The Trapper Cottage

The Trapper CottageThe Trapper CottageThe Trapper Cottage

The Trapper Cottage

The Trapper CottageThe Trapper CottageThe Trapper Cottage
  • Home
  • Allen Social Club
  • Pre-Construction
  • Reconstruction
  • Fireplace
  • Paranormal
  • News
  • Maps
  • About
  • Tours
  • More
    • Home
    • Allen Social Club
    • Pre-Construction
    • Reconstruction
    • Fireplace
    • Paranormal
    • News
    • Maps
    • About
    • Tours
  • Home
  • Allen Social Club
  • Pre-Construction
  • Reconstruction
  • Fireplace
  • Paranormal
  • News
  • Maps
  • About
  • Tours

Maps of St. Louis and Growth Towards Soulard

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.

1822 - Beck's Gazetteer

Nothing much to see from this map - of note is Chouteau Pond. Soulard would have been wilderness and/or a system reflective of French feudal farms. This was one year after Missouri statehood and 19 years after the Louisiana Purchase.

1837 - Robert E. Lee

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.

1848 - J. M. Kershaw

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. 

1853 - Phelps, Fanning & Co.

 Same general street arrangement from 1848.  Of note is the shrinking of Chouteau's Pond (it had been drained around 1849 because of the cholera epidemic), and the disappearance of Duncan's Island. 

1855 - J. H. Colton & Co.

 Fulton and Decatur were realigned, with a bend introduced between Emmet and Geyer. This is the current alignment of 8th and 9th.  A little bit of Calhoun is left, it appears it survived until the construction of the I-44/I-55 interchange.

1867 - Mitchell's Atlas

The streets are generally laid out in the grid that exists today.  The streets have yet to be renamed to numbers - If you were ever wondering why the streets in Soulard go 7-8-9-10-Menard-11-12-13, it's because they used to all have non-numbered names.

1879 - O. W. Gray

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. 

Copyright © 2023 The Trapper Cottage - All Rights Reserved.