When father St. Pierre duly noted in the parish records on February 20, 1793, that he had moved the body of Francois Leclerc from the cemetery in “old” Ste. Genevieve to the cemetery in “new” Ste. Genevieve, he might as well have pronounced the last rites for the old town at the same time.
Photo by Archivo General de Indias, Seville.
Plans were already were being made to transfer the church and the civil administration to the new town, and it is this new town of the 1790s that we cherish today. With wonderful examples of French architecture from both during and after the colonial era scattered among the homes of later American and German settlers, Ste. Genevieve is one of the most attractive and interesting historic towns not only in Missouri but also in North America.
Although receiving scant attention today, just southeast of town lies the big common field and the archaeological remains of the old, original town of Ste. Genevieve, the little French settlement that farmers and traders established around 1750 on the west bank of the Mississippi River. By 1790 it had grown to about nine hundred people, about a third of whom were black or mulatto, living in a three-mile-long settlement strung along the riverbank and exposed to the vagaries of that capricious river. They had been attracted there by le grand champ, the rich agricultural land in places nearly a mile wide on the floodplain, which they farmed with slaves and maintained as a common field. The field was divided into long, narrow private lots running from the river to the bluffs but surrounded by a single common fence, which all landholders helped maintain.
After a series of particularly severe floods in the 1780s destroyed many homes, some families began to leave the river bottom and move to higher ground in various places, including what was first known as Petites Côtes (Little Hills), a slight rise a few miles northwest of the old town, between the forks of the Gabouri Creek. As more families moved to higher ground, Petites Côtes became Nouvelle Sainte Genevieve, and after 1793, just Ste. Genevieve. The old village on the bank of the Mississippi had become only a memory—and an archaeological site.
Beginning in the fall of 1796, land-hungry Americans arrived seeking concessions in the hinterland to the west from a suddenly more liberal Spanish officialdom. Spain had secured the west bank of the Mississippi when France lost its empire in North America in the early 1760s, although Spain’s imprint on the French colonial society and culture of the area were very light. Then, Spain traded it back to France in 1800, just before Thomas Jefferson’s purchase from Napoleon in 1803 of the entire Louisiana Territory, including New Orleans, Ste. Genevieve, St. Louis, and west all the way to the crest of the Rocky Mountains. The purchase unleashed a flood tide of Americans who nearly overwhelmed the French in Ste. Genevieve.
Among the new arrivals, most of whom were from the upper South, was Jacob Philipson of a Philadelphia family, who had migrated to St. Louis to open a mercantile business and then in 1811 moved his business to Ste. Genevieve. Ste. Genevieve was a logical port of trade for manufactured goods coming west by river from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and for lead and furs from Missouri’s interior going east. In 1818 Philipson built a one-and-a-half-story home and store of local ashlar stone on the southeast corner of Merchant and Second Streets. The Federal-style structure is evidence of the new American influences on the community. The building was divided on the first floor into two distinct areas, one for Philipson’s mercantile business and the other for his residence, with two separate front entrances on Merchant Street.
Jean Baptiste Vallé (1760-1849), the last commandant of the post of Ste. Genevieve before the Louisiana Purchase, bought the building from Philipson in 1824. Vallé used it as headquarters for Menard & Vallé, a commercial enterprise involved in much of the fur trade with the Indians of southern Missouri and Arkansas. Head of the leading French family in Ste. Genevieve, Vallé then owned a large portion of the block that included Philipson’s stone building. His personal residence on the opposite corner of the block was a typical French colonial vertical log structure built in the 1790s. It still stands, now owned by the National Society of Colonial Dames in Missouri, who have long owned and carefully restored the Bolduc and Bolduc-LeMeilleur houses next door and operate them as the Bolduc House Museum.
Vallé’s youngest son, Felix, and his wife, Odile Pratte Vallé, made their home in the stone house for the next fifty years. Felix worked as a clerk for Menard & Vallé in the commercial side of the house and eventually took much of the responsibility for the firm’s operation. In the early 1840s when the Menard & Vallé partnership dissolved following the death of Pierre Menard, Felix Vallé founded an enterprise with James Harrison called the American Iron Mountain Company to mine for iron ore in nearby St. Francois County. Probably not long afterward, Felix and Odile modernized their home, removing the commercial rooms and one of the two front doors and turning it into a center-hall Victorian house.
Photo by Oliver Schuchard.
