Not long after moving to St. Louis from her native Tennessee, Amanda Clark was gifted a copy of James Neal Primm’s Lion of the Valley, an essential book on the history of her adopted city that set her on a course to learn everything she could about its place in the American story. Now a public historian and community tours manager for the Missouri Historical Society, Clark aims to instill that passion for St. Louis into everyone who finds themselves curious, sometimes beginning right in their own backyards.
You’ve spent much of your career in St. Louis helping people understand the region’s history, but you’re equally passionate about what we can find out about our own homes—even the ones that are not traditionally perceived as historic. Why? When people think of historic houses, they usually think that means really old, but we need to ask ourselves what we even mean by a house’s history. Is it the people who lived in it? The history of the land? How it has changed over time? I love finding that out for people. It has implications all the way up from when it was built to the present, and understanding our role and responsibility in that is important.
You encourage people to look at the bigger picture of their house, not just who built it but what has happened to it over time. Why is that important? People always want to start with the wagonmaker who built the house in 1870 and then stop there. That doesn’t fascinate me as much as the family who bought that same house in 1970, renovated it when no one else was doing so, then raised the value of the property so that taxes went up and people in the neighborhood had to move out. Understanding that change over time is exciting. Street names, why municipalities were formed—Sunset Hills was founded because it didn’t want to follow the rules of Kirkwood. There’s all of this weird little stuff hiding in plain sight.
How would you guide people who are interested in learning the history of their homes? I always start with the oldest map I can find, either online or at the [Missouri Historical Society’s] Library & Research Center, which has the oldest map of landholders you can find. That’s really handy for finding out things like if your house is sitting on a lake or used to be a farm. Follow it that way first, and find land-use maps over time. Then, find your address on newspapers.com; that takes days of work usually spent scrolling, depending on how old your house is. Often, there’s a ton of information about people who lived there, so you can then head off down rabbit holes. If you get to a dead end, you can reach out to family members listed in obituaries to see if they have pictures. Facebook Messenger is a good place to reach out, and I’ve found that people are always excited to share photos, if they have them. When you’re doing a house’s history, it’s like a little mystery.
Why do you think we’re so curious about homes’ histories? I sit with this a lot. Sometimes, you find out more than you want to know, and it can feel a little voyeuristic or snoopy, so it’s up to everyone’s individual comfort level to determine how much they want to know. But I really think it has something to do with the idea that, maybe someday down the road, somebody will be looking at your role in the house. It’s storytelling, and you become part of the story and are connected to everyone else who’s been there.
