Anna Maria Von Phul (American artist, 1786-1823) Study of Boy and Baby

To some who remembered that part of St. Louis as home, it seemed like the desecration of something sacred.”

— Mary Joan Boyer, The Old Gravois Coal Diggings

ALAN writes:

The “Tales of Chester” are exactly the kind of stories of particular places and memories connected to those places that readers of The Thinking Housewife should consider writing about their own lives.  If they don’t, do they imagine anyone else will?  Those tales would not exist if one man had not held on to vivid memories from living there as a boy.

No one would ever have seen the motion picture “Meet Me in St. Louis” if a woman named Sally Benson had not written her memories of life in a certain neighborhood of St. Louis during her childhood in 1903.

Late in his life, I tried to persuade my father to write about the place where he had lived as a boy.  He liked the idea and had many fine memories.  But it was too late.  He could not summon the will to do that because too many of his friends and family were gone.  He filled an envelope with their newspaper death notices.  They were the people for whom he might have written those memories and to whom they would have meant the most, but all those connections had been dissolved by the passage of time.

Last month, a man was murdered in his apartment in south St. Louis in a large area that was known more than a hundred years ago as “the old Gravois coal diggings.” Much coal and clay mining took place there in the 1800s and early 1900s.  There were “wooded acres, meadows, and hay fields, ponds, and dewberry patches…  …tall, white locust trees had grown over steep coal pit banks where coal pits had been in operation many years ago…”   There was a path “like a quiet country lane hedged with Osage Orange and shaded by vines and trees,” wrote Mary Joan Boyer in her book The Old Gravois Coal Diggings [ Tri-City Independent, Festus, Missouri, 1952, pp. 31, 33 ]

“Cattle used to graze in the woodlands and meadows, men cut hay in the fields, and several generations of children of the old coal digging locality enjoyed the woodlands…   …they picked wild flowers there in spring and summer, learned to fish and swim in the ponds, went boat-riding and held skating parties in the wintertime.  They picked dewberries in the meadows when those berries were ripe, and they gathered nuts from the woodlands in autumn….”  [ p. 33 ]

The earliest miners were English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh. “Pleasures were simple, for the people were home-keeping people with interests centered chiefly in home.”  [ p. 74 ]

There were still some farms and wooded areas there as late as the 1920s.  But that rural atmosphere would not last.  The ponds were drained, the trees cut down, the mines were closed, and houses and streets were built throughout that area.  “To some who remembered that part of St. Louis as home, it seemed like the desecration of something sacred.”  [ p. 34 ]

I knew none of these things when I was a boy in the 1950s and my mother took me to visit aunts or cousins who lived in that area or on its fringes.  What I quoted above about the character of that neighborhood in the 1800s might not be known at all today were it not for two women.

Janet Graham Stockwell, who was born there in a rock house when Lincoln was president.  She attended a one-room school.  Nearby “there were large orchards, vineyards, vegetable and flower gardens which seemed like wonderlands to a small girl of Janet’s imagination…”  (p. 94)  Later in her life, she wrote down a few nostalgic notes in her notebook, notes “written in a mood of keen homesickness for the place where she had been born and reared and still thought of as home…”   (p. i)

Mary Joan Boyer, who was inspired by those notes to write the book named above, an informal history of that former coal-mining locality in south St. Louis.

Life in the old Gravois coal diggings was neither easy nor glamorous.  It was too hard to permit much crime or lawlessness.  Residents were busy in the mines or on the farms or in their small stores throughout the neighborhood or in their homes and gardens.  Drinking water was often the color of mud.  Most families were Protestant, while some were Mormons and others Catholics. They relied on their own labor and wits to get by as best they could.  They did not look around for the nearest welfare department.  Responsibility and self-reliance were high on their list of values.

“There was an aesthetic something about those early settlers who made themselves remembered through several generations by their kindness and consideration of one another.  They were generous to a fault, lovers of homes and gardens…..”   [ p. 56 ]

 “One of the most laudable traits of the coal miners was their complete dependability and their faithfulness to their work.  Though they worked long, hard hours, they vied with each other in putting out extra amounts of work…..”  [ p. 58 ]

It may have been a hard life in some ways.  But a hard life has its virtues.  It may be a kind of insurance against decadence.  It concentrates the mind.  The people of the old Gravois coal diggings were old-stock Americans.  They knew how to mind their own business.  They attended to the particular responsibilities of their lives in their homes in their community.  I doubt that they would have had any sympathy for a nation of people who are pampered, overschooled, miseducated, and undisciplined.  I doubt they would have agreed to make their neighborhood “inclusive” and “open”.  Why would we be foolish enough to do that and alter its very identity?, they would have asked.

I doubt that they could have understood people who fill every hour of their lives with gadgets and contrived amusements and daily rituals of electronic “news” which they are foolish enough to imagine makes them “well-informed.”  I doubt that any of them were ever seized by the delusion that it was their job in life to become do-gooders to people in other towns or cities, let alone on other continents, a form of arrogance born of decadence and now routinely accepted by many Americans.  A hard life devoted to one place and close to the earth would likely dispel any such delusions.

