Though we call powerful figures “forces of nature,” nothing shapes a city like actual natural forces. At times (like the mid-19th century) St. Louis’ history has read like one of the lighter passages from the Book of Revelations, with tornadoes, fires and plagues raging nearly all at once …
By Stefene Russell
Raging Pestilence!
In December 1848 a tiny pathogen—V. cholerae—arrived in St. Louis with the steamer Alton. During the trip upriver from New Orleans, one woman and six children died onboard, their deaths attributed to dysentery. The other passengers, exposed but not yet ill, disembarked and went out to infect the city. By the end of 1849, St. Louis had lost nearly 10,000 people, or a 13th of its population, with hardly a neighborhood untouched. City fathers attempted to keep the plague under control by burning vast piles of coal, resinous tar and sulfur (they blamed bad air). It was this “bad air” misconception that led to the cleanup of the “Sarah and Olive Street Stench-hole,” the “Cavanaugh Foul-Smelling Quarry,” the “Dock Street Quagmire” and Chouteau’s Pond, which had actually become the worst open-air sewer in the city. Once a bucolic picnic site, it was now full of the contents of chamberpots, “washings of contiguous streets ... the offal of slaughter pens ... [and] the dead carcasses of dogs and horses.” In late 1850, to clean up the city’s many “stink-holes,” St. Louis installed its first public sewage system. This made the next outbreak of cholera, in 1866, far less severe. But until the cholera bug was isolated in 1884, city fathers continued to believe they’d saved the day by ridding the city of stinky air.
Floods of (Almost) Biblical Proportions!
During winter 1843, a miserable series of blizzards moved across the northwest. Come spring 1844, that snowmelt ended up in the Mississippi. The river began to rise … and rise … and rise. By early May, the water was lapping at the door stoops along Front Street; 18 inches of rain fell that spring, and in June both the Missouri and Mississippi swelled past their banks. Houses and businesses washed away and more than 500 families were displaced. Though the recent Flood of ’93 nearly matched the 1844 flood in terms of sheer cubic feet (1,030,000 versus 1,300,000), the earlier flood had a larger impact: Wisely, we strengthened the few levees we had and added several more, with the help of the federal Swamp Act of 1849.
Raging Whirlwinds …
Those curdled, greenish clouds that can only signify one thing—a tornado—gathered quickly in the late afternoon of May 27, 1896. In only 15 minutes, what would become the third deadliest storm in American history left a mile-wide path of splintered wood, sizzling power lines and dead horses and people. In South St. Louis, the storm claimed 138 lives, damaged 8,800 buildings (including the super-sturdy City Hospital and dozens of Victorian beauties in Lafayette Square), tore up trees, overturned railroad cars, sank riverboats, damaged gas and electrical lines and ripped 300 feet off the eastern half of the Eads Bridge. The storm crossed the river, taking another 118 lives in East St. Louis and destroying a quarter of the buildings. It took nearly $2 million to rebuild the city, an unheard-of amount of money at the time. The tornado of 1958, on the other hand, had zero fatalities, but is often cited as the force that propelled Gaslight Square from a quiet bohemian neighborhood to world-class entertainment district. Building owners used the insurance money to begin rehabbing in earnest, turning formerly rundown spots into restaurants, bars and dance clubs.
And Towering Infernos
As if 1849’s cholera wasn’t bad enough, the city nearly burned down at the peak of the epidemic. It’s true that city officials were constantly feeding large fires with resinous substances of one sort or another in an attempt to fend off bad air and evil spirits, but that wasn’t the cause of St. Louis’ Great Fire. On May 17, a paddle-wheel steamboat, the White Cloud, caught on fire (no one is quite sure how). Before the volunteer fire department could respond, the boat burned through its moorings and drifted down the river, igniting the Eudora, the Edward Bates, the Belle Isle and the Julia. Soon, 20 other steamboats and barges—plus everything along the levee—were in flames, feeding on the cotton and dry goods stored along the river. The fire swept through downtown, moving mainly along Locust and Market; after 8 hours, the firemen were still unable to contain the blaze. Finally, they unloaded kegs of gunpowder into the buildings at the front of the fire and dynamited them. In the end, the disaster destroyed 430 buildings over 15 city blocks, killed three people and despite all that thick black smoke, did nothing to eliminate the cholera epidemic. However, did give St. Louis a new building code (which required that all new buildings be constructed of stone or brick), wider streets, a better system of levees and a chance to reinvent itself before the turn of the century.
