I was curious about early St. Louis and its growth towards Soulard and the Trapper Cottage. I researched historic maps and overlayed them with city street grid.
The current street layout is shown with black lines, and the Cottage is shown as a black rectangle near the bottom of each picture.
Click on each picture for more detail.
Before the Civil War, Robert E. Lee was in the employ of the Army Corps of Engineers and was tasked to study the silting of St. Louis harbor. The Mississippi was routing to the east of Bloody Island and was threatening to cut the city off from the main channel of the river. A system of dikes were constructed to channel the river back towards the city. As a result, the east channel silted in, Bloody Island became enjoined with land in Illinois, and Duncan's Island was eroded away.
It's hard to line up maps in this time period because the streets were very different than they are today. Best I can tell, the Trapper Cottage was somewhere between Fulton (later 8th) and Decatur (later 9th) which used to have a straight alignment from Park to Lesperance; and between Lesperance (now Allen, roughly) and Calhoun (no longer exists). Part of Lesperance still exists in Kosciusko.
Same arrangement of streets, this one is interesting because it shows the alleys. Alley houses used to be largely prevalent in Soulard, at one point there was even an alley house behind the Trapper Cottage. A significant number are gone because they were generally hastily-constructed timber frames, but there's still quite a few brick alley houses left.
I stopped doing maps here because the street grid as it exists today is established. I'm not sure when the streets names changed to numbers, If you know, let me know and I'll add it here. It's also worth nothing that at some point, the names for Lafayette and Soulard were switched.
The next major change would be the "urban renewal" of the mid 20th Century which decimated the west side of Soulard and most of the Kosciusko neighborhood. Cue sad historian noises.
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