USA > Missouri > Centennial history of Missouri (the center state) one hundred years in the Union, 1820-1921, Volume I > Part 46
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Associating with himself his son-in-law, Major Thomas Wright, also an army officer, and Colonel William Chambers, who had come from Kentucky, Major Christy established North St. Louis. A glance at the present city map shows how entirely independent of old St. Louis North St. Louis was intended to be. The site was a tract bounded by the river on the east. Twelfth street on the west. Madison street on the south and Montgomery street on the north. North St. Louis within those limits is today one of the most outstanding patches on the patchwork map of St. Louis. It was designed to appeal to the American settlers who were flocking in. The three founders were related to two Presi- dents. They selected for the streets the names which suggested their patriotic sentiments .- such as Madison and Monroe, the Presidents; Clinton, the canal builder : Benton, then coming to the front as a young political leader; Warren, who fell at Bunker Hill.
Chambers, Christy and Wright had advanced ideas in city planning. Along the river front of their town they dedicated a strip of several acres for public purposes, including the marketing of all kinds of produce, wholesale and retail. Appropriately they called this "Exchange Square." Westward through the heart of the new town, extending from Exchange Square, was dedicated a street of more than average width to which the name of North Market was given. The founders held out inducements for steamboats to land at Exchange Square. A boatyard was established, the first at St. Louis. A ferry to the Illi- nois shore was operated. Boats. ran regularly between Alton and North St. Louis, while the more conservative St. Louis-under-the-Hill was slow to recog- nize the coming use of steam on the water.
Near the center of North St. Louis were dedicated three circles of ground for public purposes. One was for a "seminary," and is today occupied by the Webster school, fittingly named because when the godlike Daniel visited the West one of the most notable features of his entertainment was a reception to him at the mansion of one of these founders of North St. Louis. Another of the circular reservations was set apart for the recreation of the people and is
MAJOR WILLIAM CHRISTY Founder of North St. Louis
Courtesy Missouri Historical Society RESIDENCE OF MAJOR WILLIAM CHRISTY Built of stone in 1818. Considered one of the finest houses in St. Louis. The scene of many notable functions
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THE SPIRIT OF A CITY
today Jackson park. The third circle was for a church and cemetery. It is occupied by Grace Episcopal church. When the cemetery was given up, the bones of two governors of Missouri were among those removed to Bellefontaine. A quarter of a century North St. Louis remained an independent community with its own government. In 1841 it was annexed to St. Louis.
The Spirit and the First Labor Problem.
The spirit of St. Louis has not been the domination of the few over the many, not the control of all others by a single element. Nowhere in the United States has there been a more satisfactory relationship between the capital and labor of a community than in St. Louis. From the earliest times wage earners have found here uniformly good treatment. When this was no more than a fur-trading center, labor was better recompensed than in other sections. The rate of pay for common service was two livres a day. That was about $11.25 a a month. In the same period, similar labor in the American colonies, and later in the American states on the Atlantic seaboard, was paid $6.00 a month. The flatboatmen, who ranked lowest in the labor scale at St. Louis, were paid not less than $8.00 a month.
Until May, 1840, the working day of St. Louis was "from sun up to sunset." Mechanics and laborers, when employed by the day, began as the sun rose and stopped as it set. This made a day of varying length. In the summer time, when the sun rose very early, an hour from six to seven o'clock was allowed for breakfast. The day was broken by a full noon hour from twelve to one. This was the custom when the bricklayers started a movement to have ten hours made a working day. The employers refused to accede. The journeymen stopped work and paraded the streets without disturbance. They called a mass meet- ing in the afternoon of May 23d. Members of all trades attended the meeting. By someone's happy inspiration, Thornton Grimsley was nominated for chair- man. He was a manufacturer who had built up a large business, and had found time to perform many public duties. If a celebration was to be held, Thornton Grimsley was the first one thought of for the committee to make the arrangements. He was the grand marshal of more processions than any other man of his generation in St. Louis. He was a high officer in the military organ- ization of his day. He was responsive to every kind of a public call, and he al- ways did the right thing. So when a hard-fisted bricklayer moved "that Colonel Thornton Grimsley take the chair," the colonel didn't flinch. He went forward and called for order with as much dignity as if he was to preside over a gather- ing of "our best citizens."
