A closer look at the Compton Hill neighborhood and its most famous resident: the late poet Maya Angelou

Angelou was born in 1928 in her grandparents’ house at 3130 Hickory Street, just east of Compton Avenue.

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Last week, we looked at the homes of some of the most famous residents of St. Louis who lived at the crest of Compton Hill. This week, we will look at the people who lived to the north of those people, as the hill sloped gently down to the Mill Creek Valley and the railroad tracks that cut through the center of St. Louis. Home first to generations of white working-class St. Louisans, it then became an African American community, one whose memory is slipping away in the collective consciousness of this city. But there are still many reminders, not only in the built environment and the people who still call the neighborhood home, but in the literary world, that speak to the importance of Compton Hill in the history of St. Louis and even to America.

For the purposes of this article, the area being discussed is bounded by the railroad tracks to the north, Jefferson Avenue to the east, Lafayette Avenue to the south, and Grand Boulevard to the west. Already by the publication of Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis in 1876, there was a large number of small houses built out in the streets of the semi-rural neighborhood. Unlike much of the South Side, the area was not pockmarked with sinkholes, and there were orchards scattered around the hillside. There were a scant number of numbered houses or businesses on the plates of Pictorial St. Louis, meaning there were few wealthy residents; the houses likewise were one story and narrow. According to the descendants of early inhabitants, many of the men walked north up to the rapidly expanding rail yards for work and later in the expansive streetcar barns to the west near Vandeventer Avenue. Due to the low-lying terrain and the extensive rail lines, the area was surely shrouded in smoke from locomotive traffic.

And just like in the Mill Creek neighborhood to the north of railroad tracks, the original white residents moved out, and African Americans moved into the aging housing stock. Easily the most famous resident to come out of the neighborhood is Maya Angelou, who was born in 1928 in her grandparents’ house at 3130 Hickory Street, just east of Compton Avenue. The house is now recognized officially as City Landmark No. 129. While some reports say the house was built in 1888, it is clearly visible in Pictorial St. Louis, so the date of construction is at least before 1875. 

Angelou lived there for three years (she was born Margurite Johnson) before moving to Arkansas to live with her grandmother. When she returned, she lived at 2714½ Caroline Street, which is near the Hickory Street house. While that house no longer exists, we can get an idea of the appearance of the immediate area from a photograph of Caroline Street a block to the west. 

While Angelou lived in St. Louis, she attended Toussaint L’Ouverture Elementary School, which was originally named Colored School No. 4 and located to the east. It was renamed after the revolutionary leader of Haïtian independence, located at 2621 Papin Street, and eventually moved to its permanent location at 3021 Hickory Street. The current building opened after Angelou would have attended school there. 

To this day, the Compton Hill area has a wealth of churches that survived the large-scale demolition of the neighborhood in the 1970s. One church of particular interest is Compton Hill Missionary Baptist Church, which has been located in the neighborhood since 1892. But the church building was expanded by an African American architect, John R. Steele, whose renovations were completed in 1944. The resulting design is unique to St. Louis ecclesiastical architecture. Steele was a faculty member of South Carolina State University and featured prominently in the design of buildings in that state’s yearly fair. One of the former pastors, Wade Cartwright, was famous for his building projects, having supervised the construction of six churches for different congregations across the country.

Another outstanding figure in his field was chemist Lincoln I. Diuguid, whose laboratory still stands on the edge of the neighborhood at 1215 South Jefferson. A Ph.D. grad from Cornell University, Dr. Diuguid operated his Do-Good Chemical Laboratories for over 30 years, starting just after World War II. He passed away only a few years ago, in 2015. His legacy continues with the many other chemists he trained over the years. The George Vashon Museum of Black History in the St. Louis Place neighborhood has an exhibit on his life and laboratory on display.

About a decade before Dr. Diuguid’s retirement, plans for the demolition of the Compton Hill neighborhood were hatched, and a new name came along with the scheme: Lafayette Towne. The area was finding itself cut off from the rest of the city, as Interstate 44 was slashing a moat between it and the rest of the South Side, and to the north, Mill Creek had already been annihilated. The newspapers heralded a grand plan to halt the exodus to the suburbs: Create the suburbs in the city.

Lafayette Towne originally called for building 2,500 houses and preserving 300 old houses. It was also one of the first times to use tax abatements to subsidize the development. For whatever reason, by 1990, Lafayette Towne was rechristened the Gate District, and the area was divided into five different areas, each with its own distinctive gateway to mark its entrance. Some of those gates are still standing, but others have been hit by cars and demolished or removed for other reasons. While the appearance of the historic Compton Hill neighborhood has changed dramatically over the last hundred years, the legacy of the people who have lived there remains.

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