Clark were met with astonishment and delight upon their return to St. Louis. Everyone left their houses and came out to greet them for they were believed lost, the journey had taken so long. Just three years later, in 1809, Meriwether Lewis was dead. But William Clark lived on until 1838, raising his children here and helping to charter the first Episcopal parish, Christ Church, in St. Louis.

There are many places in and around downtown St. Louis specific to Lewis and Clark – from the site of Dr. Antoine Saugrain’s home and surgery, where Lewis went for treatment of malaria* and medical supplies, to St. Louis Place, a skyscraper at Broadway and Olive Street, bearing a plaque that commemorates the death place of William Clark.

The Arch grounds are especially significant as the site of Clark’s home, Indian Council Room and of St. Louis College where his children were educated. The Museum of Westward Expansion beneath the Arch, traces the course of the Lewis and Clark Expedition from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean with photographs, exhibits and artifacts.

Clark’s grave site in Bellefontaine Cemetery marks the end of the Lewis and Clark Trail in St. Louis. William Clark was buried on land belonging to his nephew, John O’ Fallon, which in 1849 became incorporated into the elegantly landscaped, garden cemetery where the remains of so many other famous St. Louisans lie; none more critical to the evolution of the United States of America than William Clark.

References:*Uncovering the Truth About Meriwether Lewis -Thomas Danisi, Prometheus Books, 2012; The Point of Departure brochure for the Lewis & Clark State Historic Site; and Lewis & Clark in St. Louis – a commemorative booklet edited by David Lancaster, assisted by Amanda E. Doyle and published by WHERE International, LLP.

Illustrations: St. Louis, Missouri 1846 – in the public domain at wikipedia.org; Detail from the Map of the Lewis and Clark Expedition – in the public domain at wikipedia.com; Breaking Up Camp at Sunrise by Alfred Jacob Miller – in the public domain at wikipedia.org; Map of the Oregon Trail by Ezra Meeker – in the public domain at wikipedia.org, courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries; Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by Wilson Peale – in the public domain at wikipedia.org; The First Catholic Church in St. Louis, Missouri, 1770 – in the public domain at wikipedia.org.

Photographs: Cahokia Courthouse, Entrance of Holy Family Log Church in Cahokia, Nicholas Jarrot Mansion in Cahokia, Illinois, Commemorative Plaque at the Death Place of William Clark, Staircase at Fort Bellefontaine Park, Grave Site of William Clark in Bellefontaine Cemetery – courtesy of Thomas Kavanaugh, Sr. All other photos – The Gateway Arch, Camp River Dubois Lewis & Clark State Historic Site, Main Street in St. Charles, MO, The Captains Return by Harry Weber – Maureen O’Connor Kavanaugh, author of this blog.

Uncovering the Truth About Meriwether Lewis

It has taken more than two hundred years but with the publication of Uncovering the Truth About Meriwether Lewis, one of the most pivotal characters in 19th century American history has been vindicated.

Like so many of the framers of this republic he was born in Virginia but the roughly three years when he was governor of the Louisiana Territory (eighteen months of it spent in St. Louis), were critical for him and for the young nation. It is fitting then that a St. Louis author has brought Meriwether Lewis to life almost as vividly as when he first arrived here in 1803 as the leader of the Corps of Discovery, a.k.a. the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Author, Thomas Danisi, a native New Yorker, has a powerful sense of place and time outside of the present. And if you believe in the metaphysical then you may agree with me that the spirits who guide Thomas Danisi have led him on a merry chase through Spanish land grants, military court records, local land deeds, an almost indecipherable medical ledger due to its fragility, and forgotten archives, in order that he might uncover and reveal the truth about one of the most talented and maligned individuals in U.S. history.

This is not Danisi’s first treatment of Meriwether Lewis but rather a follow-up to the comprehensive biography which he co-wrote with John C. Jackson in 2009 and which Prometheus Books also published. And although both books stand powerfully on their own, they complement one another handsomely.

The first is as meticulous a rendering of the events of Lewis’s adult life as you will find and the second a passionate, minutely documented defense against the many slanders to Lewis’s character that have persisted to this day – including accusations of drunkenness, mental illness and incompetent governance.

Uncovering the Truth About Meriwether Lewis consists of fourteen chapters (that historian Robert Moore Jr., who wrote the Foreward, poetically describes as “vignettes”), nine appendixes, seventy pages of footnotes, a twenty-eight page bibliography, an index of twenty-one pages and twenty-five illustrations. Thomas Danisi is nothing if not precise. And he needed to be. For much of what he proposes with respect to the character of Meriwether Lewis is new in the field of American history and provocative in light of previously published and long-accepted fact. He is also a marvelous storyteller, expressive in his knowledge and compelling in his arguments.

