The Lucas Family: A Recent Echo of a Grand Past

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Courtesy of Bob Sutton

Courtesy of Bob Sutton

In 2015, John B.C. Lucas died peacefully, 91 years old, surrounded by family. Educated in Catholic schools, he’d worked as a fine arts appraiser, and for many years also chaired the Fire Protection District of Normandy.

Which was named for his ancestor, Jean Baptiste Charles Lucas. 

Jean Baptiste was born into an old Norman family in Normandy, France, in 1758. He was trained as an attorney of the king, slated to practice in the French court, and he married a wealthy cloth merchant’s daughter, Anne Sebin, whom his aristocratic family considered of lesser class than their son. 

After meeting both Continental Congress emissaries, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Lucas was so moved by their ideals—and so impatient with class injustices in France—and so stung by his family’s disapproval of his wife—that he sailed to America. (‘Until now,” he wrote, “I had always thought I would spend the rest of my days in France, despite the negative aspects of the regime. The revolution carried out by your brave citizens has inspired me.”) 

Armed with a letter of introduction from Franklin, Jean Baptiste settled in Coal Hill (now Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, where he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Then Jefferson asked him to travel to St. Louis and help adjudicate the huge Spanish land grants when the Louisiana Purchase was completed. (Had those grants stood, they would have resulted in a handful of St. Louis French families owning most of what are now Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Adjudicating them did not exactly endear Judge Lucas to the original French settlers, notes one of his descendants, and the enmity lingered for generations.)  

When Jean Baptiste died, in 1842, his obituary described him as “peculiar in some of his traits of character,” but commendable “in point of his intelligence, in the honesty of his purposes, purity of his intentions and philanthropy of his feelings.” 

His son Charles owned the land that’s now Normandy, and built a house there on land now occupied by Incarnate Word Academy. A land speculator, he bought from distressed homeowners after earthquakes in New Madrid. He died in a duel with Thomas Hart Benton on Bloody Island.

Charles’ sister, Anne, first married Captain Theodore Hunt, whose father played cards with the Hessian mercenaries’ leader on Christmas night 1776. The next morning, General George Washington’s troops had crossed the Delaware River unopposed. The Hessians’ leader died with a note in his pocket from a loyalist spy who’d tried to warn him of the impending attack.

Charles Lucas and Theodore Hunt were both business partners of William Clark. His country estate, Marais Castor, lay just east of Normandy along Natural Bridge Road. Washington Irving wrote of the fragrant wildflowers and others joined him in praising the orchards and vineyards, shady walnut grove, bee hives, dove cotes, and surrounding prairies. But Marais Castor’s real significance was the treaties signed there—including a heart-stopping 1825 treaty in which the Osage surrendered all their lands in Missouri, Arkansas, and present-day Kansas.

Castor Hill, the site where Clark whipped out his pen, is today Council Grove Avenue in Pine Lawn. Both the north and south campuses of the University of Missouri-St. Louis were built on land originally owned by the Lucas family.

After Hunt’s death in 1832, Anne married his cousin, the explorer Wilson Price Hunt. As the agent for the Astoria fur trading company, he went searching for a route more direct than the one blazed by Lewis and Clark. In 1810, he led the second organized, overland expedition to the Northwest Coast.