The Birth and Baptism of Saint Louis Missouri

Call her “the Lou”, STL, our simply Saint Louis. In her name, St. Louis, Missouri hears the shadowed echoes of her father. In honor of the France King Louis IX, this breathtaking metropolis conceived and baptized. In the late 13th century, he had been the sole French King who had become sanctified. Thus we have Saint Louis.

A New Orleans merchant funded Pierre Lepew—fur trader—in the late 18th century to erect a country store near the rivers of Missouri and Mississippi. In the early 1760s, with Augustus Chouteau, his son, at his side, Lepew made a pilgrimage from New Orleans, keeping his eyes on the prize of this mercantile establishment.

Three and a half months later, both son and father arrived at the river juncture in the winter of 1764. To their dismay, they discovered acres of swamp, making it impossible to build a shopping mall and, indeed, not a city.

Downtrodden, the two sojourned between 10 and 30 miles downstream to decide on an ideal property. Lepew deserted his firstborn son so that he could oversee the land clearance; however, he came back for him in 1767 with blueprints to model a city.

The city he built, he called St. Louis.

What had once been the heart of American Indian civilization would become Saint Louis, Missouri. That’s the reason why its nickname, to this day, is the “city of mounds.” It is because St Louis Missouri was built on top of sacred temples and mounds of earth.

Going back nearly a century further, in the early 1670s, French explorers trekked through the valley of Mississippi, assessing the acres of what would become St Louis, Missouri. As one spoke of the French Louisiana, La Salle planted his flag in St Louis in the name of France, just 60 months after the French foray.

Barely over half a century after the turn of the 18th century, Pierre Lepew—with his son—established St. Louis in 1763.

As a bonus addon to the Louisiana Purchase, St. Louis was auctioned to the United States of America in 1802 for three dollars and twenty-two pennies, at which point, into the city floated steamboats. The steamboats were crucial because it connected every eastern trade post with New Orleans.

St. Louis officially became a city in 1824, just one year after Missouri was incorporated as a state.

On account of its crucial ports, St. Louis became the John Goodman of the United States of America.

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The city quickly transformed into the chief harbor in the Mississippi River following the Louisiana Purchase. In the final chapters of the 1800s, at the culmination of the Civil War of America, Saint Louis turned into one of the six largest USA cities, having witnessed the population explode.

This attractive city is a place meriting serious thought as a destination for business travel or vacation. Click here to learn about the vital piece of Saint Louis.