Across a side street from the Felix Vallé house is a small frame structure known today as the Shaw house, now also part of the state historic site. It was originally built around 1819 by Jean Baptiste Bossier as a commercial structure. Dr. Benjamin Shaw purchased the timber-frame building in 1837 and presumably enlarged it to its present configuration around 1840. Dr. Shaw and his wife, Emile, were contemporaries of the Vallés. Emile, widowed in 1849, continued living in the house for more than fifty years. In this part of town are numerous other historic homes, most privately restored and still lived in, including the home of Dr. Lewis F. Linn, a prominent physician who served as a US Senator from 1833 to 1843. Vallé and Harrison’s American Iron Mountain Company thrived, adding a successful rolling mill in St. Louis in partnership with Pierre Chouteau Jr., scion of the founding family of St. Louis. They employed nearly one thousand men in the Iron Mountain vicinity by 1869. Felix Vallé died in 1877, leaving most of his vast estate to his wife. Odile Vallé donated three-fourths of the funds to build the Catholic Church that still stands in the center of town and continued to live in the modest stone house on Merchant Street until her death in 1894. As early as the 1930s, the federal government recognized the significance of the Felix Vallé house by incorporating architectural drawings of the structure in the Historic American Buildings Survey. In 1970 the family home was donated to the state by descendants of the inter- married Vallé and Rozier families. The Rozier family was descended from Ferdinand Rozier, a Frenchman who had arrived in Ste. Genevieve in 1811 with his business partner, John James Audubon. Audubon dissolved the partnership shortly thereafter to pursue his calling as an artist, but Ferdinand Rozier and his family lived for many years near Felix and Odile Vallé on Merchant Street.
Park officials restored the Felix Vallé house to its original appearance, including reopening the two original front entrances leading to separate sections, and furnished it as it may have been during the 1830s. The house boasts a great expanse of original painted ceiling, protected for more than a century by a plaster ceiling that was placed over it during remodeling around 1850; the newly revealed 1818 paint is covered with thousands of flyspecks, a hint of life before wire screens. Outdoors, the restored sidewalks are gravel—not always popular today but mandated by an early nineteenth century city ordinance as an improvement over the dirt that seemed always to have been either mud or dust.
Photo courtesy of Missouri State Parks.
Two connected outbuildings—a brick one that was likely a wash house and a frame building that was probably a slave cabin—remain in the rear yard, rare survivals of nineteenth-century outbuildings. The wash house has been set up as of circa 1830, while the frame building, currently repurposed, also may some day be restored. An archaeological study of the yard revealed the location of several other significant features, including a building believed to have been the original kitchen and two cisterns.
In 1989 the Shaw house across the street was added to the state historic site for use as an administrative building and a reception and exhibit area for visitors. In the process of converting the building for that purpose, numerous layers of added modern materials were removed from the walls and floors, revealing paint shadows, nail holes, and other evidence that precisely outlined the previous positions of store counters and shelving—a ghostly vision of the old Bossier store of the early nineteenth century. The site collection even holds Bossier’s original business account book. The largely residential property has had a colorful history since the days of Emile Shaw, especially during the Depression years of the 1930s when it was the focal point for a colony of artists attracted to the French heritage and peaceful surroundings of Ste. Genevieve. Because it was altered many times over the years, this house was not set up with period furnishings, but the evidence of its interesting architectural evolution from store to residence was left in view. Few buildings in Ste. Genevieve have been as intimately involved in as many aspects of the community during the last two centuries as the Shaw house, and its use for both administrative and exhibit purposes is pragmatic preservation in action.
There was a certain irony in the fact that a state historic site in the best-preserved French colonial community in the nation consisted of a series of nineteenth-century American-style buildings. This preservation was justified, however, as none of the other museum houses in town were interpreting the interaction of French and Anglo-American culture in the early nineteenth century. And yet, the lack of an eighteenth century French colonial structure—built in the traditional vertical log manner— was a striking gap in park system holdings. These distinctive buildings, with their wall logs set vertically either in a trench or on a sill, with the spaces between the logs filled with small stones and clay or lime (pierrotage) or with clay and grass or straw (bousillage), are the signature French trait in Ste. Genevieve. State park officials recognized the need for such a building and desired to acquire one for the site.
A farmhouse on a beautiful site fronting on the common fi eld a few miles south of town was among the obvious candidates. The house, near the village of New Bourbon, was discovered in the mid-1980s to have vertical logs beneath its clapboard siding. Tree-ring dating of the logs by a University of Missouri scientist established that they were cut in 1793, and archival research suggested the house may have been built for Pierre Charles Dehault Delassus de Luzières, a high-ranking French nobleman 242 * MISSOURI STATE PARKS AND HISTORIC SITES FelixValle.indd 242 Port Development Old Ste. Genevieve who left France in the aftermath of the French Revolution and arrived in Ste. Genevieve in 1793. He served as commandant of the New Bourbon District, carved out of the Ste. Genevieve District in 1793 for him to administer. Architectural study of the house established that it had the largest floor plan of any house constructed in the French colonial manner in the entire middle Mississippi River valley. The house was owned by descendants of a German family, the Kerns, who had occupied it since the 1850s. They added a second floor in the 1890s. But despite being vacant, it was not for sale.
Photo by Bill Naeger.
