St. Louis was not always known for its beer. When German immigrant Adolphus Busch came to St. Louis in 1857, few local brews were being transported beyond the city limits. But when Busch became part owner of his father-in-law Eberhard Anheuser’s failing brewery in 1861, he quickly turned it into the largest brewery in the world.

Since it was highly perishable, beer could not travel far without cold storage. Eager to tap new markets, the savvy Busch developed a system of pasteurization that allowed him to ship his beer in bottles rather than wooden barrels. For longer trips, he packed railway cars with ice and constructed ice houses at strategic sites along the rails. Busch was also one of the first large-scale beer manufacturers with marketable brand-name bottles, corks, and labels. Anheuser-Busch’s profits skyrocketed after Busch developed a lighter-style lager more suited to American tastes, named after the town of its origins: Budweis, Czechoslovakia. The new lager, introduced in 1876, became the company’s flagship brew. Americans consumed it by the ton.

Busch was also a much-beloved philanthropist, giving money to many charities and several universities. Thousands of St. Louisans turned out for his funeral in 1913 to celebrate the man who had given so much to their city.

When Annie Malone came to St. Louis in 1902 hoping to expand her small cosmetics business, few could have guessed that she would become one of the richest women in the world. Two years earlier, Malone had invented a line of beauty products for African American women that didn’t use many of the harsh chemicals common in other beauty products. Since other sales and advertising options were cut off to her as an African American woman, she trained her own door-to-door saleswomen. By 1918, Malone was a multimillionaire. Her company, Poro, employed 75,000 women. The center of her empire was Poro College, where she trained future saleswomen and beauticians in the proper use of her products.

Malone was also a generous philanthropist, giving sizable donations to historically black colleges around the country. From 1919 to 1943 she served as president of the St. Louis Colored Orphans’ Home, which was later renamed in her honor. She also encouraged the community to use Poro College as a gathering place; it served as a rescue shelter for many African American St. Louisans when a tornado tore through the city in 1927.

Malone’s business fortunes declined following a contentious divorce and costly settlement. She moved her business to Chicago, but the Great Depression and additional lawsuits hurt Poro’s earnings. Despite the setbacks, Malone remained a dedicated philanthropist until her death.

While many eight-year-olds spent time swinging on the playground, Butch Kennedy was flying down the Mississippi River at 35 miles per hour. He saved up $80 selling newspapers to buy his first boat, which he named “Judy Pie” for his girlfriend. By the time he graduated from Sumner High School, he had already been racing for a decade and owned a $1,300, 75-horsepower boat.

Butch Kennedy’s father, Arthur Kennedy Sr., was a professional racer, and Butch grew up surrounded by racing culture. They were two of the first black professional speedboat racers in the world. In 1955, they were still the only two African American members of the National Outboard Association. Butch Kennedy raced in high-profile competitions across the United States and Europe, sometimes reaching speeds of 150 miles per hour. In 1982, he won the Parker nine-hour Enduro and the Havasu World Championship back to back, a feat rarely achieved in speedboat racing.  

Kennedy ranked as one of the top 10 powerboat racers of his age. Although he set 14 world records over his 37-year boat-racing career, he described racing as a hobby. His full-time work was in commercial heating and air conditioning with Kennedy & Sons, the family business his father founded. But on weekends, St. Louisans could often find him zooming along on the Mississippi River or Creve Coeur Lake.

At the age of 14, New Orleans–born Auguste Chouteau earned the title “Founder of St. Louis”—or at least a share of it. Chouteau assisted his stepfather Pierre Laclède on a scouting venture to establish a French fur-trading post at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. At the behest of Laclède, Chouteau staked claim to the site of present-day St. Louis on February 15, 1764. Over the next six decades and under the reign of three different nations, Chouteau thrived as a fur trader, banker, land speculator, and politician.

Soon after cofounding the French town, Chouteau was shocked to discover that the French government had ceded control of its North American territories to Spain. But Chouteau did not want to give up his opportunities in St. Louis. He pledged his allegiance to Spain and thrived as a fur trader. In 1803, when the U.S. acquired St. Louis in the Louisiana Purchase, Chouteau welcomed the Americans during the transfer ceremonies and assisted Lewis and Clark in their expedition. For his efforts, he retained his monopoly on trade. He continued to contribute to the development of the region under the American government for 20 years until his death on February 24, 1829.

“The price of pollution could be the death of man.”

TIME magazine used these words to sum up the message of Washington University professor and tireless social advocate Barry Commoner in February 1970. Considered the father of the modern environmental movement, Commoner focused his interests on ecology in the 1950s when he began studying the dangers of radioactivity produced from nuclear explosions. During his investigation, Commoner became convinced that all environmental systems were inextricably linked and delicately balanced. He believed mankind had upset this balance through industrialization, pollution, and nuclear testing. If the balance was not restored soon, he argued, the consequences would be disastrous.

For the rest of his life, Commoner studied and spoke about the ecological dangers posed by modern industrial and agricultural practices. He argued that solutions to environmental problems would also address social issues such as racism, poverty, and world hunger. Commoner’s efforts had long-lasting effects. His research led to an international ban on surface nuclear testing in 1963, and in 1966 he established the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems. In 1980, Commoner used his ideas as the platform for an unsuccessful run for president. Though he lost the election, Commoner continued to fight for more sustainable environmental practices and social change until his death in 2012.

No one helped expand the Roman Catholic heritage of St. Louis more than the Italian priest Joseph Rosati. When the young priest arrived in St. Louis in 1817, about 4,000 French Catholic residents occupied the town. The sole Catholic church was made of logs and was so poorly furnished that it lacked windows and a solid floor. The priests there slept on the ground and wrapped themselves in buffalo skins during the winter months. Rosati, named the first Catholic bishop of St. Louis in 1827, would change all that.

Rosati revitalized the floundering St. Louis College, which would become Saint Louis University, the second-largest Jesuit-run university in the United States. Rosati raised funds for the reconstruction of the French Catholic church in 1834. The stone, Greek Revival–style basilica (known now as the Old Cathedral) was a testament to Rosati’s remarkable success in promoting Catholicism in the West. After Rosati died in Rome in 1843, his remains were transported across the Atlantic, up the Mississippi, and finally laid to rest inside the Old Cathedral he helped build. A year later, his successor observed that among all of the cities in the United States, “there is none that expresses Catholic life and Catholic character better than St. Louis.”

Once, as he sat beneath his parents’ porch as a child, Bob Cassilly designed his own city in the dirt as the adults talked above him. Listening to them, he felt bad that they too couldn’t be 11 years old. Cassilly never really lost that childlike spirit. Today, he is remembered in St. Louis for trying to awaken the kid in all of us.