Ten Hours Enough.
The colonel expressed the sense of the honor he felt upon being called upon · to be chairman of a mass meeting of journeymen. He told his hearers that he would discharge the duties as well as he was able. And then Colonel Grimsley proceeded in his own excellent way to solve the first labor problem presented to St. Louis. He said he wasn't a bricklayer, but a maker of saddles and harness ; that he employed many journeymen. His hearers might think from that he was not in sympathy with such a movement as the mass meeting represented. That would be a mistake, for he believed a ten-hour day was honorable and just.
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"I see many employers of journeymen in other trades before me," Colonel Grimsley went on. "If they come into this ten-hour system, they may, in some instances, lose a little time of painful toil, but they will be rewarded for the. sacrifice in better, willing labor, and will enjoy the smiles of wives and little children at the early return of their husbands and fathers from labor, if they will go and see them."
Thus Colonel Grimsley talked until he had the sentiment all one way. Other employers of labor followed him with expressions of willingness to make the concession. Without legislation, without disorder, with a single day's strike that was not attended by an unpleasant incident, the ten-hour labor day went into effect in St. Louis.
Laying the Foundations.
It was characteristic of St. Louis in the earlier generations, and the same spirit holds good today, that more attention was given to laying solid and broad business foundations than to the acquisition of numbers. When the Spanish flag was lowered, in 1804, St. Louis had about 1,000 inhabitants. Seven years after the incorporation of the city, the government census gave St. Louis 4,977 people. St. Louis was then the forty-fourth in rank of population among the cities of the United States. Ten years later it had moved up to twentieth place. In 1880, St. Louis had passed in population thirty-eight other American cities and had been passed by only one other city.
Within five years after Laclede and Chouteau marked the trees for the location of the settlement St. Louis had a population of about 900. When Stoddard raised the United States flag forty years after the founding there were not many more inhabitants. But the settlement had grown. It had rooted deeply and broadly. The view that St. Louis had waxed slowly between 1764 and 1804 was superficial. It failed to note and measure a spirit of develop- ment which meant more than the census. Every year saw the radius of the St. Louis sphere of influence lengthen. Up the Missouri crept a line of outposts tributary to St. Louis, each far more important to the settlement than hundreds added to the population. The traders established and cultivated friendly rela- tions with the Indians. They learned the great country of the lower Missouri intimately. St. Louis was to become the gateway of the stream of migration, the starting point for the expeditions. The four decades from Laclede to Stod- dard were so many years of efficient, important preparation for what was to follow.
Out from St. Louis in all directions moved the expeditions. Some were military, to establish forts. Some were scientific, to explore and to exploit. More were to establish communities, to open commercial avenues. It was a peaceable movement for the most part. Troubles with the Indians were not frequent or general in those days. The real Indian wars of subjugation or extermination west of the Mississippi came two or three generations later. The Frenchmen of St. Louis paved the way well for the American occupation of Louisiana. A branch of the Chouteaus started Kansas City with "Chouteau's landing." Robidoux, another St. Louisan, established a post which became St.
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Joseph. One of the Menards founded Galveston. A full score of Western cities owed their beginning to St. Louisans.
The Oldest. Commercial Trading Body.
On a dull summer day of 1836 twenty-five young business men iNet and formed the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce. The meeting place was the office of the Missouri Insurance Company on Main street, between Olive and Pine streets. The primary purpose was to agree upon certain regulations which the members would observe in their business. One of the first transactions was adoption of a tariff of commissions to be charged on sales of produce and lead, on purchases and shipments of produce, on payment of freight bills, on advances to customers, on placing insurance, and on adjustment of losses. The chamber also fixed the schedule of fees for arbitration of business disputes and the rates of service for agents of steamboats. In short, the young men determined that business in these lines should be systematized. They founded what is today the oldest commercial trading organization in the United States. One of the most active of the twenty-five was George K. McGunnegle, who was at that time a member of the legislature. At the next session, McGunnegle put through a bill incorporating the chamber and giving it a charter. The idea was so novel that the legislature conferred power upon the organization to do anything it pleased which was not "contrary to the laws of the land." The only other restriction imposed was that the property which might be acquired should "not exceed at any time the sum of $20,000." In the very beginning the Chamber of Commerce took on the character of a public-spirited movement. The mem- bership soon overflowed the insurance office.
