A quiet section of Eleventh Street between Lami and Shenandoah is loaded with history. Starting at Lami and heading north looking at the east side of the street, we first see a Greek Revival country house with a central hall plan.

Heading north, there are more of the usual houses you would expect in Soulard, with Second Empire houses following after some more Greek Revival and Italianate hybrids.

The last house is a nice example of the Italianate style emerging from the more classical modes in architecture after the Civil War.

I strongly suspect the ornamental lintels could very well be cast iron, which was also developing as an industry in St. Louis, as I wrote in St. Louis Magazine a while back.

Let’s go back to Lami Street, and work our way north on the west side of Eleventh Street now, where we have some surprises. We see the carriage house of the Franz Arzt House up Lami, and there is also this cool building below that was inserted into a parcel that originally faced Eleventh.

The first house is a wonderful Second Empire house, which is rapidly being obscured by foliage as spring rolls in over the course of April!

But the next house is what is exciting. Just glancing at it, one might think it is just a Twentieth Century in-fill, taking over an empty lot or a demolished Second Empire mansion.

But looking closely at the lintels in the late afternoon light, and we get suspicious! This house is old, and it has more stories to tell.

This was the William Stumpf Mansion, and when William Swekosky photographed it, it had been updated into a Second Empire duplex, as you can see below. In fact, Stumpf once owned the entire block bounded by Eleventh, Shenandoah, Twelfth and Lami, purchasing it from Rene Beauvais in 1866 for $25,000. Beauvais of course would move further west to his eponymous manor at Magnolia and Grand Boulevard.

William Stumpf was briefly partners in the 1860s with William J. Lemp Sr. until the latter was able to sell out and focus on his father Adam’s Western Brewery, which I wrote about back in the summer of 2020 at St. Louis Magazine. His brewery was originally in Soulard, but eventually moved to the corner of what is now Shenandoah and Lemp, where at least one of his brothers had been maintaining their lagering cave. That brewery site has held a host of breweries of the years, finally ending up as the now-abandoned Falstaff Plant No. 10.

Looking above, we also realize from Compton and Dry that Stumpf’s mansion (3) was originally in the Italianate style, like many country houses were at the time, which I have also written about here. You can see how Dr. Arzt built his carriage house first (2), having bought a sub-parcel from Stumpf. The bank foreclosed on the $25,000 loan, and the property went to Philip Stifel. We now start to see why Stumpf was not happy with William Lemp pulling his capital out of their brewery!

After all that history, the rest of the houses on the block still are very beautiful–don’t get me wrong–and it’s interesting to think they were built on a subdivision of land once owned by a partner of the Lemps.