A little known aspect of Lafayette Park history involves its role in expanding our national pastime. In the 1850’s, the mansion of Edward Bredell Sr. stood directly across from the park on Lafayette Avenue. Edward Sr. made his fortune in mining and dry goods wholesaling. He later established the Missouri Glass Company as an enterprise for his son to manage. Edward Jr. attended Brown University, where he likely was introduced to New York rules baseball. Games involving balls and bats in various forms have been described as early as the 1820s, but the New York game was well defined and quickly gained popularity in that area
Back in 1995, first-wave restorationist and Lafayette Square MVP Ruth Kamphoefner composed a tidy summary of observations and cautionary tales from her 25 years in the neighborhood. It not only paid tribute to some outstanding doers, but feels nearly as appropriate today as it did then. I’m in awe of Ruth, and what she accomplished in her decades here. What I write is surely inadequate. She can better convey some of it for me. In her own words…
Early in the 1970s, so many people came to house tours that we had lines half a block long in front of houses. So many properties sold that we envisioned the complete restoration of Lafayette Square within a year or two.
“Pretty soon we won’t need to have any more house tours!” I gloated to Jerry Ferrell, LSRC president at the time.
The LSRC neighborhood association turned ten years old in April of 1979. A resident wit and frequent contributor to the Marquis turned her attention to commemorating that anniversary. Linda Underwood lived for years on Whittemore Place. With her husband Gary, she was an early and frequent advocate for the neighborhood, involved in the day to day restoration of Lafayette Square. She did this with unfailing humor and the ability to take it all in stride.
Here’s a lightly edited and photo enhanced excerpt from her Marquis article, “You Think Lafayette Square Is Weird Today…Read On”
In 1874, an innovative farmer from DeKalb, Illinois received the original patent for barbed wire. Joseph Glidden established the Barb Wire Fence Company with Isaac Ellwood, also of DeKalb. It’s doubtful that either man foresaw this invention becoming one of what the BBC recently listed as “the 50 things that made the modern economy.”
All the iron on Earth originated in large stars that existed before our Sun even formed. Iron is the final product of a star’s radioactive decay, which fuses hydrogen atoms to form ever heavier elements. When the hydrogen fuel is exhausted and sufficient mass accumulates in the core of the star, it no longer supports its own gravity, and explodes; or so I’m told. In that supernova explosion, huge chunks of iron can be thrown many light years into space. Such a chunk came to land in eastern Missouri’s St. Francois County and became Iron Mountain.
Detail of Letterhead Logo for Hydraulic Press Brick Company of St. Louis (1883)
St. Louis is situated on some terrific ground with which to build a durable city. Limestone bluffs once lined the riverfront, and were quarried for facades and foundations. As mentioned in the preceding essay, a long deep seam of high grade clay ran under present day Manchester Road. There was coal galore, conveniently mined from the same area as the clay. Mold and fire the clay and you have a brick. Handy materials for an incredibly fast growing, if fire-prone city. Inexpensive and plentiful Italian and Irish immigrant labor kept production costs low. A terrible fire led to a city ordinance in 1849 mandating brick as the city’s construction material. Many such buildings have lasted over 150 years.
Edward Sterling (1834-1911) founded a bonafide brick-making empire, based in St. Louis. Early in his life, his uncle Elisha was managing a steam furnace company in Cleveland. Looking to diversify the business in the 1850’s, Elisha and his associate Ethan Rogers looked into the manufacture of bricks.
Until that time, brick production consisted of forming clay into molds by hand and then kiln-firing in batches. Now, late into the industrial revolution, underlying assumptions about labor and efficiency were challenged in almost every aspect of the economy.
Rogers invented and patented “a new and improved machine for molding and pressing brick by hydraulic pressure”¹. The first hydraulic brick machine was put into service in Cleveland in 1856. Three years later, that machine was sold to a manufacturer in Nashville, and eventually melted down for ordnance during the Civil War.
Now, about Edward Sterling
As a young man going his own way, Elisha’s nephew Edward unsuccessfully tried his hand at running a lumber company. He then returned to Cleveland and secured a financial interest in the patent rights for Rogers’s hydraulic dry brick press. Edward acquired a new press and in 1860 moved that 33-ton, cast iron machine to Memphis. In 1860, this press produced 8 million bricks in 11 months.