The exchange room of the Missouri Republican was offered to the Chamber of Commerce for the meetings, and was accepted. The exchange room was much frequented, being open to the public, except when the Chamber of Commerce was in session. Out of the Chamber of Commerce, with its meetings to consider subjects germane to business interests of the city, and out of the Merchants' Exchange and news room, where papers were kept on file and to which business men resorted for conversation, developed the idea "on 'change." The members of the committee of seven chosen to take charge of this Merchants" Exchange movement were Adam Black Chambers and Nathaniel Paschall, news- paper men ; John D. Daggett and John B. Camden, both of whom became mayors of St. Louis; Rene Paul, the first city engineer; William Glasgow and Edward Tracy, merchants.
Financial Honor of Extraordinary Quality.
No over-speculation, no failure, no dishonest methods at home ever have precipitated panic in this city. There have been local bank failures, but they were not of such importance as to shake general confidence in the financial institu- tions of the city. There has been individual dishonesty, but so rare and so excep- tional as not to disturb faith in the honesty of the bankers of St. Louis. No wild wave of speculation ever swept over the city. Financial straits have had their beginning elsewhere and this community has shared in them through sympathy or through circumstances beyond local control. So it was in 1855. when St. Louis'
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financial interests demonstrated, in a manner which deserves to be-called historic, that they possessed the get-together spirit. Private banks had performed no small part in the building of St. Louis. They had supplied the facilities which a period of expanding trade demanded. They stood close to the business interests. It is difficult to see how St. Louis could have gone through the fifteen years before 1860 without these private banks. Sole dependence upon the one great chartered bank of the state would have dwarfed the city's legitimate commerce, would have handicapped enterprise. The bankers of St. Louis in 1855 carried long in vivid memory the 13th of January. The day of the week was Saturday. Page & Bacon did not open. Down and up Main and Second and Third streets the news spread. It paralyzed business everywhere but in the banking houses. Groups collected in front of the tellers' windows. Lucas & Simonds cashed checks amounting to $260.000. Louis A. Benoist & Co. paid out over $100,000. The Boatmen's Savings disbursed over $100,coo. J. J. Anderson & Co. and E. W. Clark & Brothers paid out large sums. All day, for in those years banking business did not close at noon on Saturdays, the houses honored the checks as fast as pre- sented. When evening came the vaults of the banks of St. Louis contained $800.000 less than in the morning. Monday morning brought restoration of con- fidence. The run stopped. A superb act of financial honor did it. Ten citizens whose private fortunes amounted to over $8,000,000 pledged every dollar they possessed in support of the credit of the banks. They issued this notice bearing their signatures :
To the Public-The undersigned, knowing and relying on the ample ability of the following banking houses in the City of St. Louis, and with a view of quieting the public mind in regard to the safety of deposits made with them, hereby pledge themselves, and offer as a guarantee their property to make good all deposits with either of said banking houses. to-wit: Messrs. Lucas & Simonds, Bogy, Miltenberger & Co., Tesson & Danjen, L. A. Benoist & Co., John J. Anderson & Co., Darby & Barksdale, and Boatmen's Sav- ings Institution.
John O'Fallon,
J. H. Brant,
Ed. Walsh,
L. M. Kennett,
Louis A. La Beaume,
D. A. January,
John How,
James Harrison, Andrew Christy, Charles P. Chouteau.
The banks opened at the accustomed hour, prepared to meet all demands .. The excitement subsided as quickly as it had arisen. There was some scarcity of money for a week, but no panic.
The Crises of St. Louis.
