Heading west from the square and downtown, we come across St. Paul Lutheran Church, founded in 1921 and originally met in an older building. The current church is from 1952. Houses are relatively simple in town. But I did find this nice Queen Anne Style house back closer to the courthouse. Out southwest of town,…
Tag: Franklin County
Downtown Union, Franklin County
I rolled into Union, the county seat of Franklin County, on a quiet afternoon last Saturday and took a look around. Union, like Washington to the north up Route 47, has seen explosive growth in the last thirty years as an exurban community in the larger St. Louis Metropolitan area, so there is a lot…
Farmsteads, Southwest of Washington, Franklin County
Southwest of Washington in Franklin County along Route KK are a collection of beautiful central hall houses that sit on prominent hilltops, probably built as early as the 1840s but certainly complete before the Civil War. Certainly many of the original owners/builder of these houses were Germans brought to this country by the famous work…
Washington, At Night
I was giving a lecture out in Washington, Missouri, and I had some time to kill so I walked around the downtown, taking some pictures of the historic architecture. Above is St. Peter’s United Church of Christ which was founded in 1844. Below is the City Hall. I wandered down some of the other streets…
Cedar Street, Part Two, Washington, Franklin County
Proceeding down towards the river, we realize that the houses above are the same ones in the photograph below, just seen from the opposite direction and over one hundred years later. The house above looks like it’s been modified slightly from 1908. But this house above and below can clearly be seen in the far…
Cedar Street, Part One, Washington, Franklin County
Cedar Street turned out to be a delight, with a well-preserved stretch of houses from a wide range of styles. Below, looking way off in the west where the trees are is the location of the thoroughfare. The street works cohesively because despite being so stylistically divergent, the use of the same color of brick…
Around Immanuel Lutheran Church, Washington, Franklin County
It wouldn’t be a German American town in Missouri without a Lutheran church across town from the Roman Catholic one! In this case, it’s Immanuel Lutheran Church, founded in 1862, with the current church constructed in 1882. But let’s look at the general neighborhood around the church, which is a combination of parking lots, intact…
Main and Lafayette Streets, Washington, Franklin County
Walking southeast down Main Street from Cedar Street and St. Francis Borgia we see a fairly intact stretch of Nineteenth Century streetscape. The photograph below, most likely from the church’s spire, shows the downtown area, including Main Street at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Edward G. Busch owned a hardware store along this stretch,…
Front Street, Washington, Franklin Coutny
We’ll head down to Front Street along the Misssouri River, where unlike nearby New Haven, here that street name is more logically facing the riverbank where steamboats would have docked. There is a parking lot for visitors, which I’m not thrilled about and I think would be best filled in eventually. Industry such as corncob…
The John G. Busch Brewery, Washington, Franklin County
John B. Busch founded his brewery south of downtown in 1854, and it continued under the supervision of his sons for many years. Yes, as you might suspect, he was a brother of Adolphus Busch of Anheuser-Busch fame. As was typical, the brewery switched to the manufacture of soft drinks at the dawn of Prohibition….