Michael Meyer, project archaeologist for the Missouri Department of Transportation, didn’t expect to find much on the site of the Worthy Women’s Aid and Hospital; it had only occupied that location for five years, back in the 1870s. Still, his mandate is to thoroughly explore the area north of Cass Avenue, where the footings of the new Mississippi Bridge will go, before the construction crews bring in the heavy earth-movers. His team set to work.
To his delight, they started pulling up “patent medicines for female diseases, syringes, lots of toys, all from the exact time period.” The residents had been “poor unfortunates”: impoverished single mothers and their young children. When field workers gently brushed the caked earth off, they recognized Frozen Charlottes—pale china dolls named for the macabre American folk ballad “Fair Charlotte,” about a girl who refused to bundle up for a sleigh ride and froze to death. They found other dolls, too; marbles of handpainted porcelain, glass, and clay; poker chips and lotto pieces the mothers must have played with after the little ones fell asleep.
Meyer admits he began with the assumption that “worthy women” were a prim Victorian euphemism. As it turned out, this was not a shelter for children born out of wedlock; roughly half the women were widows. Meanwhile, every time he searched for information, he found references to “worthy grand matrons” in the Masonic Order of the Eastern Star. At first, he just scrolled past. Then it dawned on him that members of the Order of the Eastern Star had probably founded the shelter. Their local branch could find no mention of the shelter in their records, but part of their mission was to establish institutions exactly like it.
St. Louis in the late 1800s was full of these energetic philanthropic projects. Its population was exploding, thanks to the influx of German and Irish immigrants, and there were many in need. “People don’t realize that St. Louis was one of the preeminent cities in the nation,” Meyer notes, pointing out that it ranked right after New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. Its location on the river boosted commerce, and in addition to lively barter and warehousing trade, the city was full of factories.
Caspar Gestring’s wagon-wheel factory, for example. Gestring emigrated from Germany in the mid-1850s, shoed horses for the Union Army, then opened a wagon shop in 1866. He stubbornly refused to put in electricity, relying on window light to hand-make wagon wheels. The factory stayed open until 1935, when its closure signaled the end of the hand-made wagon wheel. Meanwhile, across the street, his former partner, Henry Leudinghaus, opened a fully mechanized wagon factory with assembly lines that were soon competing with Detroit.
Working around these factories—in an area that’s since turned gray and bleak—Meyer’s team excavated houses, storefronts, brass and iron foundries, and a planing mill. They found artifacts dating back to the 1840s, when the city annexed this area and begun moving factories from the city’s center to its gritty northern boundary. Working-class residences followed, along with more refined, upper-middle-class houses for the factory owners. There was a photography studio, a druggist, a grocer, a saloon, a confectioner, a cigar manufacturer, and Mound Fire Company No. 9.
At the site of Mullanphy Park, a private city park that later became a model for neighborhood civic centers, the team found a children’s garden and traced the plantings; each child was given a plot of ground and a plant to grow.
In privies and outhouses—the Swiss bank accounts of an archaeologist—lay all manner of treasures, including an intact clay pipe. “I’ve been doing this for two decades, and I’ve never found a complete pipe,” Meyer says. “Usually you break them and throw them away. But somebody dropped this one in the bottom of an outhouse, and he wasn’t going after it!”
The pipe rested, unbroken, amid layers of chamber pots. “I imagine quite a few slipped out of somebody’s hands and fell to the bottom,” Meyer says. He also found ceramic bitters bottles and an inordinate number of soda bottles; in the late 1800s, people drank either soda or beer. “Usually what we’re finding, as archaeologists, are things that were either thrown away or lost,” he explains. “Things that fell out of somebody’s pocket, like glasses, coins, and hundreds of marbles.”
Meyer’s team should finish excavating this winter. Once all the artifacts have been analyzed and documented, he’d like to create a scholarly reference manual identifying elements of 19th-century Midwestern life. He also wants to produce a book the general public can understand and enjoy, because St. Louisans tend to forget what stature their city once had, and how lively its riverfront was.
“Our field work is winding down,” he says, “but the real work is just beginning.”