In the progress among the American cities, the spirit of St. Louis has been tested and proven in a series of extraordinary crises. During one decade, 1840- 50, a great fire destroyed twenty-three steamboats along the river front, and fifteeen of the principal business blocks, with losses reaching above $3,000,000. The highest flood in the recorded history of the Mississippi Valley submerged the fertile bottoms of Illinois, opposite St. Louis. It extended to the bluffs and covered hundreds of square miles. An epidemic of cholera in one year took
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COL. THORNTON GRIMSLEY Inventor of the Dragoon saddle. Leader in the movement to reduce the working day to ten hours
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Courtesy Missouri Historical Society
THE MARKET HOUSE AND LEVEE AT ST. LOUIS, ABOUT 1840
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THE SPIRIT OF A CITY
thousands of the population. St. Louis declined offers of aid from other cities and increased the population from 16,460 in 1840 to 77,860 in 1850.
Then came a crisis even more serious,-the Civil war. The chief business of this country was then carried on along north and south lines. St. Louis was the central gateway. It had begun to build the first railway toward the Pacific, con- tributing $6,000,000 toward the enterprise. Steamboat lines radiated from the city to all parts of the Valley. Material interests suffered paralysis. St. Louis emerged from the period of chaos with the spirit of law and order restored. Financial honor was demonstrated by the redemption of outstanding notes with gold coin. Only one other bank in the United States was able to do this. But with the close of the war, the spirit of St. Louis found old business relations radically changed. With peace came new alignments.
Another crisis which tested the spirit of St. Louis was the logical sequence of the foregoing. It was not in the nature of a sudden calamity. It was not attended by the revolutionary conditions of war. It came in times of peace. It was a long-drawn trial of a community's ability to depart from the conditions of a hundred years of development and to adopt new ways. This crisis occupied the last third of the century. St. Louis had waxed mighty and far-reaching on waterway transportation. No other American inland city had been so favored by nature. But in the two decades, 1870-90, rails took the place of rivers. Again the spirit of St. Louis was equal to the test. On the municipal seal is a steam- boat,-the fit emblem of the many years of St. Louis prosperity. When the war ended the strong men of the community gave, first, attention to the revival of the river traffic; they invested millions in fleets of the finest boats that had been seen on western rivers. They devoted their energies to the recovery of what St. Louis had lost by the war's interruption. But the era of the locomotive had come. Millions of St. Louis capital invested in the hope of the restoration of the water traffic melted away. No other city of America has had to face such radical changes in its commercial and industrial life. The spirit of St. Louis was equal to this. Rapid as was the change from the steamboat to the locomotive. St. Louis caught the cadence of the shriller whistle and moved on, losing but one rank in the procession of American municipalities.
Before the war the main traffic routes had been along the meridians. Now they were on the parallels. Trade arteries ran east and west. The natural gate- way for these changed conditions should have been St. Louis. But the dominant political and business influences were exercised strenuously in favor of the more northern parallels along the Great Lakes. The wonder is not that St. Louis suffered disadvantage in those years by reason of close relations with the South but that the spirit of the city was able to accomplish what it did under the new order.
The Americanization of St. Louis.
St. Louis Americanized with greater rapidity than any other large American city. In thirty years the census returns have shown almost no increase in the foreign born population. All of the growth was of American birth. Germany born dwellers in St. Louis have been more numerous than natives of any other foreign land. The Ireland born came next in strength, but the most recent census shows a marked falling off in the numbers of both Germany born and Ireland
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born. If it had not been for an increase from other countries, the foreign born of St. Louis in this centennial period of statehood would be many thousands below the number several decades ago. The Russia born have increased. The Polanders now form a new element in the foreign born population, numbering several thousands. Natives of Switzerland have much stronger representation than they had twenty years ago. Another country which shows marked increase in its contribution to the foreign born population of St. Louis is Sweden.
Illustrative of this strength in the native born population is the fact that of the nearly forty mayors the city has had, only two were of foreign birth,-one from Scotland and one from Germany. Eight of the mayors of St. Louis were natives of the city, five were born in New York and three were Virginians, Kentucky. Pennsylvania, and Maryland each contributed two. Other states represented in the roll of St. Louis mayors are Maine, North Carolina, Massa- chusetts. Connecticut. Ohio and Illinois,-significant of the contributions made by all sections of the United States to the native born population of St. Louis.
