short span of time. New York, Boston and Philadelphia were as aged when St. Louis was born as St. Louis is today.
When Laclede and his French adventurers came up the Mississippi in 1764 to unfurl the flag of France over their stockade of logs in the wilderness, the eastern colonies must have seemed to them almost effete. The shady streets of Newburyport and Salem, Richmond, Annapolis and Charleston were lined with substantial structures exhibiting the staid elegance of the Georgian mode. These were settled communities, each with its local aristocracy closely in touch with the contemporary English fashions.
Most of the French settlers west of the Mississippi had come out by way of New Orleans where they had tarried for a while; but once they had left the sea coast they were as remote from civilization as the bushmen of Australia. To the east an all but impenetrable forest stretched to the clearings of Virginia. To the west lay uncharted leagues of plain and desert and mountain to the Pacific. They had come to trap or to trade with the Indians for furs, and though some of their number may have cherished memories of the fair parks of Versailles, the clipped alleés, the fountains, white nymphs chiselled against dark curtains of green, the long facade of the Palace itself, they dreamed their dreams on beds of boughs in such rough cabins as the axe
could fashion. Logs were the primitive building material as they had been in New England a hundred years earlier and the log cabin was the earliest architectural achievement of the French Pioneer. Little by little the village grew and as the wilderness receded, stone which lay near the surface was quarried, and walls were built of rubble. The stone houses were like the log ones in plan and general form, rectangular of small dimensions with gable ends and sloping roofs. This fashion must have persisted for thirty or forty years or until about the beginning of the nineteenth century. There never was any importation of brick as in the case of the eastern colonies, the Mississippi not being navigable by sailing vessels.
After the turn of the century, the settlement grew into a village and gradually the village became a town, and artisans of all kinds swelled the population. In 1803 Napoleon sold the territory of Louisiana to the United States. The French flag was hauled down and the stars and stripes run up where it had floated. From Georgia and Virginia and Kentucky and Ohio home seekers came and the town flourished in a straggling unkempt way like any other American town lifting itself by its own bootstraps. The cabins of logs and rubble gradually disappeared and were replaced by more mechanical and less picturesque structures of brick and frame, for brickyards and sawmills followed the flag.
HOUSE ON CALIFORNIA AVENUE, ST. LOUIS, MO. — ABOUT 1850
When Laclede and his French adventurers came up the Mississippi in 1764 to unfurl the flag of France over their stockade of logs in the wilderness, the eastern colonies must have seemed to them almost effete. The shady streets of Newburyport and Salem, Richmond, Annapolis and Charleston were lined with substantial structures exhibiting the staid elegance of the Georgian mode. These were settled communities, each with its local aristocracy closely in touch with the contemporary English fashions.
Most of the French settlers west of the Mississippi had come out by way of New Orleans where they had tarried for a while; but once they had left the sea coast they were as remote from civilization as the bushmen of Australia. To the east an all but impenetrable forest stretched to the clearings of Virginia. To the west lay uncharted leagues of plain and desert and mountain to the Pacific. They had come to trap or to trade with the Indians for furs, and though some of their number may have cherished memories of the fair parks of Versailles, the clipped alleés, the fountains, white nymphs chiselled against dark curtains of green, the long facade of the Palace itself, they dreamed their dreams on beds of boughs in such rough cabins as the axe
could fashion. Logs were the primitive building material as they had been in New England a hundred years earlier and the log cabin was the earliest architectural achievement of the French Pioneer. Little by little the village grew and as the wilderness receded, stone which lay near the surface was quarried, and walls were built of rubble. The stone houses were like the log ones in plan and general form, rectangular of small dimensions with gable ends and sloping roofs. This fashion must have persisted for thirty or forty years or until about the beginning of the nineteenth century. There never was any importation of brick as in the case of the eastern colonies, the Mississippi not being navigable by sailing vessels.
After the turn of the century, the settlement grew into a village and gradually the village became a town, and artisans of all kinds swelled the population. In 1803 Napoleon sold the territory of Louisiana to the United States. The French flag was hauled down and the stars and stripes run up where it had floated. From Georgia and Virginia and Kentucky and Ohio home seekers came and the town flourished in a straggling unkempt way like any other American town lifting itself by its own bootstraps. The cabins of logs and rubble gradually disappeared and were replaced by more mechanical and less picturesque structures of brick and frame, for brickyards and sawmills followed the flag.
HOUSE ON CALIFORNIA AVENUE, ST. LOUIS, MO. — ABOUT 1850