His documentation includes such dramatic evidence as the long-lost transcript of Lewis’s Court Martial when a young ensign (in which he ably defended himself and was cleared of a false accusation of drunkenness by a superior officer) and records made by Dr. Antoine Saugrain, revealing that he was treating Governor Lewis in St. Louis for malaria. Danisi provides further evidence that Lewis contracted malaria as early as 1795 and suffered with it for the rest of his life, which accounted for the erratic behavior in the last month of his life. That indeed it proved fatal to him in the wilds of Tennessee on the Natchez Trace.

Danisi owns with his wife the only known, extant, colonial building in the City of St. Louis. This may partially explain his powerful sense of the past, for his house resonates history, particularly a period of St. Louis history during which Meriwether Lewis lived not far from the Gateway Arch, and governed the Louisiana Territory from St. Louis, its capital.

Danisi proposes that Lewis did that as competently as anyone could have expected – given the enormity of the Louisiana Territory’s geographic size and the complexities and subterfuge of area politics (evidence of which he provides).

Lewis was but thirty-two years of age when President Thomas Jefferson appointed him territorial governor. That he was at the same time preparing for publication an amazing volume of research from the Corps of Discovery’s expedition to the Pacific Ocean, and that he was very ill with recurring bouts of malaria, complicated his duties as governor.

Thomas Danisi’s house did not stand in the colonial village proper but southwest of it, in an area beyond Chouteau’s Pond called the Cul de Sac Prairie.

Believed to have been constructed about 1790 the structure that fur-trader and merchant, Joseph Motard had constructed as an outbuilding in his Cul de Sac Prairie field lot, has been renovated to make it habitable in its modern setting in Lafayette Square.

When Thomas purchased the house in 1976 the exterior was covered with concrete and he had no idea of its age. With the aid of his good friend and neighbor, Bob Cassilly, Thomas removed all of the concrete, uncovering the original limestone walls. With the concrete removed the exterior walls required considerable tuckpointing.

He left the stonework exposed in two sections of the interior north wall, maintaining the original feel. Bob Cassilly suggested to Thomas Danisi that he restore the house “like a philosopher’s cottage…make it woody,” he said, with stonework exposed and lots of shelves for books. It’s a place from which the author continually draws sustenance for the historical research that has become his profession. It was only natural that he wanted to find out its age and anything else about it that he could. In 1977 a dream prompted him to look way beyond the records at City Hall for the origin of his house and eight years later he discovered that the house, in Motard’s field lot, belonged to a very early period in St. Louis history.

It was originally a one-story structure made from fieldstone quarried directly from the land on which the house stands, along the steep slope of what is today Mackay Place, just north of Lafayette Park.

The Danisis’ front door is now located on the south side of the house, replacing an earlier window. The front door originally set in the west side of the building, has been replaced by a window.

The photograph to the right shows that doorway from the inside and the outside during reconstruction. It revealed that Motard’s out-building was constructed to face west towards his plantation and away from the Mississippi River.

The Danisi house has become a sanctuary of area history. Inspiration for three books, two on Meriwether Lewis and a third devoted to Spanish land grants, which is in the works, has issued from this venerable if humble old building. Outside, Thomas planted pine and magnolia trees that have grown magnificently to maturity.

A short, limestone wall which Danisi built along the city sidewalk in front of his house and a vintage Cassilly wall of sculpted concrete separating the back of Danisi’s property from the alley, set it apart from the largely Victorian neighborhood in which it stands, and in many respects from the present.

Author and house have much in common, and I hope that the one will continue to inspire the other to uncover even more priceless history of the St. Louis area and beyond. Uncovering the Truth About Meriwether Lewis may be found locally at The Missouri History Museum Gift Shop, Left Bank Books, Puddin’ Head Books, Barnes & Noble, at Main Street Books in St. Charles, and online at amazon.com.

Illustration sources: Book Covers for Uncovering the Truth About Meriwether Lewis by Thomas C. Danisi and Meriwether Lewis by Thomas C. Danisi and John C. Jackson – used with the permission of Thomas Danisi;  Portrait of President Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800 – in the public domain at wikipedia.org; States & Territories of the United States of America, July 4, 1805 – March 1, 1809 – Author: User Golbez – Multi-license permisision with GFDL and Creative Commons CC-BY 2.5 – wikipedia.org.

