You might often hear the terms “St. Louis Commons” and “St. Louis Common Fields” thrown around a lot, but it’s important to know the difference between the two. Let’s talk about what they were, and how the terminology still survives to the present day in legal descriptions of properties, including the house from where you may very well be reading this. First, it’s important, as can be seen above, that surveying had begun early on, with this example of the Chouteau property around the mill pond created by the damming of Mill Creek. But our story begins with this key survey map below by Joseph Brown from 1829.
In the French and Spanish Colonial era, there were common fields to the northwest of the city, on the nice flat prairie (actually known in French as the Grand Prairie), which was suitable for agriculture. As I’ve mentioned before, French fields were long and skinny, Spanish fields were square and rotated to capture the best land, and American fields were a giant grid. The broad, regular street grid of North St. Louis preserves those flat, easily laid out fields, and the some of the names of the subdivisions and streets preserve the original French owners.
Conversely, in the south, the Commons was reserved for livestock, which were left to graze free range, as we say today, branded with their owners’ mark. This rose out of the area’s karst topography, which left the Commons a warren of often useless land due to it being pockmarked with sinkholes and lakes formed by the collapse of the roofs of caves in the limestone bedrock. Of course, as we know, that is also why brewers eventually flocked to the area. Interestingly, a long time ago I stumbled across an old book in the Central Library’s rare book room that explained the new City of St. Louis actually appealed to the U.S. Congress and successfully obtained the title to the St. Louis Commons on the basis that the former Spanish colonial town of St. Louis had once owned the land.
As you might imagine, with the price of real estate at the time in St. Louis (land was astronomically more expensive in value than a skilled craftsman’s yearly wages), so for the City to all the sudden own all of that land southwest of the growing metropolis was a big deal. Even better, the Missouri History Museum has the City’s logbook that records the sales of the land to what is a who’s who of famous pre-Civil War St. Louis businessmen. Chouteau Avenue was the northern border, Grand Boulevard would become the western border, and South Broadway more or less the eastern border. Carondelet’s fields were the southern boundary.
But of course, the City of St. Louis first had to partition the land in a logical, and very American way, to sell it off at maximum profit. They hired a surveyor named Charles DeWard to survey the Commons, and his work from 1838 still reflects on the modern city to this day, almost two hundred years later. Each numbered square is approximately 40 acres, which is logical as the Northwest Territory and most of the Midwest has standard farm fields of twice that, 80 acres. As was typical, and very much inspired by Roman surveying, DeWard completely ignored the topography of the land. The block numbers still appear in legal descriptions to this day. Generally speaking, based off my examination, the city sold land at $100 an acre. That was a lot of money back then! A skilled worker back then made a $1 a day.
Most land sold to land speculators or developers, but some of the less desirable land, which might have had too many sinkholes, for example, was eventually subdivided and platted by the City of St. Louis itself in four scattered site subdivisions. Note, as well, that there were just over a half dozen former French farm fields whose claimants’ stood, interfering with the strict checkerboard grid and is preserved in the modern street grid.
Interestingly, very early on there was a very large addition laid out called the South St. Louis Suburb, in what is now Dutchtown, surveyed by St. Louis County surveyor Charles Salomon, and filed on July 14, 1858. Thus it makes Laclede Park one of the oldest greenspaces in the City.
And of course, down south of the St. Louis Commons was Carondelet, which being its own separate city, had its own Common Fields. Some of its fields are over the county border in what is now Lemay.
Back up north, here is the map of the St. Louis Common Fields showing the ownership of those long, slender fields in 1796. The story always goes is that the reason the fields were skinny was so the farmers could stay next to each other as they worked together over the course of the day, and in the case of attack, they would be in one long picket line. Of course, like most “common knowledge” in St. Louis history, it is wrong.
The real reason is that the skinny fields go back for centuries into French history and are known as the “open field” system in the Medieval Ages. The idea behind the long skinny plots were an effort at equity, the theory being that by dividing the land in such a way, everyone was guaranteed fertile and productive soil. In fact, the idea of common livestock grazing, as we saw to the south in the Commons, also dated to Medieval Europe, as well.
