Carondelet Directory 2024

12 2024 | Carondelet Community Directory The history of community and economic development in Carondelet: A story of flexibility and resilience by Haden M. Smith Founded in 1767, Carondelet was an independent village of French speakers in what was then known as the Illinois Country. Carondelet’s founders quickly learned to navigate political and jurisdictional changes while forging a community identity all their own. This village was itself formed on the site of a community established centuries earlier by a nation of Native Americans referred to today as Mound Builders or Mississippians. The earliest French settlers named their village Louisbourg after Louis XV the Beloved, who was then King of France. However, unbeknownst to these pioneering settlers, France had secretly ceded all of Louisiana to Spain several years earlier. Founder Clement Delor de Treget therefore quickly renamed the community Carondelet after the newly appointed Spanish governor of Louisiana. It is unclear exactly when and how the French-born Delor, a mysterious historical figure, forged his official ties with the Spanish crown. Regardless, Delor’s diplomacy paid off, as Spain recognized his claim to the land between Sugarloaf Mound on the north and the River Des Peres to the south. For most of Carondelet’s first century, it was a predominantly agricultural community dotted with saloons and gambling dens. Long after the Louisiana Purchase conferred jurisdiction to the United States, Carondelet remained a distinctly French farming community. During this period, Carondelet had much more in common with newly formed and slowly growing rural communities such as Oakville than it did with bustling St. Louis proper, five miles to the north. Carondelet’s early nickname was Vide Poche (French for “empty pocket”) and depending on whose etymology you believe, referred either to the poverty of the locals or to their talent for relieving visitors from St. Louis of their folding money. In the 1840s, these original French Creole residents were joined by waves of new German immigrants, whose white limestone architecture from this period remains a trademark of Carondelet today. Following both the cholera epidemic and the Great Fire of 1849, Anglo migrants from St. Louis would begin pouring in as well. In 1851, the Missouri legislature recognized this growth by approving a new legal charter for Carondelet, which thus graduated from town status to official city. However, even greater demographic and cultural changes would follow during and after the Civil War. While the city of St. Louis served as a pro-Union stronghold before and during the Civil War, Carondelet was more divided, with its recently arrived German immigrants overwhelmingly favoring the Union and its residents of French Creole stock leaning Confederate. Dred and Harriett Scott, enslaved African-Americans, resided in Carondelet prior to the secession crisis their lawsuit for freedom helped give rise to. But despite these differences in political views and even citizenship status, residents of all ethnicities contributed to the boom in industrial Continued on page 14 A view of the Jupiter Iron Works factory in