Rental options in mid-19th century St. Louis for family of 11?

November 4, 2024 2:51 PM

A father, mother, and nine kids arrive in St. Louis circa 1840, knowing no one. What options would they have had? Would tenements have been their only choice?
posted by John Borrowman to Grab Bag (11 answers total)

What resources did this family have available? Did they come with money or with nothing? Did the father have a profession or trade or would he have worked as unskilled labor?
posted by ssg at 3:06 PM on November 4 [1 favorite]

Boating, stockyards, railway terminus to the Mississippi, and tenant farming were huge a short ferry ride across the river. Pretty large settlements over in Illinois, so they may have lived on the more affordable labor-class side of the river. Particularly if they were German or Irish.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 4:08 PM on November 4

Are they immigrants? Sometimes religious or cultural groups would have charitable organizations that provided a first point of contact for newcomers in their group to help them get settled. An example would be the Sisters of St. Agnes.
posted by moonmoth at 4:09 PM on November 4

Response by poster: What resources did this family have available?

Very few. Father was farm hand. Family needed to stabilize so father and one son could travel north into Illinois in search of farm work and (eventually) a farm to purchase.

Particularly if they were German or Irish.

They were Scots and unlikely to be connected to any religious organizations. All evidence is they DID live in St. Louis and not in IL.
posted by John Borrowman at 4:34 PM on November 4

One thought - the tenement museum in NYC is quick to point out that tenement did not mean a ghetto, it just meant multi-apartment buildings (most often home to immigrants). So living in a tenement wasn't necessarily the dire choice we might think today.
posted by ldthomps at 4:51 PM on November 4 [1 favorite]

You can get some guesses from Nature's Metropolis, which is about Chicago not St L, but the two were roughly comparable until Chicago blasted the river clear between Chi and St L.

Wash U St L has a reasonable number of digitized maps; I was looking for a collection of St Louis city directories, which you should be able to find other families of the same size in, and maybe collate them with maps of the right era. Maybe the St Louis public library? Or City Hall?
posted by clew at 6:13 PM on November 4 [1 favorite]

Following on clew's lead: For some maps of that era, check the Missouri History Museum's online map collection. Here's the direct link for the City of St. Louis & Vicinity during the years 1850-1859.
posted by Ufez Jones at 8:28 PM on November 4 [1 favorite]

“For the first six censuses (1790–1840), enumerators recorded only the names of the heads of household and a general demographic accounting of the remaining members of the household. Beginning in 1850, all members of the household were named on the census. ”

Something else to scan for households with the right size and livelihood and then compare with the maps
posted by clew at 9:38 PM on November 4

From The Peopling of St Louis:

The population of St. Louis increased 228 percent between 1810 and 1820. It doubled between 1835 and 1840, and again by 1845; in ten years St. Louis went from half to twice the size of Pittsburgh. Earliest arrivals were from farther east or England, followed by Irish and, soon after, Germans. They joined large numbers of transplants from other parts of the country. Some seventy percent of American-born St. Louisans in 1850 were from Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, or Virginia. . .

By 1850, 43 percent of all St. Louisans were born in either Ireland or Germany. Irish immigrants often brought limited skill levels, putting them into direct competition with free blacks in cities for lower level jobs. . . .

Irish immigrants in St. Louis congregated in two areas. Some lived in the "Kerry Patch" area on the near north side-a violent, dangerous, and impoverished neighborhood. Others lived around Cheltenham, centered around the intersection of present-day Hampton and Manchester. After rail connections to St. Louis opened in 1852, the clay and fire brick industry grew quickly. Irish immigrants worked in local clay mines. The first priests at St. James the Greater Parish, in today's Dogtown neighborhood, were Irish when it was founded in 1861. Later in the decade, the Archdiocese commissioned St. Alphonsus Liguori Church (the "Rock" Church on North Grand) for the growing number of Irish immigrants.

I know that is specifically talking about Irish rather than Scottish immigrants, but presumably the conditions would have been somewhat similar.

Here is an interesting account from a Scotsman visiting St Louis in 1840. He has a lot of interesting opinions comparing and contrasting St Louis with Scotland. He generally finds the famous American freedom to be mostly the freedom to riot, break the law, and take advantage of people as every individual may find advantageous. Religions often have the same name as back home but tend to have far different priorities - generally more puritanical. The number and diversity of religious sects "is incredible". The city is teaming with a lot of different nationalities, immigrants passing through, and free & enslaved blacks.

So that might give you an interesting viewpoint on the city this family arrived in, in 1840.

He notes the population of the city in 1840 is 20,000 - a "small city".

I found a few photos & maps of the city around that time: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

So it was a very bustling place with lots of people passing through, lots of people staying for periods ranging from a few days to a few weeks to a few months to a few years as they prepared to move on to somewhere else, and quickly growing permanent population as well.

So there must have been many places available to let or stay for this transient population. People probably rented a building or home, or a room or probably part of a room. There were definitely inns of various types. And I would imagine that many people who owned buildings or houses took in renters or travelers or boarders - it's a very convenient way to earn a bit of extra cash.

However I have to say that little here reminds me of "tenements" per se. New York City was likely full of tenements at this time - but its population was nearly 20X the population of St Louis.

