Multiple Ste. Genevieve locations are being considered by the National Park Service
Jacob McCleland
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STE. GENEVIEVE, MISSOURI [KRCU] - Preliminary studies are underway which could lead to several areas in Ste. Genevieve becoming attached to the National Park Service (NPS). Park Service officials were in Ste. Genevieve on August 10 to gather public information regarding the historic attractions and gauge the community’s interest.
Ste. Genevieve, Missouri is well known for its historic roots, primarily as an early French settlement. There are two things that make this Mississippi River town, located about an hour south of St. Louis, a unique place: the number of historic buildings, and their good condition.
One of the more unique structures in town is the Bauvais-Amoureux house, which was built in 1792. It is a poteaux-en-terre, or post-in-the-ground house, which was a common French architectural style in the 1700’s. However, only five known poteaux-en-terre homes survive in the United States, and three of them are in Ste. Genevieve.
Jim Baker is the historic administrator of the Felix Vallé State Historic site, which is managed by the Missouri State Park System, which falls under the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. On a bone-melting hot and humid day, Baker pointed out why poteaux-en-terre structures are such architectural marvel.
“The walls are composed of vertical logs, hewn, but there are set directly into the earth. No foundation. So there are three of these buildings left in Ste. Genevieve, but only five known in the United States. So it’s an extraordinarily rare style of architecture,” Baker says.
It is certainly notable that these posts, buried directly into the ground, have survived so long when one considers the damp conditions, the floods, the pests, and the extreme heat and cold in Ste. Genevieve. Baker says that you could not put a log directly into the ground today and expect it to survive 20 years from now, much less 220.
“But these folks were very wise and they chose woods carefully. So the logs in this house are this native Missouri cedar. It’s early growth timber, so it’s very dense and very durable. It has some properties that make it rot resistant and bug resistant,” Baker says.
“Unfortunately, a lot of these houses are gone. The original town site of Ste. Genevieve from the late 1740s is entirely gone. Virtually all of the houses were built in this fashion. But a number of these houses have survived in this post-in-ground style.”
At first glance, it may be easy to write off the poteaux-en-terre as a regional fad amongst the French in the 1700’s, but this is far from the case. The architectural style has a global reach which can still be seen today in disparate parts of the world. In Normandy, of course, you can find vertical log buildings like this, Baker says. Many sheds, outbuildings, and barns there were created in this fashion. But this style extends far beyond France.
“Architectural historians have also traced this style of vertical log architecture, especially with the projecting porches, from the Caribbean and from the influence there. And also they’ve gone back to Africa and they see variations of this same kind of architecture there. It’s curious that it takes kind of a big circle and ends up in the area again, influenced both from Canada and the South, and perhaps from the black slaves through Haiti and that region as well,” Baker says.
But why? Why would folks be compelled to build houses in this style? Baker says there probably was no advantage between vertical log construction over horizontal log construction. It’s just that the builder of this house’s father built his house that way, as did his grandfather.
“The architecture of the time is very cultural,” Baker says. “As these people developed their architectural style, it was based on what they knew, and what they knew is what their parents knew and their grandparents knew.”
Ste. Genevieve and the National Park Service
A group of citizens from Ste. Genevieve approached Representative Russ Carnahan to sponsor a bill that would prompt a National Park Service study to investigate the appropriateness of Ste. Genevieve for inclusion in the National Park System. They felt that the Bauvais-Amoureux house and many other historic landmarks in Ste. Genevieve made the area culturally and historically important.
“The folks who proposed this to the National Park Service and got the bill passed that directed them to do the study felt as though these buildings and their proximity to each was really significant,” Baker says. “The fact that there is something that was a jewel here in Ste. Genevieve that really needs to be further restored and developed, they felt as though the National Park Service could very well benefit from that as well.”
While it is still early in the process Baker sees many benefits to inclusion in the NPS. “Certainly, the National Park Service has a very broad reputation and a recognizability that is something that would draw tourism, we imagine, to the town. Certainly their ability to preserve buildings and take care of those structures is something that you see across our country and they are fine, fine stewards of those historic resources,” Baker says.