A sculptor, entrepreneur, and museum director, Cassilly designed many well-known and creative landmarks in St. Louis, including Turtle Park. But he is best remembered for creating and founding the City Museum, a truly unique play space made of found objects that draws more than 600,000 visitors each year. City Museum also provided one of the sparks for the revival of the Washington Avenue district. But Cassilly saved his grandest visions for Cementland, a project that may very well have taken root beneath his parents’ porch.

Appropriating a 54-acre abandoned cement factory on the city’s north side, Cassilly envisioned a massive outdoor playground “where people can come and do things they’re not supposed to do.” It was this spirit that tragically came to an end when he was killed in a construction accident on the site in September 2011. Mayor Francis Slay noted, “The city has lost some of its wonder.”

“$25,000 to the first aviator of any Allied Country crossing the Atlantic in one flight, from Paris to New York or New York to Paris.” That offer, made by a rich businessman looking to push the boundaries of aviation, would gain a little-known pilot worldwide acclaim and launch St. Louis into international headlines.

Several teamed airships had made transatlantic flights after World War I, even nonstop trips from Europe to North America, but the hype generated by the prize was unprecedented. Charles Lindbergh, a Detroit-born airmail carrier who regularly flew the Chicago–St. Louis route, was definitely the dark horse in the competition. Under the sponsorship of several St. Louis businessmen, Lindbergh commissioned the construction of a monoplane powered by a Wright radial engine. He named it the Spirit of St. Louis.

Departing New York on May 20, 1927, Lindbergh overcame clouds, storms, and sleepiness to traverse the Atlantic Ocean. After 33 hours and 33 minutes in the air, Lindbergh landed in Paris to a hero’s welcome. He had broken the record for the longest straight-line distance flown nonstop in an airplane—3,610 miles—and he did it alone. Later, Lindbergh’s fame would prove a mixed blessing and his opinions about World War II would stir controversy, but in 1927 he stood on top of the world and reflected at least some of the world’s attention on St. Louis.

At the beginning of the 20th century, St. Louis had a housing problem that no one knew how to solve. Slum districts were growing. People were crammed into small apartments with no indoor plumbing. Worse, city leaders could not mobilize citizens to pass much-needed housing reforms.

As the city searched for answers, progressive reformer and native St. Louisan Charlotte Rumbold proposed an unorthodox solution—cleaner, safer parks and playgrounds. Rumbold’s motto was simple: If we play together, we will work together. In 1907, she joined the city’s parks department as the superintendent of playgrounds and recreation. She also published an influential report on housing conditions in St. Louis in 1908. In 1914, she organized her most ambitious project—the Pageant and Masque. This epic outdoor play was staged at the bottom of Art Hill to celebrate the city’s 150th anniversary and to stoke civic pride. It was a huge hit, and more than 400,000 people saw the production during its four-day run.

By 1915, Rumbold’s approach was a clear success—the city had beautiful new parks and playgrounds, and citizens had passed a new city charter and sweeping housing reforms. Rumbold, however, was slighted when the Board of Aldermen refused to grant her a raise, and she left St. Louis. Later, in 1945, the city recognized her contributions by naming Rumbold Park in her honor.

“If you tried to give rock ’n’ roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’”—John Lennon

Chuck Berry’s showmanship blossomed early. At his high school talent show, his rendition of Jay McShann’s “Confessin’ the Blues” scandalized the Sumner faculty but won wild applause from his peers. The applause has never stopped.

The father of rock and roll got his start in the clubs of St. Louis and East St. Louis in the early 1950s when he began playing guitar with the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Audiences responded to Berry’s showmanship and the “hillbilly” riffs he incorporated into blues ballads. When Chess Records released “Maybelline,” Berry’s cover of the country song “Ida Red,” in 1955, American music changed forever. The number-one hit sold over a million copies, and by 1959 Berry counted 17 chart singles, including top-ten hits “School Days,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Johnny B. Goode.”

Berry was among the first inductees at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 1986 opening. In 2004, Berry ranked 5th on Rolling Stone magazine’s “100 Greatest Artists of All Time.” Now in his 80s, Berry still performs monthly at the Blueberry Hill Duck Room in the Delmar Loop.

Missouri was a slave state, but in St. Louis economic opportunities were sometimes available to free people of color. Cyprian Clamorgan was one of the most successful of these free people. He first became wealthy through an inheritance from his great-grandfather. He used his money to generate a number of small enterprises, including perfumeries where “choice French and English” goods were bought up by a wide range of city residents. Clamorgan and his brothers believed black equality would come through economic independence, and they wanted to serve as prime examples of this theory.

Clamorgan was a community historian as well. His book The Colored Aristocracy of Saint Louis, published in 1858, documented St. Louis’s rich community of antebellum blacks. The antislavery movement, the Civil War, and Reconstruction formed key touchstones of his remarkable life. But like many African Americans, Clamorgan and the “colored aristocracy” he documented endured a number of hardships that effectively undermined their wealth. Clamorgan died virtually penniless in 1902, though it is not clear how he lost his fortune. His earlier prosperity made his anonymous burial in an unmarked grave all the more telling and tragic.

Mayor. Governor. Businessman. Diplomat. The hardworking and personable St. Louisan David R. Francis earned all of these titles and more during his lifetime. Francis arrived in the River City to attend Washington University in 1866. By 1885, when he was just 35 years old, Francis had amassed a small fortune in the shipping industry and been elected mayor. Francis proved such a popular mayor in St. Louis that he won the Missouri governor’s office in 1888—though the race was so nasty that he vowed to never again run for public office. Francis did, however, remain involved in public service. In 1896 and 1897, he served as the U.S. secretary of the interior under President Grover Cleveland. He was later appointed the U.S. ambassador to Russia.

What St. Louisans most fondly remember Francis for today is the role he played in bringing the 1904 World’s Fair to St. Louis. As its president, Francis was the person most responsible for organizing and promoting the fair. While the fair was open, Francis oversaw operations and hosted visiting diplomats from around the world in his home. Francis called the fair the work of his life. As Senator Harry Hawes said of Francis at his memorial in 1927, “He invited the world, and the world came.”