St Louis was more of a sprawling frontier town with plenty of room to expand north, south, and west. There was not a lot of reason to build up - the direction was more out than up.

If you look at the photos carefully, you see a lot of one-stories houses and buildings, and some two-story buildings, and it looks like many of those have an attic, and sometimes a basement, too. But that house is Pierre Chouteau's - a really, really wealthy guy.

Most people passing through or looking for work to save up for their next move, were likely renting a room or an attic or a shack or a couple of rooms, or a floor in one of the smaller houses or building scattered around town. You can see examples of all those possible types of lodging in the photos linked above.
posted by flug at 2:25 AM on November 5 [5 favorites]

The Illinois State Museum has some interesting details about daily life in 1830s-1840s St Louis:

In 1833, Judge Lucas opened a new addition west as far as Ninth Street, and three years later the Soulard addition on the south side and additions by John O'Fallon and William Christy were opened between Washington and Franklin Avenues. Many new additions opened beyond the city limits, but without control over platting, there was no continuity in the location or direction of streets or in the size of blocks. As a result, streets had jogs, dead-ends and various widths, creating problems which had to be corrected at great expense in later years through widenings and cut-offs. A description of the City in 1837 states that there was no hotel, store, or saloon in the City west of Fourth Street, nor any house over two stories high. The City also lacked a suitable theater, hotel, park, bank, and library.

That is a pretty interesting description of a city that is scrambling haphazardly to build a lot of cheap residential housing on the west side of town - housing that sounds like it was thrown up quickly, and in completely unplanned fashion, to meet high demand.

St Louis is situated on the east side of the Mississippi River. So per the above, only the first 6 streets nearest the river - the immediate riverfront area: Water, Main, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, & 4th Streets - had any commercial buildings, or any buildings a little higher than two stories. You can imagine a bustling riverfront and somewhat dense commercial area immediately adjacent to it, and then a sprawling mass of mostly ramshackle, low-density housing stretching out to the west.

It's a fast-growing frontier town without much in the way of centralized planning. People built what they needed where they could.

That's probably a pretty good overview of the city in the 1840s.
posted by flug at 2:47 AM on November 5 [2 favorites]

Boarding houses were VERY much a thing. It was a common way for a widow who was the sole owner of a house to make her living, although plenty of people ran boarding houses, who were neither female, nor widows.

If a woman traveling alone arrived in town, the standard thing to do was to look for a spire, head over to whatever church it was, especially if it had the same sect she were a member of, and inquire as to a suitable boarding house where she could safely stay, within her budget and without danger to her property or reputation, and get a recommendation.

1840 was right in the middle of when the Free Church of Scotland formed as a schism from the Church of Scotland, but since you are in the USA they might not have cared very much which church they applied to for information unless they carried a letter of introduction for a specific minister. They might also have purchased one of the many guidebooks for travelers and immigrants, which would have information on where to stay and where to eat and how to get transportation.

The Travelers' Aid Society didn't get established in Saint Louis until 1851. It was founded then to assist immigrants going west, using a bequest of half a million dollars, an enormous sum at that time, but westward immigration was an enormous social movement. This means your family was traveling during the period when the need for the society was being felt, but had not yet been organized. There is a good chance that there were Travelers' Aid organizations that were small, not united and were probably run through the churches.

If they went the boarding house route they would look for a boarding house that provided accommodation for immigrants, not one that provided accommodation for drummer and commercial travelers, or for factory women. It's not impossible that they might have shared rooms with strangers at a boarding house or a cheap hotel. The men and older boys, for example might have been given different accommodation from the women and smaller kids.

They sound like they were not too hard up if they had the funds to purchase a farm, but boarding house accommodation was supplied with a series of different fees, depending on how many meals you got her day, if you got hot water for your baths, and if laundry was included, or if you got to use a parlour. If accommodation was in short supply the men and boys might have found themselves sleeping on porches - which is not as primitive as it sounds, as in hot weather a lot of people preferred to sleep on a sleeping porch that had screens to keep the mosquitos out and let the breezes through.

If they were sufficiently well off they had the option of various hotels.

There were tenements in the Carr neighbourhood, however in 1840 the tenements were in their earlier stages of development, so were likely to be rather small buildings, subdivided, and not that different than renting a couple of rooms in a boarding house. You are not yet looking at streets full of multistory brick edifices.

There would have been a baggage depot at the steamboat docks with a choice of warehouses where they could leave any personal property they had brought with them to assist their immigration plans, like tools or furniture.

Families often traveled in company with other families. They might not have been a party of eleven, but traveling in a party of sixty, because they went with four other families.

Your family had very likely furnished themselves with some contact names and addresses before setting out. Just as we make hotel reservations before we get on a plane, travelers in those days both made sure to get that information, and also promptly sent the current information back home in letters after they arrived. There had already been a slew of immigrants from Scotland arriving in Saint Louis, and they probably made the decision to come to the USA and where to go based on the information sent back to Scotland by earlier immigrants. The information provided was extensive, including such details as what comforts were indispensable for the voyage across the Atlantic, and where to find a reliable chandler to buy candles after you arrived.

They almost certainly disembarked clutching a fistful of papers full of instructions what to do and where to go.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:43 AM on November 5 [2 favorites]