For recreation, men pitched horseshoes and women displayed patchwork quilts.  The Germans played accordion music.  Children made up games from their imagination.    Schoolteachers taught first-graders to sing Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” and “Come Little Leaves”.  Note particularly the kind of childhood Janet recalled—alive to the variety and beauty of the natural world that she saw around her when growing up in the old Gravois coal diggings.  And imagine by contrast the kind of childhood that Americans give their children today—filled with canned music, contrived entertainment, video screens everywhere, constant commotion, and scarcely any chance for children to develop their imagination the way that children like Janet could do in a less frenzied setting.

In the 1930s-‘40s, families in that neighborhood could walk to an ice cream parlor just a few doors away from a house where my uncle lived in the 1950s. They could also walk to three movie houses and one “air-dome”.  All those places are now long gone.

On some days in the 1950s, my mother took me to visit cousins at their home across the street from a huge red-brick building called the House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic home for wayward girls.  In the 1870s, a forest and recreational grove stood on that site.

Mary Joan Boyer wrote:

“The grove was laid out like a park with gravel walks, flower beds, and shrubbery….  There was a pavilion for dancing, seats, tables, and a bar…..

“Janet attended her first Oak Hill School picnic in that grove shortly after the Civil War.  …..The women and girls all wore calico dresses for the dances, and there was a fine community spirit among the people, friendliness and understanding long-remembered by Janet…..”  [ p. 96 ]

Both that grove and the Catholic home are long gone.

On a balmy evening in 1961, my mother and I and a classmate of mine played several games of miniature golf at a miniature golf course near a busy intersection.  I had not the slightest awareness that we were standing smack in the middle of the old Gravois coal diggings area.  Many miners and their families lived right there a hundred years earlier.  It was only one block from where coal deposits were discovered in or about 1820, and only three blocks from the site of the rock house where Janet Graham Stockwell, the source of much of this information, was born in 1861.  Her father had selected that area for his home because it was a peaceful area of plantations and fields “way out in the country”.  There were no paved roads or railroad viaducts, as would be built there in later years.  It was so far out in the country that it does not even appear in the book Pictorial St. Louis, an aerial survey of the city published in 1875.

Two of my great-aunts worked at companies in the old Gravois coal diggings neighborhood, one in an upholstery shop and the other for the Alligator Company.  (They made raincoats, not alligators.)  Both companies are long gone.

In the late 1950s, I rode with my uncle in his blue Ford as he drove through that area along a street that was once called “Mine Road” and later became part of Route 66.

In an episode of “The Andy Griffith Show” telecast in May 1964, Sheriff Andy Taylor is seen checking the stores as he walks casually one evening along a street in the town of Mayberry.  That is exactly what night watchmen did as they walked along streets lined with small stores in the old Gravois coal diggings neighborhood in the 1910s-‘30s.

One feature of the old neighborhood was a large wooded area called the Christy Woods.  A longtime resident recalled:  “The Christys were English.  I remember all the woods belonging to the Christy estate, the little dinky trains with the clay dirt on them.  The Christys kept their grounds so beautiful, as was their mansion.  Mr. Christy started the Christy Methodist Church for the coal miners.”   [ History of the Bevo Area, Book Three, Published by the Bevo Historical Society in St. Louis, 1989, p. 27 ]

That church building is still there, but it is no longer a church.  It is occupied now by a pizza restaurant, and people have tried to erase the name of the church from the front of the building.

In 1920, children were taken on field trips to the Christy Woods, across the street from their school.  A newspaper reporter who grew up in that area in the 1930s remembered how boys would play in the Christy Woods, build caves, climb on freight cars, climb up and slide down clay hills, and play cowboys and Indians or soldiers or foreign legionnaires.

Only many years later did I discover these few portions of the history of that neighborhood, a discovery that sparked my interest partly because a clay processing plant had been only a few blocks away from the house where my great-aunt and her husband and daughter lived in the 1950s when my mother took me there to visit them at Christmas time and on summer days when all of us played croquet in their yard.  My mother, grandmother, and two great-aunts would sit and talk around their dining room table filled with coffee cups and plates of “bakery goods”.  They talked about family or friends or the local parish or plans for a picnic outing or their memories from the 1920s-‘40s, a range of topics that seemed unspeakably dull to a seven-year-old boy.

This was in a house one block from where little railroad cars carried clay from the mines to the processing plant only twenty years earlier.  That plant came into existence following the discovery of clay deposits nearby in the 1800s.  It was still there in the 1940s.  It occupied several city blocks and had more than ten buildings and seven large kilns where clay was made into fire-bricks, pipe, and other clay products.  And then the time came when all of that was demolished.  The only vestige of that enterprise that still stands there today is a small office building erected in 1902.

By the 1960s, there were hundreds of homes in that area as well as factories, warehouses, and several modern apartment buildings.