Dred and Harriet Scott were forced to see freedom as a process, not as a triumphant end point. In 1846, the enslaved Scotts initiated their freedom suits in the St. Louis Circuit Court. Eleven years later, their case finally made its way to the Supreme Court. The court ruled that African Americans were not and could not be citizens. Chief Justice Roger Taney infamously added that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

After the decision, northern whites grew increasingly sure that a southern “Slave Power” held sway in Washington, spurring the outbreak of civil war in 1861. Dred would not live to see that day. Although the Scotts were freed in 1857 by a process unrelated to the Supreme Court’s decision, opportunities remained scarce for blacks, and the Scotts returned to work for low wages in St. Louis. In ill health, Dred lived just one year under this bitter “freedom” before he died in 1858. Only recently have scholars learned that Harriet actually survived Dred until the 1870s, working as a laundress before dying in their daughter’s home in 1876. She lived long enough to see slavery’s end, though the fight for equal rights for African Americans would continue for generations.

When Eliza Haycraft came to St. Louis in 1840, she was penniless and ill educated. She faced limited employment opportunities as a single woman in the mid-19th century, and she turned to prostitution to support herself. That decision began a rags-to-riches story unparalleled in St. Louis history.

Haycraft made her fortune as a prostitute, madam, and brothel manager, establishing herself as a major player in the city’s sex trade as the population of the city was exploding. Although she remained illiterate her entire life, often signing property deeds with an X, she had a keen mind for business, buying up valuable property and steadily building her wealth. Haycraft was more than just a wealthy madam and savvy businesswoman—she was also a generous philanthropist. She refused to turn the city’s poor away from her door, offering them aid and financial relief.

When she passed away in 1871, St. Louis went into mourning. The city’s newspapers covered her funeral procession, and thousands of St. Louisans lined the streets to pay tribute to the wealthiest woman in the city. Her assets were valued at $250,000 at the time of her death (over $25 million in today’s dollars). Because of her largesse, and in spite of the belief at the time that prostitutes were “fallen souls,” she was interred at Bellefontaine Cemetery alongside the city’s elite.

It was an early morning gunshot that announced Frankie had been done wrong. Frankie Baker shot her 17-year-old boyfriend and probable pimp, Allen “Albert” Britt on October 15, 1899. Britt was cheating on her, and Baker, a young woman in her 20s, decided she had had enough.

The murder was certainly scandalous, but little suggested it would ever generate more than a few tawdry headlines in the area papers. But something about the affair captured the imagination of St. Louis musicians, and within days they had turned her saga into song. These songs soon made Baker’s name internationally known and sparked their own genre—“Frankie and Albert” songs, better known as “Frankie and Johnny” songs.

More than 250 artists ranging from Lead Belly to Lindsay Lohan have recorded “Frankie and Johnny,” and it has also been adapted as a story for the stage and screen. In 1936, artist Thomas Hart Benton even featured a depiction of the murder in his murals for the Capitol rotunda in Jefferson City. Like Benton, artists and storytellers throughout the 20th century continually reimagined the story, all of them adding a new layer to the St. Louis murder that became a sensation, even as the real Frankie Baker remained largely shrouded in mystery.

When Frankie Muse Freeman graduated from Howard University Law School in 1947, she wrote to dozens of St. Louis law firms seeking a position. Most never responded to her—a black woman—despite her exceptional performance on the Missouri Bar. Undeterred, Freeman decided to open her own practice, focusing on civil law, divorce, and criminal cases. It was just the start of her storied and inspiring career.

Freeman became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), focusing on discrimination issues. She led the NAACP legal team that filed a 1952 class-action suit to end segregated public housing in St. Louis. Her determined and aggressive style earned her the position of general counsel of the St. Louis Housing Authority.

Just five days before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he informed Freeman that she was recommended for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. On November 24, 1916, Freeman became the first black woman on the commission, and she served under the next three presidents. Returning to St. Louis in 1982, she continued to practice law and serve the community through the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights. In 2007, Frankie Freeman was inducted into the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame, and in 2011, she was named St. Louis Citizen of the Year, the first African American woman to receive this honor.

Say “Motor City” and Detroit immediately comes to mind, but there was a time when St. Louis could lay claim to being one of the top car towns in the United States. This was in large part thanks to George Preston Dorris. Dorris helped found the Saint Louis Motor Carriage Company, one of the first auto companies located west of the Mississippi. Dorris’s St. Louis model was the first single-cylinder car ever built. In 1904, the St. Louis Police Department used the St. Louis model at the World’s Fair—one of the first times a police department made use of a police car.

Not satisfied with making crude motorized carriages, Dorris pushed himself to make the best cars available. He later started another company, the Dorris Motor Car Company, which was briefly one of the top makers of luxury automobiles in the nation. At a time when a typical Model-T rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly line might cost a few hundred dollars, Dorris offered a car that was hand-made, though it cost consumers several thousand dollars. Dorris also added a touch of class to his company by personally delivering cars to his customers. The few that have survived continue to symbolize a long-overlooked part of St. Louis’s rich transportation history.

Gerty Theresa Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences, is recognized today as a titan in the field of biochemistry. Because of sexism in the sciences, however, this Washington University professor’s contributions almost went unrecognized in her own time.

Cori and her husband, Carl, began working together while they attended medical school in Prague. In 1922, they moved to Buffalo, New York, where Carl had accepted a professorship. Though the Coris had published together, no university would hire Gerty Cori as a professor. Instead, she worked as a research assistant, earning one-tenth of Carl’s pay. But the Coris continued to work and publish together.

In 1931, the Coris moved to St. Louis to work at Washington University, though Gerty Cori was still forced to take a low-paying job as her husband’s assistant. By 1942, her work finally led to some recognition and she was hired as an assistant professor. After the Coris jointly received the Nobel Prize in 1947 for their discovery of the Cori cycle—the process by which the body breaks down glycogen for energy—the scientific community warmed to the idea of women in the sciences. From then until her death in 1957, Gerty Cori received numerous awards, and prominent scientists flocked to St. Louis to work with her.

For Harland Bartholomew, St. Louis was more than just a city. It was a massive laboratory where he could test his ideas about how cities should be designed.

Bartholomew became the country’s first full-time city planner when he was hired by the City of St. Louis in 1915. Bartholomew began his work in city planning just as the automobile was becoming popular, and he worked to integrate car traffic by adding wide streets and highway rings around St. Louis. He was a strong believer in the need to clear large sections of cities to make more room for highways and carried those ideas to Washington, D.C., where he served on the Interregional Highways Committee. Bartholomew was also a proponent of zoning laws, arguing that healthy cities should maintain a separation between commercial and residential space.

Bartholomew also helped to inaugurate city planning as a full-time profession. In the mid-20th century, his firm Harland Bartholomew and Associates was one of the most sought-after urban design firms in the world, commissioned for projects from Peoria to Vancouver. Once the projects were done, his associates were often hired as planners for those cities, spreading Bartholomew’s ideas around the nation.

