Historical April 1986 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Hiram Leffingwell had no knowledge of the Indian villages when he proposed the existence of a large park nearly two miles west of St. Louis in 1870. Nor would he see the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 make that same park world famous as the site of one of the largest world fairs in history. Leffingwell was in the real estate business; he was not an historian or a prophet.
He was not even a dreamer or a closet environmentalist.
He was a developer who knew the fringes of the city had to have something special to attract home builders, something not to be found in the close-knit fabric of urban structures. What he planned for a park, Indians had mined for brown coal. What he succeeded in establishing, later generations would use for museums, golf courses, and zoos.
The two Indian villages, just northeast of Art Hill, died out when the Mississippian culture moved away around the year 1500.
One was built beside the creek the French later called Riviere des Peres.
The other was on higher turf across the creek but above the reach of flood.
A total of seventeen mounds were clustered in the two village sites.
The people who lived in the villages were miners.
The brown coal they dug from the hillside heated the homes they built on the mounds and made up the resource they carried to the east side of the Mississippi and sold in the markets of the city around the big mounds.
These “suburbs” of the largest Indian metropolis in North America were two of many smaller communities which supplied the needs of the central city seven miles east of the river in the middle of the bottoms.
As Leffingwell walked about his future park site, he never thought of the Indians digging up coal for a long-dead civilization. Thirty-five years later, archaeologists dug up the seventeen mounds of the two villages ahead of the earth movers which were preparing the park for the world fair of 1904.
All the artifacts and remnants from those villages were taken to Harvard University and added to the collection of the Peabody Institute. Anyone wishing to study the Mississippian Indians of Forest Park must also travel to Harvard and request to see the objects gathered in St. Louis in 1903 by the crew of David Bushnell of the Peabody Institute.
The Fair celebrating the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase brought millions of people from around the world to Forest Park and its nearby acres.
Not only were the Indian mounds moved for that fair; more earth was moved to build the 1904 World’s Fair than any other project of mankind to that time except for the Panama Canal.
The notion that the Suez Canal was less of a project than the St. Louis Fair seems strangely unreal; yet the earth moved in St. Louis for the Fair would more than fill that canal.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, a year late for the centenary it was planned to celebrate, was a truly remarkable event.
It signaled the end of one era and the start of another with its use of electricity, dynamos, educational exhibits, and entertainment centers.
It was unusual in that it made money; the proceeds from the Fair built the building which now houses the Missouri Historical Society, the pavilion at the Hampton Avenue entrance to the park, and put some of the thousands of trees destroyed to build the fairgrounds back in the ground.
The Fair was usual, on the other hand, in that its permanent structures included an art Museum and an animal house—the bird cage.
The latter was restored when the famous zoo was built after World War I. Both the zoo and the art museum are now jewels of the park along with the historical museum and the science center.
The Fair of 1904 made the park what it is today.
During the last fifteen years, numerous studies have come and gone which have focused on the needs and embellishments necessary for Forest Park. Roads have been resurfaced, closed, planned, destroyed, opened, and ignored. Bridges have begun to Collapse; pond banks have eroded; trees have died at alarming rates. Museums have undergone renovation; zoo facilities have improved; golf courses have been manicured. National balloon events have taken to the air; ethnic fairs have drawn international attention; tennis facilities “named for a world-famous supporter of the sport have been improved. Curbs have sunk into the ground arid weeds havespread everywhere. Like the city in microcosm, specific facilities have improved while infrastructure has continued to deteriorate. Hiram Leffingwell was a successful developer. Forest Park was part of the reason for that success. Around it, neighborhoods grew, developed, declined, and now are coming back.
The park that gives these neighborhoods some of their elegance and charm is barely keeping even.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, April 1986.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1986_04.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
