The history of Carondelet's heavy industry

At one point, the southern end of St. Louis was a thriving and bustling industrial center, with huge factories, mills, foundries, and shipyards that employed thousands. Today, almost all of it is gone.

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Carondelet deserves more attention. Before being annexed by St. Louis, it was a separate community for much of the 19th century. That history has allowed Carondelet to develop its own special personality. I’ve written about its stone houses before. But what I find so fascinating about Carondelet—which was actually a city in its own right, with its own mayor and city council—is that it possesses a rich industrial heritage that has largely been lost to demolition and deindustrialization. However, at one point, the southern end of St. Louis was a thriving and bustling industrial center, with huge factories, mills, foundries, and shipyards that employed thousands. Today, almost all of it is gone.

Carondelet was laid out close to the river, at the confluence of the Mississippi and River des Peres. Like St. Louis upriver, there is a gradual rise to the hills to the north, and there are even bluffs that rise dramatically to the north of the downtown of Carondelet. But down by the river, where the land flattens out, are streets of workers’ houses within a short walk of the industries that took advantage of transportation networks. The Iron Mountain Railroad passed through Carondelet on its way south, providing easy access from St. Louis, as well as providing iron ore from the Ozarks. There was a spirit of optimism in the mid-19th century, as geologists mistakenly believed that the Iron Mountain was actually made entirely out of iron ore. While not true, the mountain and other mines nearby provided a steady supply of iron to the smelters in St. Louis and Carondelet via the railroad. Other raw materials, such as the pink granite from around what is now Elephant Rocks State Park, also flowed northward.

One of the most notable industries in Carondelet when it was still an independent city came during the Civil War, when James B. Eads built ironclads at his shipyards at the foot of Davis Street. Formerly the Carondelet Marine Railway Company, the yards were refitted for Eads’ new designs for the Union to retake the Mississippi River, which was controlled by the Confederacy in the south. The 14 ironclads that were built in the newly christened Union Shipyards would go on to aid Ulysses S. Grant’s victory at Vicksburg, which cut the Confederacy in two in 1863. After the war, Eads would go on to build the bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis, which would later bear his name. Today, the site is now largely vacant, though barges still dock in the area.

The Vulcan Iron Works, founded in 1858, was another of the industries that took advantage of Carondelet’s location on the Mississippi River and railroad connections. Located in the far southeast corner of Carondelet by the River des Peres in an area called the Patch, it was a dirty, dangerous place to work, and its furnaces were temperamental, posing a daily risk of explosion. One such explosion of a furnace in October 1874 caused a portion of the building to collapse, sending bricks and wood timbers falling down on workers, many of whom had also been badly scalded by the intense heat and steam that had escaped. When the plant was torn down in 1898, a Post-Dispatch article related some of the astonishing statistics of the size of the operations. At its height, upward of 2,000–3,000 men worked in the foundry, and the monthly payroll was $200,000. The primary product was railroad rails, and the plant finally closed due to the obsolescence of its machinery. What’s interesting is how difficult it is to find photographs of what had been such a massive presence in St. Louis. Another foundry in Carondelet, the Jupiter Iron Works, which was also demolished in the early 20th century, gives us an idea of what these foundries looked like.

In the general area, and on a portion of the same land as the shipyards and Vulcan Iron Works, next rose the Great Lakes Carbon Company. More well-known by its last name, Carondelet Coke, the huge complex was demolished and cleaned up by the EPA as a Superfund site due to extensive pollution. For almost a century, the plant converted coal into gas as well as the production of coke. Through a process of heating coal in the absence of air, coke is created in giant furnaces or ovens. The result is a fuel with high carbon content and fewer impurities—but it also gives off large amounts of pollution. The buildings that made up Carondelet Coke were fascinating to look at, including the furnaces that were still standing until a decade ago, but they were all demolished as part of the environmental cleanup. The giant crane that stretched out over the river near the site was a famous location for urban explorers in St. Louis.

Meanwhile, to sate the thirst of all the working men in the area, the Klausmann Brewery opened in 1888 along the River des Peres at Lorentz and South Broadway. Its president, John Kraus, ran the brewery during its golden days in Carondelet, dying in 1897 with an estate of $500,000. It closed at the beginning of Prohibition, but it was one of a select few that reopened, with the investment of $2,000,000. In 1934, backers from Oklahoma and Chicago purchased the old plant from the St. Louis Brewing Association, the second of two local conglomerates that had combined smaller breweries to compete against Anheuser-Busch and Lemp. The investors picked up the old buildings for only $100,000. The enterprise failed, and the buildings are now demolished.

One industry that still remains in Carondelet is milling. One early flour mill was founded in 1870 by the German immigrant Friedrich Gottfried Hermann Baur, who came to America from Stuttgart. He was born in 1848, and came to St. Louis in 1868, and died here in 1934. In 1927, his son, Andrew Baur, purchased the oldest flour mill in St. Louis, the Ziebold Flour Mill, originally known as the Carondelet Milling Company, which was already 100 years old at the time. The sale was valued at $150,000. The Baurs sold out in 1945, and the buildings are now demolished. But milling still continues on a massive scale in Carondelet. Italgrani USA maintains the largest semolina and durum mill in North America along with a grain elevator on the river. Riviana Foods also produces a range of rice and pasta products nearby.

But perhaps the best way to end is to look at the lost Irish parish of St. Columbkille Roman Catholic Church, which was located up the hill from the foundries and mills. For a century, the workers and their families would head to St. Columbkille and other churches nearby, on the one day of the week when they had a little time off. They were escaping untold poverty and oppression in Ireland, only to be faced with extremely hard and dangerous work in Carondelet. Those old factories and shipyards are gone, but many of their houses still stand, some still owned by their descendants. Perhaps that is the greatest legacy of the industrial past of Carondelet.

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