Today, urban planners largely condemn Bartholomew’s philosophies, more often promoting the value of mixed-use spaces and walkability. Despite the criticisms, Bartholomew’s status as the father of urban planning remains intact.

Millions read the words of Austrian-born Henry Boernstein (Heinrich Börnstein) when he was the editor of the German-language, St. Louis–based newspaper Anzeiger des Westens. After all, his “Gazette of the West” was one of the largest German-language newspapers in America in the mid-19th century. That wide readership earned him admirers, but it also earned him enemies.

Boernstein’s sensationalized and radical writings in the 1850s appealed to German political refugees who staunchly believed in such ideals as free speech, fair labor, national unity, and the abolition of slavery. He also railed against church establishment, clerical authority, Sunday laws, unfair wage labor, and slavery in his newspaper, to the delight of his readers. Although Boernstein’s community leadership and radical views won him loyal supporters, his biting political commentary enraged conservative and religious Germans and native-born Americans alike.

In 1860, Boernstein hoped for national unity and equality after the election of Abraham Lincoln but soon witnessed full-blown civil war. Boernstein was appointed ambassador to Bremen, Germany, after serving a brief stint in the Union army in 1861. With hardly a friend left in war-torn St. Louis, he resettled in his native Vienna, but he continued to regard himself as a citizen of Missouri. Before he died in 1892, he requested that his tombstone inscription declare that he and his wife died Americans.

Upon immigrating to the United States from England in 1818, Henry Shaw visited culturally vibrant cities such as New York and New Orleans. Then he found his way to St. Louis. His initial impression of this rough-and-tumble western outpost was not positive. He called it “a country of knavery, oppression and slavery.” But the savvy Shaw also spotted economic opportunity.

Shaw made St. Louis his home, traded in hardware, invested in real estate, and became fabulously wealthy, retiring at age 40. His success changed his mind about St. Louis. He purchased “a beautiful prairie” west of Grand Avenue where he built his permanent residence. He also changed his mind on slavery, owning several slaves by the 1850s.

Shaw’s most lasting impact on the city was the establishment of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Inspired by the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, Shaw established the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1859. The garden, now the oldest operating botanical garden in the country, earned St. Louis an international reputation for its role in botanical research, conservation, and science education. Shaw’s contributions weren’t limited to his garden. He also founded and endowed the School of Botany at Washington University and donated the land to create Tower Grove Park, one of the few parks in the country designated a national historic landmark.

By 1922, St. Louis’s only African American hospital was on life support. Though white city leaders had refused to open a hospital for African American patients and doctors until 1919, “City Hospital #2” was soon known for being crowded, understaffed, and underfunded.

To resuscitate the hospital, local black leaders turned to Homer G. Phillips, a successful St. Louis attorney known for his political activism. With Phillips spearheading the effort, St. Louisans passed a bond measure in 1923 that funded a state-of-the-art African American hospital. When city leaders refused to act on the bond, Phillips spent the next decade of his life fighting city hall, passionately arguing for a better hospital for the city’s black doctors and patients.

Tragically, Phillips did not live to see the new hospital completed. On June 18, 1931, he was murdered in a crime that remains unsolved. Phillips’s legacy, however, lived on.

In 1932, the city finally broke ground on the promised hospital. Upon its opening in 1937, the Homer G. Phillips Hospital became a premier hospital, and elite African American doctors from around the nation trained there. Though the hospital continued to thrive after city hospitals were desegregated in 1955, the city began to merge hospitals in the 1970s due to budget issues. Despite massive community protests, Homer G. Phillips was closed in 1979.

On April 6, 1971, Howard Baer was nervous. He had accomplished much in his life—he ran the A. S. Aloe Company for 30 years, served as the president of the Saint Louis Zoo Board for 10 years, spearheaded a $200 million expansion of Lambert Airport, and served more than 50 civic organizations. He was also a pioneer, becoming the first Jewish St. Louisan to chair the city’s Chamber of Commerce in 1952. But on that snowy April morning, Baer fretted as city and county residents went to the polls to vote on something Baer had pursued tirelessly for several years—the creation of a Zoo-Museum District (ZMD).

Baer’s hard work paid off. Today, the ZMD—a joint tax district between St. Louis City and County that helps fund the Zoo, Art Museum, History Museum, Science Center, and Botanical Garden—stands as one of the most distinctive features of St. Louis. For his efforts, Baer was named St. Louis Citizen of the Year by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1971. Baer continued to be active in civic service until his death. In 1999, St. Louis Commerce Magazine posthumously named him one of the 20 most influential St. Louis business leaders of the 20th century.

When cooking meals at home, countless Americans have turned to one St. Louis woman for help. By making cooking simpler and a lot more fun, Irma Rombauer proved to others that they could find joy in cooking.

When her husband committed suicide in 1930, Rombauer had little income and many bills to pay. In an attempt to solve her problems, she wrote a cookbook. But Rombauer had an innovative idea for this cookbook—she wanted to fill it with simple recipes. A novice cook herself, Rombauer collected recipes that used common ingredients and provided easy-to-follow instructions. She also listed all of the ingredients right along with the recipe—a simple addition that appealed to many novice cooks.

Book publishers were surprised at the self-published cookbook’s immediate success. Taking notice, the Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company bought the rights to the cookbook in 1936. With the might of a major publishing house behind it, Joy of Cooking quickly became a national sensation and the kitchen bible for countless home cooks. Today, it is in its eighth edition and has sold more than 18 million copies. The New York Public Library named Joy of Cooking one of the 150 most influential books of the 20th century, the only cookbook to be given such an honor.

100 meter hurdles: 12.69 seconds; high jump: 1.86 meters; shotput: 15.80 meters; 200 meters: 22.56 seconds; long jump: 7.27 meters; javelin: 45.66 meters; 800 meters: 2 minutes, 8.51 seconds

These numbers propelled East St. Louisan Jackie Joyner-Kersee into the record books as the first American woman to win the Olympic heptathlon. Her performance in the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul prompted Bruce Jenner to call her “the greatest multi-event athlete ever, man or woman.” Today she remains the most decorated female track and field athlete in Olympic history—with three gold, one silver, and two bronze medals won over the course of three Olympics.

Known for her grit and determination, Joyner-Kersee often competed in spite of injuries. Nursing a torn hamstring in 1992, she won her final Olympic medal, a bronze, in the long jump. At the 1988 Olympics, she scored 7,291 in the heptathlon, which has stood as the world record for over 25 years.

