I think one of the more interesting aspects of the built environment in St. Louis is the number of churches we have lost not due to neglect and disinvestment but rather due to rapid growth. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the earliest churches in St. Louis that were swept away by the burgeoning and unprecedented building campaigns in the downtown and inner neighborhoods of the city. Many early houses of worship embraced Jeffersonian ideas of the Neoclassical, such as the one above, rejecting what were seen as “old-fashioned” styles associated with despotism back in Europe.

However, historicism crept back in, such as we see above in this composition by George I. Barnett, where the Italian Romanesque Revival informs the design of the First Methodist Episcopal Church. (It also shows the dynamism of Barnett as an architect.) Shorn of its campanile, it was later rather bizarrely converted into a commercial space before its eventual demolition.

I also had to chuckle at this church–what, a house of worship in the Second Empire style? I suppose anything was possible in the adolescent stage of American architecture.

Finally, we have the move towards more traditional Northern German Romanesque Revival, with the use of brick accented with sparse stone quoining, with almost the feeling of a church in Lübeck or Kiel.