A National Distinction.
The St. Louis industrial district is the third largest in the United States. St. Louis for years was one of the three central reserve cities of the United States. Reports of recent date to the comptroller of the currency showed that the banks and trust companies of St. Louis had gained $50,000,000 deposits in twelve months. No other large city holds closer relations with its territory south, southeast and southwest. Striking recognition of this relationship was shown by the government in the selection of St. Louis to be the location of one of the Federal Farm Loan banks. St. Louis was the only Federal Reserve bank city given a Federal Farm Loan bank. One of the twelve Federal Farm Loan districts was so defined by the Federal Farm Loan board as to embrace territory south, southeast and southwest of St. Louis and this city was given bank location. This action of the board came as a distinct recognition of the closeness of the relationship between the city and the agricultural interests of the district. One trust company of St. Louis has a record of more than $30,000,000 loaned on farm mortgages, nearly . all of it within the district defined by the government board on rural credits, and without a dollar of loss. Other loan companies and trust companies of St. Louis have the same records as to stability and extent of farm loans in this district. Shortsightedness might have prompted the financial interests of the city to look with indifference or coldly upon rural credit plans of the government to make possible farm loans in the St. Louis territory at lower than the prevailing rates. The bankers and trust companies, seeing only immediate conditions, might have viewed the Federal Farm Loan bank as an invasion. They did not. They saw in the long run an uplift, a development of agriculture, meaning mutual gain to city and farm. The St. Louis clearing house, by a unanimous vote, determined to invite the location of one of the twelve Federal Farm Loan banks in St. Louis. The bankers and trust officials of St. Louis, headed by Chairman Walker Hill, made such forceful and convincing presentation of the conditions in the proposed district and of the advantages of St. Louis as the location that the government board made a single exception in the case of this city and gave the Farm Loan bank to a Federal Reserve city. The Federal Farm Loan bank of St. Louis came into existence commanding the maximum degree of confidence on the part
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of the farmer borrower and the farm bond investor because of the repute the spirit of St. Louis had established in the generations past.
A Home Made City.
To a degree which gives it distinctive character,-municipal individuality so to speak,-St. Louis is a city of homes and a home made city. The government census showed that St. Louis had 105,650 detached dwellings. More than two- thirds of the St. Louis families were living, not in tenements, or flats, or hotels, or apartment houses, but in separate homes. As a city of homes St. Louis was placed in a class of its own among the large cities of the United States.
Pioneer St. Louisans built "houses of posts,"-not the log cabins of the Americans to the eastward. They cut smaller trees into posts nine feet long and set them on end to form the walls of their houses. For the cheapest construc- tion the posts with the bark left on were used. For a better class of colonial architecture the posts were hewn. The prudent 'St. Louisan set his posts on a stone foundation a little above ground. Chinks were filled with clay which hardened. The floors were of slabs. The chimneys were of flat blocks of lime- stone. Every house had its porch, or "gallery" to use the vernacular, and the porches as a rule faced eastward or southward to catch the prevailing breezes. Travelers in those early days invariably commented upon the fine climate of St. Louis. As the fur trade prospered, houses of stone became numerous but they were never crowded together and the gallery was never forgotten by the architects.
With the invasion of "the Bostons," as the early arriving Americans were called by the French habitants, came Philadelphia and Baltimore economies. Through several generations it was the custom to build homes on narrow lots, the front steps flush with the sidewalk, or at best only a few feet back, and often in long solid rows. The newcomers did not indulge in what seemed to them the unnecessary luxury of a gallery or piazza. As a consequence of the archi- tectural misconception, St. Louis suffered from an unjust reputation which clung to it through two generations. But with the coming of the trolley cars, the residence sections expanded over suburbs which rose on the foothills of the Ozarks. . The monotonous brick and stone rows passed forever. St. Louis returned to architectural sanity with detached homes, side as well as front and back yards, and, not to be overlooked, the east piazza. The bad summer became only a fading tradition.
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