After retiring from track and field she turned her attention to encouraging youth in East St. Louis to participate in sports through the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center Foundation. In 2007, Joyner-Kersee helped establish Athletes for Hope, an organization that encourages athletes to work for community and charitable causes.

When he was 13, James Eads watched his family’s possessions sink to the bottom of the Mississippi River in a tragic steamboat accident. Little did he know that so much of his life would be tied to that forceful river. Eads never finished school, dropping out to help his family run their St. Louis dry goods store. A self-taught architect and scientist, he invented a special diving bell that allowed him to explore murky river bottoms to recover wreckage and earn his fortune. In the 1860s, the Union army called on his expertise to produce ironclad gunboats.

Eads’s most famous creation is the St. Louis bridge that still bears his name. By the late 1860s, it was clear that St. Louis needed a Mississippi River bridge to facilitate rail traffic. Eads called for an innovative steel design and arch spans of almost 500 feet. When the immense bridge finally opened in 1874, Eads became a hero to thousands of St. Louisans. Architects and poets alike heralded the bridge and its designer, earning Eads an international reputation as one of the 19th century’s greatest engineers. Though the river almost claimed his life as a boy, his connections to it resulted in a legacy that continues to define the St. Louis riverfront.

John Berry Meachum believed that a good education could rescue people from even the most dire of circumstances. Born into slavery, he learned that lesson firsthand. Using his carpentry and barrel-making skills, Meachum eventually earned enough money to purchase his freedom. When his enslaved wife was brought to St. Louis from Kentucky, he followed her and eventually bought her freedom as well. As his business success continued, Meachum bought other slaves who paid back their debts by working for him, learning from Meachum the skills they needed to survive as free men in a racist society.

But Missouri’s pro-slavery laws made Meachum’s beliefs dangerous. Slaveholders knew an educated population was a potentially rebellious one and made it illegal for blacks to receive an education. In secret, Meachum operated a school in the basement of his First Baptist Church, the first Protestant church created for African Americans in the city. From here, he could preach and teach, as he believed religion and education went hand in hand. He was also credited with creating a floating school on a steamboat in the Mississippi River to avoid state restrictions on educating blacks, but this has proved a difficult story to verify.

In 1854, Meachum died while doing what he loved most—preaching from the pulpit.

Joseph Pulitzer always dreamed of being a soldier. While his poor eyesight and small frame made that unlikely in his native Hungary, there was one country that was desperate for soldiers in the 1860s no matter their physical limitations. So Pulitzer made his way to the United States in 1864 to fight for the Union in the Civil War. He took part in a few small skirmishes, but it was battles of a different sort that would earn him a worldwide reputation.

Postwar St. Louis was corrupt, crime ridden, and rife with slums. Blessed with a pen much mightier than his sword, Pulitzer began a newspaper career opposing “frauds” and “shams,” honing a style of writing that would soon make him one of America’s most famous journalists. In the 1870s, he combined two of the city’s daily newspapers to create the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Pulitzer used some of the same crusading efforts he had employed at the Post-Dispatch when he bought the New York World in 1883. There, however, he was swept up in the competitive New York publishing environment and, for a time, became known more for his sensational stories and headlines than quality journalism. His reputation and contribution to journalism, however, were solidified by two late-in-life philanthropic gifts—endowing both the Columbia University Journalism School and the esteemed Pulitzer Prize.

In 1974, the St. Louis Public Library did something it had never done before: it named a new branch after a living person. A graduate of St. Louis public schools and Stowe Teachers College, Julia Davis began teaching at Simmons Elementary in St. Louis in 1913. At a time when many school curricula ignored the cultural and historical contributions of African Americans, Davis made those contributions a central part of her lessons in American and world history.

Through her energetic and personable teaching style, Davis encouraged her students to discover information for themselves and pushed them to use the resources available in local libraries. When she retired from teaching in 1961, she donated $2,500 (almost $20,000 in today’s dollars) to establish the Julia Davis Fund at the St. Louis Public Library, giving the library the money to purchase books about African American achievements. Eventually, this grew into the Julia Davis Collection, which today houses more than 3,000 works. Before her death in 1993 at the age of 101, Davis won many prestigious awards, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

A ripsaw is designed to cut against the grain. It is appropriate that the fiery Kate Richards O’Hare would take up the work of writing, editing, and publishing for the National Rip-Saw from St. Louis, where she spent her most important years.

The Rip-Saw was one of the most influential socialist publications of the 20th century. Cutting her way through a society defined by inequality and unfair labor practices, O’Hare became the most important female socialist of the West in the early 20th century. She saw herself as a figure who hacked away against the forces of corruption and exploitation even in the face of strong opposition. Critics did attack her for her staunch socialism, and even her supporters criticized her overt racism, especially when she wrote in support of segregation in 1912.

Often described as the “First Lady of Socialism” in the United States, O’Hare became the first socialist Senate candidate from Missouri in 1916. After a particularly fiery anti-war speech in 1917, O’Hare was arrested under the Espionage Act. Even in prison, O’Hare worked for reform. She helped create a prison library and worked for improved living conditions for inmates. From her release until her death in 1948, she continued to speak against the mistreatment of prisoners and for policies to end poverty.

Katherine Dunham once said, “So many times, people tell you what you can’t do. I don’t think about those things. I think mostly about what I can do and what needs to be done.” By the end of her life, she had done a great deal. She was a dancer, choreographer, teacher, movie star, and activist. In every endeavor, Dunham sought to reveal universal human experiences.

Her fusion of Afro-Caribbean dance with ballet—known as the Dunham Technique—continues to influence modern dance. Dunham dancers don’t learn just dance. They also learn language, culture, and history. Dunham believed dance is more than just “personal pleasure”; it is an expression of “culture, the meaning of your life, the meaning of the people you came from, your family, and your roots.” She brought these ideas to the Performing Arts Training Center, which she opened in East St. Louis in the 1960s.

She was also a vocal and passionate activist. Over the course of her life, she exposed the horror of lynchings through her ballet Southland, refused to perform for segregated audiences, and embarked on a 47-day hunger strike to bring attention to the plight of Haitians. Though she accomplished much in her life, she said that she wanted her epitaph to read not “She did it,” but “She tried.”