Today:  Most of the windows in one of those apartment buildings are boarded-up.  One factory was destroyed by fire.  A tall warehouse building three blocks away from where the murder took place was erected in 1928 as a production center for the National Candy Company, whose president was the father of actor Vincent Price.  In 2003 a friend and I walked in front of that building and took pictures of the terra cotta candy canes and other multi-colored candies above a doorway, a remnant of the candy company that was long gone.  In later years, the building was still in use by other companies.  Today it is vacant with all the ground-floor windows boarded-up and many higher windows broken.  Its exterior walls are now a palette for spray-paint vandals, who include black thugs and white anarchists.

A baking company across the street closed in 1988 after being there for 41 years.  A corner tavern has been boarded-up for 25 years.  A popular bowling alley and restaurant down the street closed in 2005 after 43 years in business.  It closed because many of its customers stopped going there or moved away—because crime was increasing in that area—because of “change”, black thugs, and cultural trends leading downward.

Weeds grow on the vacant corner lot where a restaurant stood for half a century.  A building across the street that was once occupied by a 7-Eleven store has been boarded up for years.  All of this is in the very heart of the old Gravois coal diggings area.

When the mines were still operating, one woman lived there in a house on a quiet street for 58 years.  In that same area one evening in May, police officers shot a woman when she pointed a gun at them.

Last December, a murder-suicide took place a few blocks east of there; in February, a murder-suicide took place a few blocks west of there.

In January, a man was shot by two black thugs.  In March, two white people were shot in the head and killed by a black thug.  Two years ago, a 23-year-old black thug shot two young Bosnian brothers, killing one, in a robbery at their small store across the street from where Janet Graham Stockwell’s family lived 140 years earlier.

There is no “Gravois Coal Diggings Historical Society”.  There are no historical markers anywhere in that area; if there were, they would be stolen or defaced.

“Even the memories of the years when coal and fire clay were mined…are fading with the hurried flight of Time—the records are scattered and much interesting information is being lost,” Mary Joan Boyer wrote in 1952 in a book that is now itself a part of that history.  (p. ii)

It is not a pretentious, academic book like would be published today.  It is written in plain, straightforward English by a woman who spoke with many ordinary people who lived and worked in that area, or with their children.  It is a modest, unpretentious book that runs to fewer than 110 pages and includes a handful of small photographs of old houses and buildings, all of which are long gone.  From a tour of that neighborhood today, a person could not know that it was once the site of extensive coal and clay mining.  The names of streets are the only trace of some of the families who lived and worked there.  In the 1950s, one of my uncles lived on Ellenwood Avenue, which was named after a woman in the Christy family.

A neighboring community’s historical society went out of business when its members got older or died.  Three books of memories of that neighborhood published by that group were in large part a result of the efforts of two women to preserve that area’s history.  They were sisters and had lived in that neighborhood for more than sixty years.  They spoke with other long-time residents who had many happy memories of a stable neighborhood in years when lawlessness was held to a minimum.

There is another historical society for a third large neighborhood in south St. Louis and they have done a wonderful job in writing and archiving local history.  But when I attended some of their meetings more than ten years ago, one thing that struck me was the absence of people under 40.  Where, I wondered, are the younger people who must preserve their building, the files, letters, books, clippings and photograph collections that they have assembled and maintained (all through volunteer effort) for the past half-century?  Where are the younger people to take their place?

The answer is:  Moved away, or ignorant and unconcerned about such things, or too busy with their gadgets, games, and amusements, or too immersed in their worship of the great pagan gods Automobile and Speed.  The net effect:  The disappearance of any attachment to place, the surrender of such places to aliens who neither know nor care anything about the history of those places, the loss of Christian churches, the loss of continuity between generations, and the virtual extinction of neighborliness between and among people who live side by side in what are still called “neighborhoods”.

To what extent do neighborhoods, towns, and cities disintegrate because Americans are Fast Folk?  Jane Jacobs named the automobile as perhaps the key factor in the destruction of the fabric of towns and cities.  I have long thought that she was right.  That thought occurs to me every day as I see hip, cool Americans rushing about here and there in their motor vehicles in endless, mindless commotion, utterly oblivious to any loyalty that they might otherwise feel to the specific places that their forebears worked hard to settle and improve.  To what extent is their idolatry of motor vehicles a form of hatred of responsibility?  The responsibility to keep those places as clean, decent and livable as they once were and could be again?  I often have the impression that we are living in a nation of infants.

— Comments —

Mark Jaws writes:

I very much enjoyed this piece, even though I am not naïve enough to believe that life in these communities was as idyllic as portrayed.   There were undoubtedly numerous cases of marital infidelity, sexual deviancy, illegitimacy, broken families, crime, and ethnic tensions – but those were the exceptions, and certainly not as prevalent as in today’s America.

Those who are preserving such memories of pre-1960 America provide current and future generations a vision of what life was like – and what it again could be if we were ever to regain a portion of this continent on which we could rebuild western civilization.  While some may call me a dreamer, I know that our civilization goose is cooked and the rate of decay cannot continue forever.  One day the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down via a financial crisis and subsequent food riots.  Should the federal government implode, it will be useful to have such thoughts of the past in deciding who is allowed to stay in whatever portions of the country we can seize.

Aah.  Future communities in thought alone.  They keep me going.

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