Please join me on July 24 at 6:30 at the Central Library in downtown St. Louis for a lecture about my new book. Please register here.

St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in the 1960s still sat at a relatively peaceful intersection, but change was happening rapidly around Manchester and Ballas roads.

West County Mall would soon rise across the intersection, replacing the old drive-in movie theater, and Interstate 270 would pass by, too.

The current church was built in 1938, but the congregation dates back to 1838, when it was founded along with a German Evangelical group that later moved up to Ballas and Clayton. A cemetery survives from that early period.

St. Paul’s served the nearby Lutheran Orphans’ Home, and when the latter was sold, a parcel for the church was subdivided off, leaving the congregation at the same spot as it has been since before the Civil War.