Horse-drawn carriages clip-clop down cobblestone streets in St. Charles, echoes of the storied past that pervades this 250-year-old river town just north of St. Louis.
Founded in 1769 by French Canadian fur trapper Louis Blanchette, St. Charles grew from a wilderness trading post to a Spanish-led French village; from a jumping-off point for settlers heading west on the Boone’s Lick Road toward the Oregon, California and Santa Fe trails to a university town that draws students from all over the world.
The co-founder of that university, Mary Sibley, will make a reappearance of sorts at the town’s Sestercentennial celebration, May 18 and 19. Sibley—or rather, the reenactor playing her character—will join other figures from St. Charles’ past, turning Main Street into a history lover’s hoe-down. The amusements—a parade, skits, old-time dancing, antique exhibits, vintage vehicle displays, encampments, guided tours and 19th-century baseball—will offer a glimpse of every era that has shaped St. Charles.
At the center of the celebration is frontier educator Sibley, head of the oldest women’s college west of the Mississippi and a pivotal figure in the river city’s early days.
“We hear a lot about Lewis and Clark in St. Charles but not so much about women leaders like Mary Sibley,” remarks Sestercentennial organizer Ryan Cooper. “Sibley achieved amazing things 100 years before women won the right to vote.”
Only 15 when she married, Mary Easton Sibley first taught the children of Native Americans and early French and Anglo settlers living near the federal trading/military post Fort Osage. Northeast of what’s now Kansas City, the fort was run by her husband, Major George Sibley. Only 33 years old, the major had served as the head of Fort Bellefontaine in St. Louis until Fort Osage, farther west, took its place.
Established in 1808 by Indian Agent William Clark, Fort Osage closed during the War of 1812. George Sibley temporarily moved the fort farther east during the war, avoiding unrest on the frontier. Once Fort Osage reopened out west, Mary Sibley moved there to join her new husband.
With the garrison back at Fort Osage, the Sibleys hauled a keelboat full of furniture up the Missouri River—including Mary’s piano, outfitted with fife and drum attachments that thrilled the Native Americans when she played for them. A St. Louis socialite, she said goodbye to cultured city life and hello to a rougher region interlaced by various tribes, trappers, and mountain men, including Daniel Boone, Manuel Lisa, and Pierre Chouteau.
Like other military/trading posts, Fort Osage aimed to lower tensions between tribes and settlers through trade and land treaties.
The Osage, Kansa and other native tribes around the fort respected Major George, and they loved Mary, both for her musical ability and for the charm she showed in teaching reading and writing to untutored youth. No dowdy schoolmarm, the vivacious Mary Sibley tackled any dare or challenge. As a girl in St. Louis, hanging out with a friend group that included Nancy Anne Lucas (daughter of the socially powerful J.B.C. and Anne Lucas), Mary rode horseback with aplomb; later, she farmed alongside George with as much zeal as any settler. She also had a penchant for planting red geraniums, an apt metaphor for her passionate nature.
“Mary Sibley was no shrinking violet,” concedes Cooper, the Sestercentennial organizer. “She knew what she wanted to accomplish and made it happen.”
Debbie Ladd, a former teacher herself and a longtime actor in local community theater, will play Mary at the Sestercentennial. Ladd says she feels drawn to the character: “She was brave. I have a much greater appreciation of her struggle to bring education to the American frontier.”
After 1822, though, the Sibleys’ world changed, as private traders and trappers pushed free enterprise rather than federal oversight of negotiations with Native Americans. The couple stayed on at Fountain Cottage, the log home they’d built near Fort Osage, for several more years, farming and raising horses, mules and cattle. Then President John Quincy Adams commissioned George to help survey the Santa Fe Trail.
In 1827, he and his two survey partners met at Eckart’s Tavern (now Bradden’s) on South Main Street in St. Charles to complete records for the survey.
In 1929, the Sibleys moved to St. Charles, where George had bought a 280-acre plot of land that was called the Linden Wood, named for the thickets of linden trees he’d need to clear.
A biography, The Indomitable Mary Easton Sibley, recounts how the Sibleys “stood on the brow of the hill overlooking the town and a widespread and beautiful landscape and resolved that upon this spot they would lay the foundation of a school for young ladies.”
George would be the business manager, and Mary would oversee education and related student needs—a role for which her past life had perfectly prepared her.
Her parents—Rufus and Abial Easton—had six other girls and three boys. They, too, moved to St. Charles, and they sent plenty of children for Mary to teach and mentor, along with new boarders at her college. Her father, a lawyer from New York, acted as a judge and the first postmaster in the new Louisiana Territory. Later, once Missouri became a territory, he served as a congressional delegate and attorney general. Land he purchased across the Mississippi River became Alton, Illinois, named after his youngest son.
Unusually, the Eastons believed in giving their sons and daughters equal educational opportunities, according to Mary Sibley’s biographer. That thinking spurred Mary Sibley’s drive not only to educate young women at Linden Wood College but to teach Sunday school to German immigrants and enslaved children—even though teaching “slaves” would be outlawed by 1847.
Like most Missourians, the Sibleys had complex notions about abolition. They held papers for more than one African-American but set them all free in the late 1850s. Mary and George befriended Elijah Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister and abolitionist they helped to escape to Alton in 1837 after a mob attacked him at his mother-in-law’s home on Main St. in St. Charles.
Lovejoy’s murder in Alton a month later helped start the Civil War.
A passionate Presbyterian, Mary thought the Missouri frontier needed a non-Catholic college. The French-born nun Philippine Duschesne and several other sisters had started Sacred Heart Academy on Second Street not long before Linden Wood was established in the early 1830s.
The characters of Mary Sibley and Philippine Duchesne (along with St. Charles founder Louis Blanchette) unite as the main reenactors at the Sestercentennial, but they would not have been so cozy back in the day. On fire after the Second Great Awakening in the early 1830s, Mary Sibley set about converting everyone she knew to Presbyterianism. The girls at her college affectionately named her Aunt Mary and dubbed the coach she drove around town the “Ship of Zion.” Her advocacy brought about the first Presbyterian Church in St. Charles, built in 1844.
A colorful character literally as well as figuratively, Mary Sibley wore bright ribbons on her cap and had students wear them as well, matching different-colored dresses for the seasons.
In 1853, her girls’ college became incorporated as one of 17 Presbyterian higher learning institutions opened in the south before the Civil War. Offering a varied curriculum, Linden Wood drew women throughout the Mississippi Valley to its teacher training program.
Major George Sibley died in 1863. Mary Sibley died 15 years later, at the age of 78. Both are buried in a plot on the current Lindenwood campus.
James A. Michener included Mary Sibley’s character in his 1974 novel, Centennial.
Her biography quotes a St. Louis newspaper report of the many St. Louisans who took the train to her funeral: “She was as well and widely known as any lady in the state.”
The St. Charles Sestercentennial runs from 10 a.m.–6 p.m. May 18 and noon–5 p.m. on May 19. Events occur on Main St. and in Frontier Park by the Missouri River. For more information, contact or stop by the St. Charles Convention and Visitors Bureau, 230 S. Main St., 63301, discoverstcharles.com, 1-800-366-2427.