Photo Credits: Original Front Doorway of the Danisi Home on Mackay Place From Two Perspectives and Photograph of Author, Thomas C. Danisi in Front of His Home in Lafayette Square, St. Louis – used with the kind permisison of Thomas Danisi; Old Trace Sunken – generously released into the public domain at wikipedia.org by its author: Jan Kronsell, 2002. All other photos: Maureen O’Connor Kavanaugh, author of this blog.

The Lou’s Signature Bread Co.

Once, neighborhood bakeries were almost as common in The Lou as banks. Practically every ethnic group had its own – Polish, Russian, Swiss, Bohemian, Syrian and Italian  among them. There were kosher bakeries and French pastry shops; distinctive but certainly not exclusive to their own nationalities, for St. Louisans sampled and patronized great bakeries wherever they found them.

This was a big improvement over Colonial times when St. Louis earned the nickname, Pain Court (Short of Bread).

As early as 1770, Jeanette Forchet, a free woman of color was supporting four children as a laundress after the death of her husband, Gregoire, and legend has it gaining a reputation for baking the best bread in the Village of Saint Louis.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries German bakeries were the most numerous in St. Louis, catering to the city’s largest immigrant group.

But their flaky, fruit-filled strudels, candied stollens, streussel coffee cakes, Springerle cookies and savory rye breads became favorites of the many other immigrant groups that contributed to St. Louis being designated the fourth city in the nation in commerce and population, by the U.S. Census of 1890.

By the 1960s most of these neighborhood bakeries had disappeared but a fair number survived. Today there are more ethnic bakeries on The Hill, where Italian breads reign supreme, than in any other St. Louis neighborhood. Locals may argue over the best but know that it’s wise as well as convenient to choose the bakery according to what you’re serving on a given night – Marconi’s, Amighetti’s, Vitale’s or the Missouri Baking Company.

On October 19, 1987 entrepreneur turned baker, Ken Rosenthal, opened the St. Louis Bread Company in Kirkwood, a community in St. Louis County.

His concept was so sensational that it took The Lou and eventually the nation by storm: a combination bakery-cafe featuring delicious coffees, soups, sandwiches, salads – and most importantly, breads and pastries baked fresh every day – in a relaxed and warm setting where friends, neighbors and business associates could gather.

Wi-fi access would become an added draw.

His inspiration came during a trip to San Francisco where he visited some excellent coffee houses and bakeries and sampled sourdough bread, with which Rosenthal fell in love.

He brought a sourdough starter back to St. Louis and built his bakery-cafe around it.

His was an experiment in the return of the small, St. Louis neighborhood bakery with a San Francisco twist. A neighborhood bakery it turns out that could work in almost any neighborhood in the country.

Sourdough bread (like that wonderfully crafted at Boudin Bakery on Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco) is believed to have its origins in Egypt 3,500 years ago. It remained a common process for leavening as late as the Middle Ages in Europe, and gained great popularity in the U.S. during the California Gold Rush. Boudin (opened by French emigrées in 1849) is considered to be the mother of San Francisco sourdough French bread; the oldest continuous business in the city, where a portion of the original “mother dough” starts every loaf of bread they bake.”*

I’m told that Ken Rosenthal’s St. Louis ancestors flourished in the garment trade. His talents would emerge as baker and restaurateur. “Creating sourdough is a slow, tedious process,” Rosenthal told KSDK-TV reporter, Jennifer Blome in a 1988 interview filmed on site at his flagship bakery/cafe.  (

).

But beginning the day’s baking at 2:00 am is something he found that he enjoyed. Ken Rosenthal has since moved to Colorado to be near his children and grandchildren but he remains Panera Bread’s largest franchisee.

His local model is a proven recipe for success. Today there are twenty-six locations in the Greater St. Louis area and 1,562 Panera Bakery Cafes (several under the previous name of Paradise Bakery and Cafe) in forty of the 49 continental United States and Ontario, Canada. In 2012, respondents to a Harris Poll voted Panera – Best Casual Dining Brand in the U.S. It also consistently ranks as one of the healthiest.

Known elsewhere as Panera Bread and locally as The St. Louis Bread Company, Rosenthal’s initial investment of $150,000 supplemented by a SNA loan of an additional $150,000 blossomed into the $14,000,000 for which he sold the company in 1993. The buyer? Ronald Shaich, owner of Au Bon Pain (an earlier, very successful chain of bakery-cafes) who changed the name to Panera. Shaich serves currently as Panera’s Chairman of the Board and CO-CEO along with William Moreton, Panera Bread’s President. By 2010 Panera Bread was a 1.3 billion dollar enterprise.