Choir programs in St. Louis Public Schools are greatly indebted to the determined efforts of Kenneth Billups. After receiving a master’s degree in music in 1947 from Northwestern University, the St. Louis native returned to his hometown to become a music teacher for Sumner High School, his alma mater and the oldest African American high school west of the Mississippi. He would go on to found and supervise the honors music program in the St. Louis Public Schools. As president of the National Association of Negro Musicians, Billups received wide acclaim for his influence on the development of music in St. Louis. He was perhaps most recognized for directing the Legend Singers, a renowned choral group that featured greats such as Grace Bumbry and Robert McFerrin.

Relentlessly active, Billups also taught as an adjunct professor of music at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in the late 1970s. He even hosted a television show called God’s Musical World. Billups served as director of the Legend Singers, who continue to perform, until his death in 1985. Billups Avenue in the Ville, the neighborhood where he was born, is named in his honor.

Before the world had ever heard of a St. Louis mail carrier named Lindbergh, Marie Meyer was shocking audiences with death-defying airplane stunts. She grew up fascinated by the airplanes at the Forest Park airmail fields, and she owned her own plane by age 20. As she began flying around Missouri and Illinois giving demonstrations and sightseeing trips, she discovered that audiences were captivated by the danger of stunt flying.

She created Marie Meyer’s Flying Circus, and from 1924 to 1928 the antics of the pilots and performers dazzled towns across the Midwest. Circus member Bertie Brooks dangled beneath a plane by his teeth with no safety net or harness. Meyer herself performed acrobatics on the wing of a plane flown by her husband, Charles Fower, before parachuting off its side. Sometimes, a young pilot named Charles Lindbergh flew in her circus.

Few women were involved in the early years of aviation, making Meyer’s ownership of a plane and her daredevil feats all the more stunning. Her shows convinced many people of the airplane’s capabilities and inspired further interest in aviation. Later, Lindbergh’s historic 1927 flight and the public’s expanding familiarity with airplanes rendered her once-unbelievable shows an odd novelty, and interest waned. Marie Meyer settled in Macon, Missouri, to run a gas station chain with her husband.

You couldn’t ask for a more interesting or more complex mother than Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau. Known as the “Mother of St. Louis,” Chouteau was born in New Orleans in 1733. Her arranged marriage at the age of 15 to tavern-keeper René Chouteau quickly went sour. She often referred to herself as “Veuve” (Widow) Chouteau, even though René was very much alive.

Following the unsuccessful marriage, Marie Chouteau became romantically involved with French merchant Pierre Laclède, and they entered into a common-law marriage. Laclède built Marie Chouteau a large St. Louis home registered under the name Widow Chouteau after he founded the city along with her son Auguste in 1764. When her lawful husband, René, demanded her extradition to New Orleans in 1774, the Spanish governor of St. Louis refused the order, arguing that she was effectively “established in a separate house.”

The matriarch of approximately 50 grandchildren residing in St. Louis, Marie Chouteau presided over one of the most powerful merchant families in the Trans-Mississippi Valley. She encouraged her children to marry into other powerful families and eventually established strong connections to many of early St. Louis’s elite. Through these connections, Chouteau became a leading figure in the city, and was eventually called “the Queen” by many St. Louisans.

Every Sunday between 1963 and 1985, millions of Americans welcomed one St. Louisan into their homes: Marlin Perkins, host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. During each episode, the Saint Louis Zoo directorinvited viewers to travel with him around the globe and have up-close encounters with animals in their natural habitats. Viewers responded to Perkins’s magnetic personality and love of animals. Wild Kingdom boasted 34 million viewers in 1974, and it collected four Emmys during its run.

Wild Kingdom fulfilled Perkins’s lifelong goal: to teach people about animal and habitat conservation. Perkins rose from a Saint Louis Zoo groundskeeper in 1926 to reptile curator by 1928. His exhibits, which provided entertainment with lessons about conservation, were so successful that he left St. Louis to take up the director position at other zoos. While serving as a zoo director in Chicago, he starred in ZooParade, one of the first television shows about wildlife. Perkins’s experience convinced him that TV could be a powerful tool in teaching people about animals. He returned to the Saint Louis Zoo as director in 1962, overseeing the construction of the Children’s Zoo and the Zoo Railroad. He also launched Wild Kingdom. The show lived up to Perkins’s dream as a program that entertained while also teaching the value of caring for the world’s wild places.

Max Starkloff always said he wanted the same things that anyone wants—a loving family and a fulfilling career. After he was paralyzed from the neck down in an automobile accident in 1959, he recognized many barriers that kept him and others with disabilities from pursuing their dreams. Most distressingly, Starkloff found many people treated him as if he could do nothing for himself, especially after he had to move into a nursing home four years after his accident. As Starkloff later said, “The problem wasn’t my disability; it was the limiting social attitudes about my disability.” So he got to work changing those attitudes.

In 1970, Starkloff and his wife, Colleen, founded Paraquad, an organization dedicated to providing the disabled with independent living options. After he moved out of the nursing home in 1975, he became even more active in protecting the rights of the disabled. He lobbied the city to equip its buses with chair lifts—making St. Louis the first city in the nation to provide this service. He was an active supporter of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other legislation to provide the disabled with employment opportunities, equal access to public services, and in-home care options. For the rest of his life, Starkloff worked tirelessly to ensure that the disabled had the same rights as anyone else.

If you want to make St. Louisans who grew up in the early 1970s jealous, just tell them you had your birthday party on the Mr. Patches show. Broadcast for much of its run on KDNL Channel 30, Mr. Patches and the Little Castle was one of several locally produced clown shows on the air in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and it starred Jack Miller as a hobo clown with a patchwork suit and a moptop wig. Every weekday, Mr. Patches and his puppet friends Princess Moonbeam and Cecil D. Dinosaur would delight local children with stories, jokes, and antics. Each show also featured children who had asked if they could have their birthday party on the show. By 1975, the waiting list was more than a year long.

Another regular feature of the show was Mr. Patches encouraging kids to buy the shoes, hamburgers, and other products made by sponsors. It was this feature that would put an end to the Little Castle. The FCC ruled in 1975 that children’s TV hosts could not endorse products on their programs. Mr. Patches, like many TV clowns who relied on these live advertisements, left the airwaves. But St. Louisans who missed Mr. Patches didn’t have to venture far to find him—he continued to perform at Six Flags St. Louis until his retirement in the mid-1980s.

Few people have a longer civil rights résumé than Norman R. Seay. In 1948, as a 16-year-old Vashon High School student, he was a founding member of the local Committee on Racial Equality (later known as the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE]). From there, he went on to participate in countless sit-ins and protests, leading the fight to end Jim Crow laws in St. Louis.

