Historical September 1980 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
William Carr-Lane was mayor of St. Louis scarcely a week when he made the statement “… a free school is more needed here than in any town of the same magnitude in the Union.” This was more than just a judgment; it was a dig at the French aristocracy of the city.
His major opponent in the first mayoral contest of St. Louis had been the venerable Auguste Chouteau– the same Chouteau who had been a thirteen year old in the trading post of St. Louis when it was founded in 1764. From 1809 to 1823 Auguste Chouteau presided over the Town Board of Trustees, but in 1823 he lost the first mayoral contest to Carr-Lane. Carr-Lane remained mayor for nine years at a time when elections were held every year.
For him and for others during the first half of the nineteenth century, the questions of schools and city improvements were big political issues. Actually Congress had endowed the public schools of the Village of St. Louis back in 1812.
It has said all unclaimed land in any village in the Louisiana Territory prior to 1803 was to be used for public education in that same village. St. Louis had a good deal of land without clear title.
But the French aristocracy, not able to prove clear title, wanted to forestall any claims on the land.
By keeping the schools’ existence questionable, they avoided the question of clear title: They could use the land without title as long as nothing else was on it!
As President of the Board of Trustees, therefore, Chouteau petitioned the Territorial Legislature in 1817 to appoint a board to solve the school lands question.
It was then five years after Congress gave the schools the land, and William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) was Territorial Governor. Chouteau’s petition was approved and Clark appointed the school board.
It was a blue ribbon board with William Clark as chairman. Chouteau was a member and the remaining appointees were of old French stock or were Americans who owed Chouteau numerous favors and were related to him through marriage.
The full title of the board was the “Board of Trustees for Superintending the Schools in the Town of St. Louis.” By the residents of the village, however, they were known as the “Board of Trustees for the school lands.” In effect they turned a gift of Congress into a means of controlling untitled land–a good capitalist use of the law.
As an aside, this is the historic base for the distinction between the City of St. Louis and the Public Schools of St. Louis as coequals in their existence under state jurisdiction.
As it turned out, Congress became upset over the lack of progress with the school lands law of 1812 and took all the land itself.
When it freed the lands again in 1833, the state of Missouri established a new Board of Education with aldermanic ward representation.
The schools finally opened on April 2, 1838–over a quarter of a century after the initial land grant from Congress.
By that time Carr-Lane was no longer mayor, Chouteau and Clark were dead, and the number of indigents in the City of St. Louis was so great as to render inadequate the amount of donated lands. Thus the schools opened with a tuition for all students.
This practice continued until 1847, was reinstituted during the Civil War, and was dropped for good in the fall of 1863.
It seems the public schools have always been a political issue in St. Louis.
Authors Note: This is the first of several articles on the history of St. Louis, its institutions, its people and its character.
These will be timely, interesting and otherwise free of the usual baggage of the historian’s treatise.
Originally published in The Paper, September 1980.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1980_09.pdf, printed page(s) 3; PDF page(s) 3.
