For starters, you won’t find the house and I can’t find a photo. How then to write about the Pulsifers? Probing a more obscure part of Lafayette Square history, it’s instructive in what it touches. Let me draw you a word picture.
William Henry Pulsifer was born in 1831, grew up in Boston, and moved to St. Louis in 1859. He found work in the locally prosperous and poisonous industry of white lead production.
Finding lead is easy if there’s any lead present. Early on, one could find it on the surface of the ground. it often forms galena, which looks like the lead it 80% is, compounded with 17% sulfur. The area around eastern Missouri was thick with galena, from Potosi, where lead was first mined in 1720, to Dubuque, Iowa and beyond. A long lead belt roughly followed the Mississippi Valley north.
Leaden alchemy
The process of turning lead into lead carbonate, or white lead, is nothing exotic. Ancient Romans and Greeks used “ceruse” as a pigment base and a facial cosmetic. (a toxic beauty at that!) The conversion was known as the Dutch Process. It was employed virtually from earliest times right into the 19th century. The procedure involved soaking sheets of lead in vinegar, then laying them between layers of animal dung (“stable litter” in the literature). Acetic acid and heat created an oxidized white powder, which was scraped from the lead. This process was repeated until the lead was gone.
With sulphur, lead, vinegar, and horse manure, a white lead factory would be a fine place to avoid living near. Due to the local abundance of materials, downtown St. Louis was blessed with several of these businesses. They were lucrative enterprises in the days when rough-hewn wooden homes gave way to painted plaster walls. White lead performed well as a base pigment, mixed well with linseed and castor oils, and left dried paint both flexible and durable.
A raft of tie-ins to the Square
The largest white lead works in St. Louis in the 1870s was Colliers White Lead And Oil Company. Here it is in 1874, at the corner of Clark and 9th Street. Colliers was operated by Henry T. Blow, an abolitionist whose parents once owned Dred Scott.
Henry married Minerva Grimsley, daughter of Colonel Thornton Grimsley. He was the namesake of “Grimsley’s Folly,” an epithet for Lafayette Park in the 1840s. One of their daughters, Susan, with the support of St Louis School Superintendent William Torrey Harris (of Lafayette Square’s Harris Row fame) founded the nation’s first public kindergarten.
The very busy William Pulsifer
For his part, William Pulsifer joined the 7th Regiment of the Missouri Militia during the Civil War. In 1866, he was appointed vice-president of the St. Louis Lead And Oil Company.
He became president of the firm the following year, and efficiently ran the offices and factory at 2nd and Cass Streets. In 1868, he moved to 1837 Kennett Place in newly fashionable Lafayette Square. Pulsifer and his wife lived with their daughter in the Square for the next twenty-two years.
A man of many interests, Pulsifer was treasurer of the American Central Insurance Company, a director of the National Bank of Commerce, and a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a longtime member of the American Folklore Society, National Geographic Society, Sons of the American Revolution, and other groups. Pulsifer joined the faculty of Washington University, doing research in geology, archaeology and astronomy. He was a founding member of the St. Louis Museum of Arts and Sciences, formed in 1877. In addition, he owned perhaps the largest private library in the city during the late 1870s.
Birds of a feather eclipsing each other
His most excellent adventure came in 1878. He joined a group of scientists from Harvard. Together, they traveled to Fort Worth to observe a full eclipse of the sun. Astronomers predicted both date and best place for studying the event, so it was highly anticipated in the national press. Leonard Waldo, leader of the team, managed to write 92 pages of observations from a totality that lasted two minutes and 42 seconds. Pulsifer’s contribution was a calculation that the sun’s chromosphere is 524 miles wide.
These gentlemen were prolific writers. in 1888, William Pulsifer sat down to assemble “Notes For A History Of Lead.” He called it the “amplification of an article prepared as an after-dinner paper for a paint club.” Published without further editing, the 488 page result has proven definitive ever since.
A match for her husband’s pace
William’s wife, Cornelia was similarly high-octane. She was a non-practicing physician who stayed busily engaged within the community. From her home’s location in Lafayette Square, she took an active interest in conditions at nearby City Hospital. It was then an appalling, Dickensian place. The sick poor virtually treated themselves inside a filthy, vermin-infested environment. Cornelia worked connections with William Greenleaf Eliot, chancellor of Washington University, to establish a school of nursing on-site at the hospital.
Finding Emma Warr
She then began searching for a hospital director. Cornelia traveled East and recruited Emma Warr, a graduate of the New York School of Nursing. Warr had studied European schools and methods. As a result, she developed strong ideas for a new curriculum.