As I wandered into the Bread Co. downtown for lunch a few weeks back I watched a baker carry out a large tray of assorted cupcakes. After establishing a reputation for numerous delicious pastries, coffee cakes and bagels, the St. Louis Bread Company had now entered the cupcake wars.

Brian Rubach, a District Manager of Panera in St. Louis, explained to me that “not all, but a lot of tests for the whole company, are still done here” in St. Louis, which remains the center of (the company’s) operation.” You can only find the cupcakes in select St. Louis cafes where they are being test-marketed. A very recent experiment, time will tell whether or not they become a Panera staple like Broccoli Cheddar Soup in a Sourdough Bread Bowl, Pumpkin Muffies or the Bread Co.’s killer Frozen Mochas. The cupcakes are rich, moist and decadent. Whatever experiments follow, customers can count on ingredients being fresh and of the highest quality, service being friendly, and the franchises community-centered.

Baked goods remaining at closing each day are distributed to local charities. Contributions dropped in the “Share the Bread” boxes on the counter of every St. Louis Bread Company are donated to Operation Food Search to support local food pantries. Panera is a company characterized by generosity as well as taste.

Believe it or not the sign pictured at right is one of the most frequently photographed in downtown St. Louis. It’s not unusual to hear out-of-towners comment as they stand in line deciding upon what to order, what a “knockoff” the cafe at 6th & Pine is of Panera. When they learn that it is Panera with a local title, Brian Rubach told me, they pose for pictures at the sign outside the front door.

Downtown business people, loft dwellers, sports fans and tourists will be happy to learn that the St. Louis Bread Company at 6th & Pine has expanded its hours until 7:00 pm “until autumn (or beyond)”.**

The Lou still boasts some wonderful bakeries of long-standing, such as those already mentioned on The Hill, as well as Carondelet, Pratzel’s, Federhoffer’s, McArthur’s, La Bonne Bouchee. And while Polish and Hungarian bakeries have given way to Mexican and Bosnian pastry shops, excellent, artisan bakeries like Surgaree, Sweet Arts and Pint-Size are wowing St. Louisans anew.

But when it comes to national name-recognition we have only one, signature, neighborhood bakery-cafe. At home it bears this city’s name. But elsewhere they call it Panera!

References: * Boudin Bakery website: (
http://boudinbakery.com/
), ** Brian Rubach, Panera Bread District Manager; wikipedia.com; Panera Bread website: (
http://www.panerabread.com/
).

Illustration Credits: St. Louis Birdseye Map, 1896 – by Fred Graf – in the U.S. Public Domain at wikipedia.org., Deutsche:Frau biem Brotbacken – by Jean-Francois Millet, 1854 – in the public domain at wikimediacommons.org.

Photo Credits:  Masa madre.jpg – in the public domain at wikimediacommons.org; Bread in Boudin – Fisherman’s Wharf – author: Edward Z. Yang, Creative Commons Share Alike 2.5 at wikimediacommons.org.; Photos captured with my cell phone of the St. Louis Bread Company at 6th & Pine and at St. Louis Hills – Maureen O’Connor Kavanaugh, author of this blog.

Special thanks to Brian Rubach, St. Louis District Manager of Panera Bread, for taking a few minutes out of his busy schedule for an interview!

Gateway to Freedom: Commemorating the Civil War in St. Louis

We are six generations removed from the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history and it’s easy to forget, in the wake of more recent wars and philosophical conflicts, how close we came as a nation to permanent division. The costs in human life, and in the shredding of the fabric of family life, were incalculable.

But a recent recalculation of the war’s dead* by J. David Hacker, Associate Professor of History at Binghamton University, SUNY – a staggering 750,000 of the three-and-a-half millions who fought (750,00 being a mid-point of the likely 617, 877 – 851, 066 dead) – is cause for renewed reflection and re-dedication to peace and civil discourse in the U.S.*

After two-hundred-and-thirty-six years this republic remains an experiment in whether or not “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle that all men (humans) are created equal, can long endure,”** for the limits to individual freedom remain controversial one-hundred-and-fifty years after civil war.

A replica of the thirty-three star flag that flew over the Courthouse in 1861 decorates the rotunda of the Old Courthouse for naturalization ceremonies held annually on, or near, the Fourth of July. The original flag was briefly removed and replaced with a secessionist banner in the Spring of 1861 by Missouri Militiamen who socialized at the Berthold Mansion (today the southeast corner of Metropolitan Square) one block away.

2012 has been designated The Year of the Soldier in the City of St. Louis’ Sesquicentennial Commemoration of the Civil War, a war that had enormous impact on the population, commerce and cultural evolution of the community. For veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies returned home here – many to die, but many more to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on.

