Look at the above postcard from the late Nineteenth Century, with a view down Main Street, which we looked at yesterday. An intact, intimate urban space with even a streetcar going by. It’s not like that anymore. As we walk down Main Street in Galesburg, crossing over Cherry Street, we see the parking lots and…
Tag: Parks
Grant’s Farm, Mid-June 2023
The Busch Family Ownership Group (minus Billy and Adolphus IV) welcomes you to Grant’s Farm! We paid an evening visit to the Busch family estate recently. I learned the structure below was the ice skating building. This was part of the original holdings of the Dent Family, and the Hardscrabble log cabin is one of…
The Former Faust Estate
Always take that strange narrow road and see where it goes. We were recently visiting Faust Park in Chesterfield to look at the collection of historic West County structures on display there (see them here and here) and noticed there was a little road going to the east. Before we knew it, we had discovered…
Eberwein Park
Time for more barns! Eberwein Park is the former farm of the eponymous family, who sold hay harvested from its fields into the Twenty-First Century. It is now a public park owned by the City of Chesterfield off Old Baxter Road, preserving the original barn from the early Twentieth Century. Garden plots are available as…
Downtown Springfield
Downtown Springfield is dominated by a public square at the intersection of two major cross streets. While for much of its history during the Twentieth Century it was a morass of open pavement, in what looks to be the 1970s it was converted into a park and traffic was routed into a single lane that…
Stockton Lake, Cedar County
It’s been years since I featured a manmade lake, and recently we visited Stockton Lake, created in 1969 from the Sac River in Cedar County. Pop-up storms were brewing over the lake, so in some directions dark clouds loomed, while in other directions sunny skies prevailed. It seems like the great era of dam building…
Reinke Barn, Bluebird Park
Tucked in a valley in Bluebird Park in Ellisville is the Reinke Barn, moved from its original location west of Clarkson Road on Manchester Road. Originally built in 1905 for Henry Reinke, laborers came from the communities of Sherman and Glencoe to help build the barn. It could originally hold two horses, six cattle and…
Winfield Lock and Dam No. 25
I find it fascinating just how heavily modified and altered the Mississippi River is north of St. Louis. Starting at Alton, or perhaps we should say at the Chain of Rocks Canal, humans force barges into a series of artificial channels all the way to Minnesota. Of course, the river channel itself is completely altered…
Downtown Civic Buildings, Lincoln, Illinois
Oh no, they pulled a Chambord on me! But anyway, the Logan County Courthouse, constructed in 1905, is a beautiful building, nonetheless. It is relatively unadorned, and seems to be constructed out of yellow limestone or sandstone. Like many palaces in Europe, the first floor possesses rusticated stonework, while the upper stories features polished finish….
Chesterfield, Post-Chesterfield Mall
Big things are happening out to the west of the now almost completely defunct Chesterfield Mall, which entered the hallowed halls of my Crumby Run-Down Malls of St. Louis pantheon with this post in June of 2017. But Chesterfield still boasts some of the highest income levels in the region (even if other zip codes…