When the Civil War interrupted his production in Memphis, Sterling established a plant in St. Louis, He leased a brickyard near the southeast corner of Chouteau and Mississippi streets (in what is now Lafayette Square) and began manufacturing in late April 1865. With the luck of being in the right place at the right time, the following month brought the end of the Civil War, and began a long process of physical reconstruction.
Hydraulic gathers steam
The Sterlings family business soon attracted other investors, and Hydraulic Press Brick Company incorporated in 1868.
Edward Sterling became Hydraulic’s first president. The company took over the buildings, equipment and machinery in use at the plant on Chouteau and Mississippi. It also acquired an interest in the rights to three patents: the Rogers hydraulic press; a novel design for a brick kiln; and another design for an improved “perpetual kiln.” Hydraulic’s annual production in 1868 amounted to around 5 million bricks, and 7 million the following year. Sterling claimed this output was far less than the demand.
The quality of this brick – heavy, dense, and strong – proved itself in tests conducted by the government. The crush strength of a Hydraulic brick proved more than twice that of conventional handmade brick of the time. James Eads also performed tests and praised the solidity of Hydraulic brick. The product thus began selling itself. With both press and kiln patented, profits flowed to Sterling’s enterprise. Hydraulic product was used in the construction of Eads Bridge, the Bissell Point water treatment plant and Anheuser-Busch brewery. As word spread, it found use is both Chrysler and Manhattan Life buildings in New York.
By the end of 1872, the company had increased its throughput to nearly 18 million bricks a year. With 14 kilns and 2 brick presses, the plant could produce nearly 9,000 bricks per hour.
Getting the local bearings
It’s possible to locate both Sterling’s home and business on the 1875 Compton and Dry map of St. Louis. At that time he lived at the intersection of 14th and Chouteau Ave. His Hydraulic Press Brick Works had migrated down the road to Chouteau and Grand.
As the company yards followed excavation of the clay deposits, several moves west ensued. The works eventually resettled at Kingshighway, where it remained at the turn of the 20th century. Hydraulic Press Brick by then was churning out over 100 million bricks per year, It was, by then, the largest brick company on Earth.²
300 million per year. Note: H.W. Eliot – Secretary and eventually President of HBP Co. was poet T.S. Eliot’s father.
Epilogue
Edward retired from the business in 1905. Eight years earlier, he prepared a home to retire to, in Redlands, California. “La Casada” was a 22 room mansion of 8,000 square feet. Italian/Mission Revival in style, it featured extensive formal Italian gardens and seven landscaped terraces running down a hillside. Scenic America magazine in 1912 proclaimed this home to be “The most beautiful residence in all southern California”…
(2) Mound City On the Mississippi. City of St Louis Planning and Urban Design Agency
Bob Corbett of Webster University did an extensive amount of research into mapping the proximity of coal and clay mines in the Dogtown area of St. Louis. It proves the point in this essay’s first paragraph. http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/dogtown/history/mines.html
The advent of civil war was a perilous time to be a state in the middle U.S. There were slave states with deep economic interests in that “peculiar institution,” and free states where slavery wasn’t legal. However, four slave states did not secede from the US in 1861: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. These states walked a tricky line, and it required political and sometimes military maneuvering to prevent their secession.
In a recent essay here about Augustus Eichele, the match king of Lafayette Square, his obituary mentioned his membership in the Rainwater Rifles. Curiosity roused, I plunged into a deep pool of Rainwater.
21 Benton Place in Lafayette Square dates back to 1870. Noted architect John H. Maurice designed it for Brevet General John S. Cavender (1824 – 1886). The new owner commanded the 1st Missouri Volunteer Light Artillery during the Civil War. He was a veteran of the battles of Wilson’s Creek, Shiloh, Vicksburg and Fort Donelson.
It’s a long way from the subject of matches to that of pianos. Maybe not so strange when taken through the long lens of history in Lafayette Square.
On Carroll Street east of 18th Street is a row of houses built from 2013 through 2015. They face an older row of houses built around 1872. The homes at 1717, 1719, 1723 and 1725 Carroll were designed and built for Augustus Eichele, who had 1727 Carroll built for his own use. The other three were constructed for his daughters. 1725 connected to 1727 through a passageway meant to enable one of Augustus’s daughter to tend him in his old age.
Sometimes the research for a historical essay seems linear enough, but then pinballs off at unanticipated angles. I set about to simply find some background on Edward Krausnick, the little-remembered first superintendent of Lafayette Park. What followed is a reminder that real lives seldom follow a linear narrative.