Decades ago, some who dealt with Civil War  statistics realized that the long-accepted number of 360, 222 dead could not have been accurate, for it did not include thousands of men and boys who were “discharged to die” and eventually did. It did not include the members of State Militias, Junior Reserves, Senior Reserves and Home Guards who fought in the war but were not counted.

The city’s signature event took place last Saturday and Sunday, May 5th – 6th primarily at Soldiers Memorial and the Campbell House Museum and included tours, a Civil War film series and book sale, and special exhibits. The walking tour that I conducted on Sunday covered roughly fourteen city blocks resonant with Civil War history, from the Old Courthouse west and north to the Campbell House Museum.

The homes of Margaret Parkinson McClure (for a time the Chestnut Street Prison for Women) and Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly (by 1861 Mary Todd Lincoln’s modiste in the White House), Bernard Lynch’s slave trade establishments, the Myrtle Street and Gratiot Street Prisons, street ambushes of Federal troops at 5th & Walnut Streets and near the Recorder’s Court on Olive Street, a recounting of the Affair at Camp Jackson, and St. Louis’ critical role in the survival of the Union, were some of the sites and subjects that I covered.

The front doors to Campbell House, which offers the most elegant window on family life in St. Louis during the Civil War, were metaphorically thrown wide for visitors to step into the mid-nineteenth century. Robert Campbell provisioned Union troops in southern Missouri during the war.

His wife, Virginia Kyle Campbell, nursed wounded soldiers in hospitals nearby.

Andy Hahn, Director of the Campbell House Museum, guided tours of Lucas Place as it existed during the Civil War.

St. Louis’ Soldiers Memorial Military Museum provided an especially symbolic setting

for The Year of the Soldier. Exhibits in the east wing illustrated the little-known importance of Benton Barracks during and after the war, and personalized the soldiers’ experience with uniforms, photographs, and weaponry.

Dr. Lynnea Magnuson spearheaded the events at Soldiers Memorial that included films depicting the soldier’s experience such as “The Red Badge of Courage” and “Glory”.

James Erwin of Main Street Books in St. Charles (
http://mainstreetbooks.net/
) offered an excellent selection of books pertaining to the Civil War in St. Louis, throughout the State of Missouri and in the nation, including his Guerillas in Civil War Missouri, published by the History Press in February of this year (
http://www.historypressblog.net/sneak-peek/guerrillas-in-civil-war-mo/
).

At the suggestion of his publisher, Erwin expanded his original concept of retelling the Battle of Centralia, to encompass the nature of and key players in Missouri’s infamous guerrilla warfare.

Bloody Bill Anderson (pictured on the right), William Quantrill and the James brothers are among the most well-known. Erwin’s book is a dramatic read.

James co-owns Main Street Books with his wife, Vicki Berger Erwin, who has twenty-three published books to her credit, including recent histories of St. Charles and Mexico, Missouri.

You can purchase Guerrillas in Civil War Missouri at Main Street Books in St. Charles, and in the St. Louis area at Left Bank Books, Subterranean Books, Barnes & Noble and Pudd’nhead Books.

It is well to remember that political discord can turn deadly and that the cost to those who defend us can be horrific. Hopefully Civil War Commemorative Events like this one will help us to understand the seeds of dissension that erupted in large-scale violence and prevent the United States from ever being divided by war again.

References: *This recalculation is the result of Hacker’s meticulous study and synthesis of digitized U.S. Census Records from 1850 – 1890. ** President Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”.

Photo Credits: “Bloody Lane at Antietam”, “Soldiers- Black-White – 1861″, “Elizabeth Keckly UNC-jpg “, “Full Length Portrait of Virginia Kyle Campbell”, and “Bloody Bill Anderson” – all in the U.S. Public Domain at wikipedia.org. All other photographs: Mosaic Ceiling in the Atrium of Soldiers Memorial, Thirty-Three Star Flag in the Rotunda of the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Walker Hancock Sculpture – “Sacrifice” – at Soldiers Memorial St. Louis, Front Doors of the Campbell House Museum, Photographic Portrait of Margaret Parkinson McClure in the Missouri in the Civil War Exhibit at the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park, Benton Barracks Exhibit in Soldiers Memorial – St. Louis, Audie Murphy in John Huston’s Film Version of The Red Badge of Courage Showing in the Auditorium at Soldiers Memorial, James W. Erwin – Author of Guerrillas in Civil War Missouri, and Stan Prater’s Photograph of the 8th Missouri Infantry Re-enactors – Maureen O’Connor Kavanaugh, author of this blog.