I reckon that many of you are aware of the Compton and Dry panoramic map of St. Louis from 1875. It provides minute detail of the entire city at that time, even rivaling what Google Maps provides. There’s been a good deal of conjecture about how Camile Dry and his team managed to accomplish this, but if done with observation balloons, it went completely unremarked upon by the press, which seems odd.
Here’s a panel from that Pictorial St. Louis map for your review. This is image 25 of 114, depicting part of downtown in 1874-1875. For orientation, above 1 is the original home of St Louis University. Above 2 is the Old Courthouse, not yet so old. Its distinctive dome was finished just 11 years earlier. Above 3 is the Post Office, like the Courthouse, still there today. Just to the right of 4 is the Lindell Hotel, designed by George Barnett and completed shortly before drawing of the map. The original hotel on the same site burned spectacularly in 1867. Stones from it today grace a pond at Tower Grove Park.
Introducing the St. Louis of Henry Vogel
While browsing around the Library of Congress map collection, I came across a wonderful cartoon of significant St. Louis sites and buildings, drawn by Henry Vogel for the Lawton Printing Company in 1884. It is a sort of anniversary drawing, as it compares a view of the city from 1784 with a current one from 1884. Voila:
The earliest days of the city
There are 37 visual vignettes to enjoy. Allow me to docent you through just a few. Here’s the large oval just left of center in the drawing:
The slogan at top echoes the name given to a 30 foot long mural by Emanuel Leutz that resides in the U.S. Capitol Building and celebrates Westward expansion. https://www.aoc.gov/art/other-paintings-and-murals/westward-course-empire-takes-its-way The mural portrays Lewis And Clark leading the way with Daniel Boone, who would have been 70 years old in 1805. Seemed acceptable American mythology by 1861, when it was painted. In Vogel’s eye, St. Louis in 1784 was a fledgling city at 20 years of age. It’s shown as little more than a stockade. You can see Native Americans issuing from teepees on the Illinois side of the river, and a small keelboat crossing over.
The medallions on the left and right of the scene both promise a new day dawning, with all its promise of “wealth for millions”. On the left, the discoverers celebrate reaching their destination, and on the right, presumably the view below them, of an unspoiled vista with its native inhabitants.
St. Louis of 1888.
The other main scene is of the industrially rich city of 1884. It feels strange today to conflate smoke with urban progress. St. Louis looks lost in the flames north of Eads Bridge. There are many such proud representations of smoldering American cities in the 19th century. If you want a home away from all this glorious progress, you moved to the suburbs, like Lafayette Square. Note how you couldn’t wedge another building into the existing density of downtown, proof of its desirability for business.
Again, borrowing from interesting sources, Vogel paraphased the title of an influential 1875 book by L.U. Reavis (The Future Great City Of The World). Reavis was a civic booster nearly without equal, and he argued that the Westward course of development would leave St. Louis ideally situated. Ideal by virtue of placement, transport, resources, and especially human leadership, to become the center of civilization. He went as far as to propose relocating the nation’s capitol, and even its buildings, to St. Louis. Reavis added letters of endorsement from Horace Greeley, Willam Sherman and others to buttress his position. Vogel apparently bought into this vision. “Upward and onward” indeed.
Rolling on the river
There is quite a lot of bustle around the riverfront. In fact, look closely and you’ll see a Civil War era ironclad ship on the Mississippi. Perhaps it’s an allusion to James Eads, as he designed them during the war. Ironclads had no such utility on the river twenty years later
The Veiled Prophet
On the left of this scene from 1884 is a medallion featuring the mysterious Veiled Prophet. He holds an edict for the destiny of the Great City, and waves his wand to make it so. This tradition originated in 1878, six years before Vogel’s drawing.
