We visited the town of Perryville in Perry County last weekend to check out the area and in particular the Shrine at St. Mary of the Barrens, which we’ll look at later this week.
It’s an interesting and extremely old part of Missouri, with origins dating back to 1820, right around the founding of the state. It’s the similar story for other parts of Missouri along the Mississippi River with some interesting variations: first there were English American Roman Catholic settlers from Maryland and obviously some French and French American immigrants. Then came the German Lutherans from Saxony, and then the German Catholics.
There’s a beautiful courthouse, which we’ll look at tomorrow, anchoring an active town square with numerous restaurants and businesses.
The Historic American Building Survey made many stops in Perry County, so below are some of the stone houses that are almost certainly the oldest buildings in the area. In many ways, their rough stone walls are your classic early Missourian houses. Tomorrow we’ll get to seeing the town as it is today.
. Perry County Missouri Perryville, 1933. Documentation Compiled After. Photograph. Library of Congress.
My mother’s family was one of seven highlighted in the book Maryland Catholics on the Frontier. I spent childhood summer vacations on my Uncle’s farm. It was a long drive from St Louis via Route 3 in Illinois. I was always happy to eat lunch in one of the taverns on the square before heading to the farm.. One of the ancestors donated land for the Seminary. Nice memories.
A little while ago, when I was making a map of historic places to take pictures of in Perry County, I stumbled across some of the HABS surveyed houses you included. I am pretty sure two of those stone houses HABS surveyed are still standing. The McCauley House (last photo) was brutally renovated, probably after the 1950s, and turned into a ranch style house right across MO-51 from Kueker’s Nursey. Only the stone foundation and stone portions of the house, without their gables, survive. The other is the first stone house pictured which is probably the one in ruins at the edge of a field less than a mile southwest of the McCauley House.