Between 1950 and 1960, St. Louis County grew by 297,183 people, while the City of St. Louis lost 106,770 residents. What is interesting about this map, and this is assuming that it accurately represents the street grid in 1954, is how unpopulated so much of the county actually is. Florissant is yet to develop, as is most of South County. Will we see a gigantic spike in the building of new streets in the last half of the 1950s? I know that much of the inner ring suburbs of North County and Central County had been laid out decades before. Had they just begun to finally be filled in with houses and residents? It really makes you think.
In 1954, Dad purchased 26 acres of what was then called an unincorporated part of St Louis County. And our contiguous neighbor had 96 acres. Dad became a gentleman farmer and the neighbor used our 26 acres. They would make their own meat and soap and sometimes share their bounty. I remember the pork sausage to this day. Oddly enough, the Compton & Dry map shows where Dad’s factory was on St Louis Avenue at 19th Street as being undeveloped back then. Eventually all the County acreage was eminent domained for what is now the outer belt where it meet Olive Blvd. Olive, when I was a boy living there was name (stupidly) Olive Street Road. We had no postal delivery service at for the first few years and would have to go into “downtown” Chesterfield to get the mail. Both sides of Olive were farmland and only after a few years did a subdivision go in 2 or 3 miles east of us. Thanks for bringing the memories, Chris.
Did you know Louraine Davis?
I don’t recall that name. What context, Chris?
I was born in 1959 in Shrewsbury, and my Uncle Norman Rossi was one of the biggest local plumbing contractors back in that day, and also custom-built his own home in Shrewsbury. His nephew, Dick Vivian, settled in the same neighborhood in 1955 and became a real estate broker with Ira Berry Real Estate for many years. My Dad (Dick’s brother) followed in 1957, though we only lived in the area until the late 1960’s. Based on what I know from my family, as well as my urban studies at Washington University in the late 1970’s, almost all of the INNER RING suburbs were fully developed by the late 1940’s, and some much earlier, so the roads that you see on this map do not represent empty streets, most of these were fully functional suburban neighborhoods with schools, parks and nice communities. I am referring to Shrewsbury, Webster Groves, Maplewood, Richmond Heights, Brentwood, Clayton, University City, Wellston, Normandy, Jennings, and Bellefontaine Neighbors. By late in the 1950’s, the “second ring” of suburbs was beginning to be expanded, and my maps from a few years later show a huge development of streets in some of those suburbs that surround Lindbergh Blvd, especially in South County. It was not until the late 1960’s that the areas outside of Lindbergh (to the south, west and north) began to fill in dramatically, as the previous commenter notes, these were primarily agricultural areas up until the last sixty years or so.
My parents best friends moved from Berkeley (by the airport) down to the new Concord development south of Sappington in 1965. Theirs was one of the early homes in the community, and we would go down there and play in what seemed to be an endless series of natural gullies nearby. Within another ten years or so, that same community was much more densely packed, and all of the gullies and other natural features were gone.
I have a very full set of maps of the St. Louis area from about 1950 all the way to the present day, which clearly show the progression of development in the county areas.
Wow, thanks so much for the in-depth commentary! It’s information like this that makes me appreciate my readers so much.
On Saturday morning, this had to be 1956 or ’57, some men showed up at our door. Some wild hogs were attacking farm animals and dad got his rifle and went off with the rest of the posse (who were also armed, some with shotguns), and got rid of the predators. Ahh! It makes me miss rural farm life. When we got the 26 acres, an old farm house was on it. Dad got an architect and built a two story Mid-Century Modern style home. But one of my best memories is the smell of Honeysuckle wafting into my bedroom window at night. Thanks for the inspiration, Chris.