Wait a minute, I said to myself, the home of William D’Oench, one of Eberhard Anheuser’s early business partners, has the same address as the early Maronite church of St. Anthony the Hermit. It sat in the neighborhood we looked at the last couple of days. And yes, it was not hugely common, but down near the wharf in the rough and tumble neighborhoods where there was not a lot of wealth, some churches were built inside houses. As I mentioned before, the area south of Chouteau was where the wealthy business elite lived before the Civil War, but now their mansions had been cut up into boarding houses. Lebanese immigrants, who I’ve been told worked unloading boats on the Levee, lived in this neighborhood.

St. Anthony the Hermit was the first Lebanese Maronite church, founded in 1898, and bounced around to several other locations, including what might be described as a “traditional” church building at Broadway and Poplar Street, which you can see below.

The parish seems to have closed in 1940, which is around when the “slum clearance” began in the area. St. Raymond’s, which is the far more famous Maronite parish in St. Louis, had already been founded by this point and continues to this day. We’ll look at it tomorrow.