By 1963, he was a seasoned activist who assumed a leading role in the largest civil rights battle in St. Louis history, the Jefferson Bank protest. This four-year campaign targeted the bank for job discrimination and resulted in more than 500 arrests of protesters. For his role, Seay served months in jail along with a key group of 19 demonstrators.

Among his most lasting achievements was his work on behalf of the Martin Luther King Holiday Committee. As the organizer and first chair in 1970, he led the group to secure the passage of a municipal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday bill and the renaming of a major thoroughfare in King’s honor. The 1971 law predated federal legislation and made St. Louis one of the earliest cities to commemorate King’s life and legacy.

Seay’s long association with CORE, his work with the NAACP and the Urban League, and his many other accomplishments have led many to consider him the dean of St. Louis civil rights.

On July 8, 1913, St. Louis music teacher and housewife Pearl Curran and some friends gathered around a Ouija board. While Curran had used Ouija boards before, she thought the “spirit boards” were just toys until she received the following message:

“Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth is my name....”

So begins one of the most eccentric stories in St. Louis history. From that day until her death in 1937, Curran wrote novels, plays, and poems that she claimed were dictated to her by Patience Worth, the spirit of a 17th-century English woman. Renowned authors praised her writing for its wit and historical accuracy, and the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York named Curran an outstanding author in 1918.

Many doubted Curran’s supernatural claims. For her part, Curran insisted that Patience Worth was real. She made believers out of skeptics with frequent public demonstrations of her communications with the spiritual muse. Many also claimed that Curran, a woman with a limited education, could not have produced the volumes of literature credited to Worth. Today, skeptical experts think Curran may have invented Patience Worth to express herself during a time when women faced myriad barriers to successful publishing careers. The mystery of Patience Worth is still debated, but Curran’s widespread acclaim makes her story a significant—and mystical—part of St. Louis history.

Phyllis Schlafly is known to stir debate, but what cannot be debated is her considerable impact on the modern conservative movement and her role in moving social issues to the forefront of the conservative agenda.

Over the course of Schlafly’s career, she has become a hero to many for her role in the emergence of the “right wing” of the Republican Party. In 1962, she exploded onto the national scene with A Choice Not an Echo, a book that argued that all Republicans should embrace both social and fiscal conservatism. She mobilized conservatives to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and founded the Eagle Forum, an interest group to protect “traditional family values,” in St. Louis in 1993. Today it boasts 80,000 members.

But critics note many ironies about Schlafly. Although she asserted that women should be stay-at-home mothers, she spent a great deal of time away from her home, making public appearances and running for political office. When Washington University in St. Louis, her alma mater, awarded her with an honorary degree in 2008, the university faced a storm of protests from liberal and feminist groups. Hundreds of students and faculty turned their backs to her commencement speech in protest.

Approaching her 90th birthday, Schlafly remains an active speaker and writer, encouraging her supporters and enraging her critics.

When young Ruth Jacobson found out that Northwestern University did not have a public relations major, she convinced her political science professor to allow her to design her own. That sales skill and toughness would eventually propel Jacobson to become one of St. Louis’s pioneering businesswomen. 

When Jacobson joined St. Louis–headquartered Fleishman-Hillard in 1955, she was the public relations firm’s second female employee. By 1971, she had become the firm’s first female senior partner. In that role, she perfected the conception of big events that drew big attention. Among her credits are the creation of the Fair St. Louis celebration on the riverfront, the opening of the Saint Louis Zoo’s Living World, and the idea to take home plate by helicopter from Sportsman’s Park to Busch Memorial Stadium at its 1966 opening. Jacobson served on more than 30 local community boards, was the first female member of the prestigious Noonday Club, and was a top adviser for business leaders including August Busch Jr. and Robert Hyland of KMOX.

Jacobson established a path for an entire generation of women entering public relations. She became a mentor to younger female executives, giving direction and advice, but she never lost her toughness. A colleague once recalled, “Ruth has subtlety like a linebacker.”

The great poet and native St. Louisan Sara Teasdale once said her art was fueled by the tensions between her two selves. On the one hand, she was adventurous and curious—she loved to travel and read poems and stories about the beauty of the world. On the other, she battled illness and frailty her whole life, spending much of her time alone with her thoughts while confined to her room. She also felt torn between her traditional Victorian upbringing and her pursuit of free expression.

Out of these tensions, though, Teasdale penned some of the greatest poetry of the early 20th century. She got her start in St. Louis as a member of the female literary circle the St. Louis Potters. She published her first volume of poetry in 1907, and critics praised her work for its lyricism and its exploration of complicated ideas about beauty, love, and death. After she moved to New York in 1916, she earned even higher praise. In 1918, her collection of poems Love Songs won high acclaim—including the precursor to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Even with this success, Teasdale never found peace. In 1933, her health problems became too much for her and she committed suicide.

“The Man” can only refer to one person in the 250-year history of St. Louis—Cardinals great Stan Musial. Musial joined the Cardinals in 1941. During his 22-year career, Musial won three National League MVP and three World Series titles. He retired in 1963 as a 24-time All Star with a .331 career batting average, 3,630 hits, 475 home runs, and 1,951 RBIs. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1969—his first year of eligibility—and was also named to the MLB All-Century Team in 1999.

As much as Musial thrilled St. Louisans with his play on the field, it was his life off the field that truly inspired the city. He took a year off from baseball in 1945 to serve in the U.S. Navy. After his retirement, he continued to live in St. Louis with his wife, Lillian, running several businesses and working with local charities. In recognition of his outstanding life, Musial won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. When Musial passed away in 2013, thousands of St. Louisans left memorials at his statue outside Busch Stadium. Stan Musial was, in the words of President Barack Obama, “an icon, untarnished; a beloved pillar of the community; a gentleman you’d want your kids to emulate.”

Called the “Mother of the Kindergarten,” Susan Blow forever changed American education from her St. Louis classroom. Born in St. Louis in 1843, Blow developed a keen interest in early childhood education during her youth. On a trip to Europe in 1870, Blow observed the “learn-through-play” kindergarten education model of the German philosopher Frederich Froebel. She was determined to bring it back to the United States.

In 1871, Blow convinced the superintendent of St. Louis schools, William Torrey Harris, to explore the creation of a kindergarten program in the city. Two years later, using her own money and accepting no pay, Blow opened the nation’s first public kindergarten at the Des Peres School. Blow adorned the kindergarten with colorful decorations, and she used toys to teach children about colors, shapes, and fractions. Blow’s experiment proved popular. Parents in other districts clamored for kindergartens. By 1879, there were more than 50 kindergarten classrooms in St. Louis, all designed by Blow, and schools sought her out to train kindergarten teachers.