The St. Louis program began in Spring of 1884, just nine years after the creation of the nation’s first nursing school. Students earned a small stipend, while expected to complete a two year program of lectures and twelve hour per day shifts in the wards. Warr trained nurses until the great tornado of 1896 wrecked the hospital. Upon rebuilding, she continued to lead the program until 1909. Missouri had no trained nurses before 1884, making this the first nursing school west of the Mississippi, . Emma Warr has since been dubbed “St. Louis’s Florence Nightengale.” Cornelia chose well.
The later years
William and Cornelia Pulsifer left Lafayette Square and St Louis in 1890, moving to Newton, Massachusetts. Their former home in the Square became a boarding house in 1920, and was razed in 1960. By that time, Lafayette Square was on the skids, and the Kennett property had been heavily vandalized and condemned by the city.
I initially thought their house was gone without a trace, but there actually is something left. In the side yard between 1843 and 1831 Kennett Place, there is a crenelated limestone wall and gate, like one finds in nearby Benton Place. It’s what remains from the Pulsifer’s estate.
Cornelia Pulsifer appeared prominently in the book “Famous Old Recipes From A Hundred Years And More,” in 1908. Here’s her recipe for Dutch Toast, which doesn’t have the same heft as William’s Notes For History Of Lead, but was quicker to the point. In fact, this looks a lot like French Toast to me, but maybe it was a nod to the Dutch Process her husband made his fortune with:
When Cornelia died in 1925, she took a spot beside her late husband in Newton. The Pulsifers share a cool philosophical type of headstone. It’s an unshackled statement, coming from the early 20th century. They seem to have been a great fit in a progressive neighborhood of the 1880s.
Research Sources
St. Louis: The Fourth City 1764-1909; Walter B. Stevens; Clarke Publishing Co, 1909
St Louis City Directories For 1865-1870
Edwards St Louis Business Directory, 1870
Famous Old Recipes Used A Hundred Years And More; John C Winston Co., 1908
Notes For A History Of Lead; Pulsifer, W.H.; John Wilson And Son; 1888
Transactions Of The Academy Of Science Of St Louis Vol. 15; June 5, 1905
Becker Medical Library Digital Collection beckerexhibits.wustl.edu
100 Years Of American Commerce 1795 – 1895, Volume 2; Chauncy Mitchell Depew; D.O. Haynes And Co.; 1895
Portal To Texas History; University Of North Texas; https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth28039/
Pictorial St Louis; Metropolis Of The Mississippi Valley; Compton, Dry; 1875
Another great piece, Mike. Of some interest is the fact that the original owner of my home on Whittemore Place was Peter Schaumleffel, the supervisor of the St. Louis Lead and Oil plant at 2nd and Cass Avenues (now a forlorn asphalt surfaced truck lot). Before moving here in 1884 the Schaumleffels home was just a few blocks from that plant. I’ve wondered what role the proximity to all that toxic dust and materials played in the demise of the Schaumleffel’s son at age 9, the daughter in her 20s, Peter in his 50s, leaving the wife and mother alone for the remainder of her sad life.
Thanks, Michael; It reminds me of a photo I once saw of EPA workers in moon suits taking soil samples near Times Beach kids playing with toy trucks in the same dirt. The average lifespan at the turn of 20th century America was about 45. So many reasons…
Twenty years ago my husband and lived at 1843 Kennett. We shared the vacant lot where the Pulsifer’s house was located. I always wondered what the destroyed house looked like. We really enjoyed the time we lived in the Lafayette Square neighborhood. Thank you for the information.
Linda Partridge
1843 is a beautiful home on a great street, Linda. You should come back and see what’s new in the old neighborhood. Thanks for reading. Homer, Alaska is a first for me.
This is great. Meticulous. I combine producing and presenting documentaries and exhibits-who and what made St. Louis a real city. Toward rescuing what is left and for indicting and prosecution bastards, especially the Kiel and Muny Killers. History for reading on cell phones is A nice experience. History as a battle tactic is better. Why is the house or houses still not there? St. Louis remains the most destructive and replaces the real goods with butt-ugly.
E mail correction. Egolterman@att.net
Sorry,Ed. Noted and corrected.
Bravo, William and Cornelia.
Bravo, Mike. How do you find this stuff?!
It’s all around, Duke. I just screen out the big chunks and focus on what looks like pay dirt.
Excellent!
Mike,
A ‘most excellent’ post for my morning read. I think I’ll have Dutch toast for breakfast. I’ve never seen a tombstone like that.
Dan
Thanks,Dan. Not to go all highbrow about that tombstone, but if you check out Percy Shelley’s poem Prometheus Unbound, you can find the context. About humankind’s need to embrace love and forgiveness in the face of tyranny and evil in order to end evil’s self-propagating nature. Too bad we don’t all study stuff like that anymore!