The idea of a Veiled Prophet was dreamed up by a group of businessmen meeting at the Lindell Hotel. They were trying to devise an event as popular as New Orleans’ Mardi Gras. At the same time, they wanted to counter the growing buzz Chicago received for its robust economic health. There may have been a racially charged component too, as this group was all white, all male and largely angry about recent labor strikes and protests involving mixed race and lower income workers. The original look of the Veiled Prophet was strikingly similar to that of a Klansman, with a conical hooded white robe and shotgun at his side. A thinly “veiled” warning to mind one’s place? Fifty thousand people turned out for the first Veiled Prophet parade. The VP, then Fair St. Louis remains, heavily modified to fit the changing times.
St. Louis’s annus horribilis
Vogel featured these early and late views of St. Louis along with various buildings and events from the city’s history. Here are a couple favorites, although every picture tells a story:
1849 might have been the worst year ever in St. Louis. A flaming mattress on the steamship White Cloud managed to ignite a conflagration that engulfed the riverfront and destroyed 418 buildings.
Only heroic countermeasures by the St. Louis Fire Department, like blowing up buildings to form a fire break, kept the inferno from torching the entire city. This nearly coincided with a devastating outbreak of cholera that ended up taking the lives of 8% of the city’s population. Worse still, emigrants passing through St. Louis brought it west, decimating the wagon trains and Native American populations along the way. Dr T. McCollum, a westward traveller that year wrote, “the road from Independence to Fort Laramie is a graveyard.”
So a new city rose on the ashes of the old one. Engineers drained Chouteau’s Pond to improve sanitation. The Old Courthouse, built in 1828, hosted the original Dred Scott trial of 1847, and slave auctions until 1861. Enhanced over time, it survived the fire and found its way to Vogel’s work.
The wind-up, with thanks to Mr. Vogel
The city itself eventually regained its trajectory. By 1884, Chicago, by virtue of its clearly superior railways and proximity to the iron of Minnesota outstripped St. Louis in terms of new development. It would not relinquish that lead. We did, however, enjoy inarguable baseball superiority for another 132 years. Some small comfort in that.
So there’s a quick intro, with hopes this has stimulated your appetite for discovering the rest of this terrific cartoon. The rendering is expert, noteworthy now as it must have been in 1884. I regret not knowing more about Henry F. Vogel, the artist. He continued to live in St. Louis into the 1910’s, and held a patent on design for the St. Louis Rail Car Company, in addition to being an officer of that firm. The original version online appears as a tiff formatted image. You can enlarge it on your computer to a high degree…and it will reward close inspection. I recommend you spend some time with it; the better to remember some of our shared past. Just click on https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4164s.pm004400/?r=-0.288,0.005,1.452,0.808,0
Thanks to research sources, including
The U.S. Library Of Congress
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/fair-st-louis-and-the-veiled-prophet/379460/
The brief profile of the Old Courthouse from the National Park Service at nps.gov, in its Gateway Arch brochure.
If you enjoy historical maps, give a look at my earlier essay about James Palmatary and his vision of Lafayette Square in 1858: http://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1858-palmatary-maps-the-square/
Mike,
An expertly rendered story by our favorite docent. Never thought a printing company would hire an in-house artist. Though it makes sense to generate reasons to keep the presses running.
Dan H
Thanks, Dan; Yeah, the level of detail in the piece makes me think it was an effective way to showcase their ability to hype something for a potential customer.
Nicely done! A fascinating look at the St. Louis of yesteryear. The commentary about the various panels brings them to life.
Thanks for taking the time to feed back, Valerie. The tiff version at the end of my essay is really worth some close study, and it’s able to be expanded enough to reward the effort.
Mike
I always appreciate your resourcefulness, your scholarship, and your ability to connect the dots. Your images and maps are truly a gift. Thanks for sharing them with the broader community.
Greg Rohde
Input like that is what makes me do it. Thanks, Greg, for understanding that everyone can use a pat on the back from time to time.
I had always been told the Capitol dome #2 was a St. Louis patented Rumbold cast iron construction as here the Old Courthouse and Insane Asylum have . Is this an oversight in the Capitol history ?
Beats me, Tom. That’s a long way from the direction of the essay, but I hope you get an answer from someone better versed on it than me.