In early 1993 the Delassus-Kern house was finally offered for sale, and the state agreed to accept it as a gift from an anonymous donor. Before the transaction could be completed, the Mississippi rose out of its banks in one of the greatest floods of modern times, gravely imperiling Ste. Genevieve, St. Louis, and lands along the river. The agricultural levee protecting the common fi eld was one of many to breach that spring, and the Delassus-Kern and many other houses, both historic and modern, on the south side of town stood in floodwater until late September. When the waters finally receded, preservation experts discovered that the old vertical log French houses came through much better than newer frame buildings, and the state park system found itself the recipient of not one but two flood-damaged but largely intact vertical log houses.
The French are noted for fine cuisine and joie de vivre, and the staff and volunteers at the Felix Vallé house have a reputation for staging soirées that would rival those Felix and Odile Vallé would have held in the early 1800s. Perhaps the most special is le réveillon, a traditional French Christmas celebration that calls for thirteen desserts. After preparing feverishly until the last minute, the hosts don period clothing to welcome visitors to the house, simply decorated with boughs of native shortleaf pine and bathed in candlelight. On the elegant dining table is the pièce de résistance: a bûche de Noël, a cake shaped as a Yule-log, alongside other sweets from the era: gâteau de sirop, a cake made with Louisiana cane syrup; madeleines, tiny, shell-shaped cookies; gâteau St. Honoré, a cream-puff ring like an ornamented crown, topped with miniature caramelized cream puffs, named for the patron saint of French pastry chefs; croquembouche (literally, “melts in the mouth”), a pyramid of the tiny caramelized cream puffs; and on and on to the count of thirteen. Enjoy a slice of bûche de Noël and a chat with other guests, then join in singing French carols—and imagine having spent such a Yuletide evening with Felix and Odile Vallé. Stroll through the village center after the soirée, back to your bed-and-breakfast, and you may discover the intangible sense of Ste. Genevieve’s early days lingering in the air.
Photo by William Hopkins.
In addition to the Delassus-Kern house, the state acquired the Bauvais-Amoureux house, a gift of the French Heritage Relief Committee, formed to raise money for flood-imperiled French heritage sites. Also overlooking the common fi eld, the Bauvais-Amoureux is poteau en terre, or “post in ground,” a type of construction, once common in the original town along the river, in which the vertical wall logs extend into a trench in the ground to form the foundation. Today, the Beauvais-Amoureux is one of only five such houses known to still exist in North America, three of which are in Ste. Genevieve. Jean Baptiste St. Gemme Bauvais Jr. built it in 1792. It was sold to Benjamin Amoureux and his wife Pelagie in 1852. Pelagie had been born a slave in 1805, owned and perhaps fathered by Bauvais’s brother Vital. Vital’s widow set Pelagie free in 1832 after Pelagie’s common-law marriage to Amoureux; Felix Vallé witnessed her manumission document. Pelagie, who had six children with Benjamin Amoureux, continued to live in the house until her death in 1890. The house contains no original furnishings, but with its excellently preserved original eighteenth-century features, it illuminates both the technique of vertical log construction and the mixed cultural heritage of its occupants. Additionally, it houses a remarkably accurate diorama constructed by Lewis Pruneau, a nationally known model maker, depicting Ste. Genevieve as it appeared in the 1830s. You will definitely want to see this diorama when you visit Ste. Genevieve.
Meanwhile, the Delassus-Kern house fell victim to historical controversy, which stymied its restoration. A French colonial historian challenged the house’s purported connection to Delassus on the grounds that the Delassus house had been both mapped and described at the time as located on a bluff, whereas the extant house was on a terrace at the base of the bluff. In the late 1990s, archaeological excavation around the house in conjunction with a Southeast Missouri State University field school found a gap between Native American artifacts and Euro-American materials from the 1830s, suggesting the house was not on that site until the 1830s. Archaeology on the bluff above found a house foundation, but the dig was too limited to establish its floor plan. The question became: Is it the Delassus house relocated or a house built from salvaged materials of the period? The question remains unresolved, but in either case, it is a significant example of French-style construction, fabricated from logs cut in the 1790s. After decades of inaction, park officials allocated modest funds to stabilize it in 2013.
In 2006, Congress authorized a study of the feasibility of National Park Service involvement in preserving Ste. Genevieve. The NPS considered not only the heart of the historic town, which was one of the first places in the nation to be designated a National Historic Landmark, but also the significance of the common field and the old town archaeological site, a thirty-eight-acre tract, never excavated, that is probably the only remaining portion of the old town not obliterated by channel changes of the Mississippi River. A decision by Congress on NPS recommendations may be years off, but Ste. Genevieve’s residents and many friends eagerly await the possibility of enhanced national attention.
FELIX VALLÉ HOUSE STATE HISTORIC SITE • 198 MERCHANT STREET, STE. GENEVIEVE
To purchase the Missouri State Parks book, visit the link to our shop here .