At a public meeting on August 10, 2010 with officials from the NPS, Ste. Genevieve residents gathered to hear the latest information about the feasibility. The NPS is still in the preliminary stages of their studies on Ste. Genevieve, and they are far from reaching a conclusion on which locations would be included, or even what kind of a relationship the NPS will have with the community. It is possible that the NPS would purchase and subsequently administer the sites, or perhaps partner with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to jointly administer Ste. Genevieve’s historic attractions without owning them. Or NPS could choose to not have anything to do with Ste. Gen at all. It’s all up in the air. The sites could even be designated as a National Heritage Area, or a Heritage Corridor.
“Facilities and the sites in Ste. Genevieve County will be recognized as being nationally significant,” says Delecia Huitt, the Southern District Supervisor for Historic Site for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. “That then will enable the owners and entities that operate those facilities to apply for grants and get possible tax credits that were not available to them prior to the National Park Service designation.”
The NPS mentioned in their presentation that Ste. Genevieve is certainly suitable for inclusion in the Park System, and Huitt fully agrees that the community is historically significant on a national level.
“It has got the most densely collected group of historic structures and sites that I know of. As someone was telling me this evening, there are more historically significant structures here than in New Orleans. So that makes it pretty nationally significant,” she says.
And national significance is critical for inclusion. But now, that is not the question, according to NPS Community Preservation Planner, Natalie Franz. “What I find really interesting is that it’s a really remarkable survival of this type of architecture, and they are all in one concentrated area,” Franz says. “And that’s also what the National Park Service finds unique about them, and that’s why they were designated as National Historic Landmarks very early on. I think they were part of the very first batch of National Historic Landmarks when the program began in 1960. So from the very beginning, Ste. Genevieve was recognized as being of national significance, telling the story of French exploration.”
Since that recognition back in the 1960s and 1970s, many of Ste. Genevieve’s historic structures were protected. In more recent decades, though, the NPS has begun to look at things through a wider lens. Therefore, the current study takes into consideration more than just buildings.
“Now we’re starting to look at things more holistically, and the landscape. Things like the common field meet those criteria whereas we might not have been thinking about that back in the earliest days,” Franz says.
When a lot of folks think of the National Park Service, Yellowstone comes to mind. Or the Grand Canyon. Big, majestic landscapes. The little town of Ste. Genevieve may seem like an odd fit. But the Park Service, according to Franz, is now moving in new direction that does not focus solely on these types of attractions.
“You know, I would say that Park Service history goes from owning and managing huge swaths of natural things or extremely outstanding icons of our nation’s heritage towards really helping tell the American story across the board,” Franz says.
Currently, the Bauvais-Amoureux house and the two other poteaux-en-terre structures are among the 49 properties that are under consideration. They also include 24 post-on-sill houses, three French cultural landscapes, 17 Anglo-American building, one German building, and two archaeological sites. Obviously, the NPS cannot turn the entire community into a park, and that is an important point that Kathy Waltz, a Congressional Outreach Coordinator for Representative Russ Carnahan, is trying to get out.
“The purpose of the study never was to take over anything. Anyone’s property, any organization’s property. The purpose of the study is to help Ste. Genevieve provide for and protect the historic treasures that are here in the city and county of Ste. Genevieve,” Waltz says.
But from the comments of folks in attendance at the meeting with Park Service personnel, residents of Ste. Genevieve take great pride in their community’s history, and want their history to be recognized on a national scale, according to Delecia Huitt.
“There are a lot of people here that are descendents of the people who settled this area,” Huitt says.
“Those houses have been handed down generationally. They’ve been taken care of by family after family after family, generation after generation. And now many of them have made it into the hands of groups of people who have come together as organizations that are solely for the protection of those buildings. So I think it’s a great, great commendation to the people of this community, now and previously, that they saw the importance of these structures and made a concerted effort to restore, protect, and preserve them.”
The National Park Service will continue with their study of the community. The next step is a preliminary determination of sites; the final study will be completed in the summer or fall of 2012, when it will be submitted to Congress, who will have the final say on the subject.