The grandeur of Victorian-era St. Louis
By Gladys Montgomery
Photography by Alise O’Brien
Now a stately 156 years old, Campbell House was the first home built in Lucas Place—St. Louis’ first suburb. Irish-born Robert Campbell and his wife, Virginia, purchased it for $18,000 in 1854, a hefty hike from the going house price of $1,200.
Today, as a result of a five-year, $3 million renovation, the home gleams as gloriously as when Victoria was queen, Lincoln was still in Illinois, and St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the country.
“It was amazing how intact the house was,” says the Campbell House Museum’s executive director, John Dalzell. “During the restoration, every time we needed to know the color for woodwork or wallpaper or carpet, we were able to go down and literally uncover it.” Pieces of Victorian wallpapers were hidden behind later woodwork, and carpet fibers still clung to tacks remaining in the floors. “When the family had the furniture reupholstered,” Mr. Dalzell notes, “they added another layer to what was already there, going all the way back to 1855.”
Restorers used leading-edge technologies to pinpoint original paint colors; union painters replicated the original wall stenciling, the grain painting and the double parlor’s ornate ceiling decoration. English Mills, Schumacher and American Axminster reproduced the carpets, and Mount Diablo Handprints replicated wallpapers. The museum showcases 90 percent of the family’s original furnishings and many possessions, including their horse-drawn carriages.
“Campbell House is known as a decorative arts museum, but to me,” Mr. Dalzell says, “the most important discovery is the archival material—diaries, receipts, letters, business ledgers and family records from the mid-1820s to the mid-1930s. These are some of the best first-hand accounts of the growth of St. Louis and the development of the West. Every time we examine them, we find something new. We’ve been through 5,000 pages; there are 495,000 pages no one has looked at yet.”
Irrespective of lessons gleaned from letters and pages, the house itself is simply resplendent. “Robert and Virginia had a lot of money and could have whatever they wanted,” Mr. Dalzell says. “When they built the house, they hired George I. Barnett,St. Louis’ best-known 19th-century architect, to choose the carpet and wallpaper … In 1855, Virginia Campbell went to Philadelphia and spent $40,000 purchasing furniture.”
One of the reasons history comes alive in the house, Mr. Dalzell explains, is that “the Campbells aren’t flat, two-dimensional historical characters. They have real passions, tragedies and triumphs.” The couple had 13 children, but only three—Hugh, James and Hazlett—survived to adulthood. The family occupied the house for 84 years, until 1938.
In the master suite, restorers discovered toy soldiers behind the pocket doors. In the fireplace chimney serving the bedroom last used by Hazlett Campbell, they found a bottle of alcohol heavily laced with cocaine, a Victorian treatment for schizophrenia. The sons kept the family furnishings, and in the mid-1880s, Hugh, an amateur photographer, created 60 albumen images of the interiors, which became the guiding light for the restoration.
Over time, Mr. Dalzell says, the sons became “increasingly eccentric.” After their mother died in 1882, they hung her portrait in the parlor, flanked by paintings of Christ and the Virgin Mary. “There are no paintings of Robert, their dad, in the parlor,” Mr. Dalzell says. “His portrait is in the master bedroom.”
