This eighteenth-century map shows the mouth of the River Des Peres (unnamed, below St. Louis) and the Kaskaskia village to the south on the opposite side of the Mississippi, where the River Des Peres mission resettled after abandoning the site in what is now south St. Louis. [Frederick Charles Hicks, ed., A Topographical Description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina, 1778]

More than half a century before the founding of St. Louis, French priests established a…

Van Horn Tavern in 1913

The Gentry–Threlkeld–Van Horn Tavern, usually referred to as the Van Horn Tavern, was the last known log…