Though complication from a thyroid disease forced Blow to retire from teaching in 1884, she continued to write, publish, and lecture about the values of early childhood education. At the time of her death, more than 400 school districts in the United States provided kindergartens for their students.

St. Louisans J. D. and Ethel Shelley had a simple dream: to live where they wanted. As African Americans in the 1940s, though, they often met fierce resistance to that desire, both from individuals and from the law. Their pursuit of that dream would eventually take them to the Supreme Court and pave the way for future civil rights cases throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

After the Shelleys bought their house at 4600 Labadie Avenue in 1945, they soon found they were not welcome. White property owners had put a restrictive covenant in the deed of the house in 1911, stating that the home could never be sold to “persons of the Negro or Mongolian race.” Longtime area residents Fern and Louis Kraemer sued the Shelleys for violating the covenant, and the Missouri Supreme Court originally ruled for the Kraemers. But in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled that verdict, stating that restrictive covenants violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave African Americans equal protection under the law.

Though restrictive covenants were no longer legally enforceable, they did not disappear. Many white homeowners continued applying them well into the 1960s. Today, the Shelley case is recognized as a landmark case, one that was a direct forerunner to later civil rights victories and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968.

The Veiled Prophet represents, for some, the generosity and civic-mindedness of the city’s elite. For others, he represents the city’s racism and classism. The argument started more than 135 years ago and continues today, making the Veiled Prophet the most debated person in St. Louis history.

In 1878, organizers of the “Mysterious Order of the Veiled Prophet” held a parade meant to stoke St. Louisans’ civic pride. Inspired by Mardi Gras, the parade featured a mysterious masked and robed man—the Veiled Prophet. In the evening, the organization held an exclusive ball, and the Veiled Prophet crowned a queen. The festivities became a yearly tradition for the city with a new civic leader taking on the role of the Prophet every year but keeping his identity secret.

The festivities, however, also drew heavy criticism. Critics complained that the parade and organization replaced trade union parades and protected the interests of the elite. Others charged the group with racism. In 1972, members of the Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negros snuck into the ball and unveiled the Prophet. It wasn’t until 1979 that the organization admitted its first black members.

Today, the Veiled Prophet Organization helps operate Fair St. Louis. The organization continues to host a parade, select a Prophet, and name a queen at the evening ball. What also continues is the debate over what the Veiled Prophet represents.

established 1878

For students of photography, Thomas Easterly is important because his daguerreotypes are strikingly beautiful works of art. But for St. Louis, Easterly has a different legacy—his work provides us with one of the largest and most detailed visual archives of the mid-19th-century city.

After moving to St. Louis in 1848, Easterly took many daguerreotypes, a form of early photographic image. He photographed St. Louis’s rich and poor, the extravagant and the everyday. He captured the city’s inhabitants and its rapidly changing streets, including the destruction of many mounds in the area. Intensely devoted to his craft, Easterly established a reputation for offering some of the highest quality and most beautiful images available. People traveled for miles to have portraits taken at Easterly’s St. Louis studio, but the daguerreotype was quickly becoming outdated. It was steadily replaced by simpler photographic processes. Easterly, however, stuck to the daguerreotype, believing it provided superior images. He encouraged the public to “save your old daguerreotypes because you will never see their like again.”

Luckily for us, many people heeded his advice. Today, Easterly’s lush daguerreotypes are noted both for their artistic merit and for their historical importance. Nearly 600 remain in the collection of the Missouri History Museum.

From 1900 to 1906, in the heart of St. Louis’s Chestnut Valley—an African American entertainment district—you could find the Rosebud Café. This sprawling, smoke-filled saloon stood out among the many bars, brothels, and gambling dens in the area. It occupied most of a city block and featured several bars and piano rooms where patrons could drink and socialize. Many visitors were drawn to the Rosebud’s wine room, where patrons found bar owner Tom Turpin’s piano standing on blocks—Turpin preferred to stand when he played. He towered over the piano with his six-foot, 350-pound frame, and the music he created would change the world.

Turpin played ragtime, a musical form considered the first truly American music, and he became the first African American to publish a “rag” in 1897. At the Rosebud, he tutored, mentored, and befriended some of the greatest ragtime musicians of the generation, including Scott Joplin. During ragtime’s early years, the Rosebud was its epicenter—a place where musicians made a name for themselves. As ragtime’s popularity grew, however, those musicians spread out across the country. The Rosebud closed in 1906, but Turpin remained a massive figure in St. Louis, serving as a deputy constable and opening several smaller bars in the area before his death in 1922.

On October 15, 1872, Virginia Minor walked up the steps of the Old St. Louis Courthouse and tried to vote. The city registrar turned her away, stating that the Missouri State Constitution did not give women that right. Minor disagreed. She sued the registrar, passionately arguing that women did have a constitutional right to vote. Her case would bring the women’s suffrage movement national attention and take Minor all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Minor had fought for suffrage before that day in 1872. Though she was born in Virginia, she supported Union causes and suffrage for African Americans. After the Civil War, she joined with women’s suffrage causes in St. Louis, circulating a petition demanding the right to vote. She also served as a delegate to the 1869 convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association.

Though the case that started at the Old Courthouse did not convince the Supreme Court that women had the right to vote, Minor continued her fight for women’s suffrage. She was one of the signers of the “Declaration of Rights for Women” in 1876—on the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—and served as an officer in many women’s suffrage organizations. She passed away in 1894, decades before women gained the right to vote with the 19th Amendment.

When President Thomas Jefferson asked Meriwether Lewis to explore the vast wilderness of the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis knew he needed a partner who had experience interacting with the natives who lived there. William Clark fit the bill.

Clark, who had fought during the Indian Wars in the Ohio Valley and set up several trade operations with the Native Americans in the Mississippi River Valley, became the expedition’s second-in-command when it set off from the St. Louis area in 1804 on a two-year journey. While some considered the trip a failure because Lewis and Clark couldn’t find an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean, the expedition eventually became one of the most famous journeys in American history, celebrated for its contributions to the natural sciences and geography.

But Clark’s service was far from over. Recognizing Clark’s expertise, Jefferson appointed him the region’s chief U.S. diplomat to Native American tribes in the West. He held this position for 30 years, the longest tenure of any U.S.-Indian diplomat in American history.

Clark also left his mark in Missouri. He was appointed governor of the Missouri Territory, led the suppression of the Black Hawk War as superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis, and enforced—albeit with serious reservations—President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy. He remained in the St. Louis area for the rest of his life, negotiating with Native American groups until his death in 1838.