Note: This was the post I was working on as the Great Blogger Crash of 2011 occurred. I'm thankful that it was restored. I may have my problems with Google and Blogger but I appreciate the folks who were, I'm certain, busting their rear ends trying to get all of this fixed. Good work on their end.
I'm working on a short biographical sketch of Ellis Wainwright that I hoped to have finished and posted today but, as the poet said, the best laid schemes o' mice an men gang aft angley. I'll have it up tomorrow. Until then, here's a neat picture of St. Louis as it looked in 1814, just fifty years after the founding of the city. The picture comes from the February 16, 1964 issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I found it at Genealogy in St. Louis and it is part of Dave Lossos' personal collection.
To tie all of this to baseball, you'll find Charles Gratiot's house in the picture (labeled as 12). Charles Gratiot, Sr. was the father of Henry Gratiot, who we know played ball in St. Louis in the late 18th/early 19th century. Motard's Mill, the site of Gratiot's ball-playing, would have been out to the left of this picture and over the hill.
And to give you a sense of where those buildings stood, the Arch is currently located on top of the hill that see in the back of the picture. Here's what the area looks like today:
No comments:
Post a Comment