Thirty Landscape Architects From West Virginia

I am a volunteer tourguide.  On Saturday mornings, I lead walking tours showing off the architecture of downtown St. Louis.

The tourguide coordinator emailed and said that I should expect a large group this Saturday: 30 landscape architecture students from West Virginia University.  WVU has one of the ten best landscape architecture programs in the nation, according to the Design Future Council.

My first thought: did these people get landscape architecture confused with building architecture?  When I lead a walking tour, I tell people who designed a building, what it is made of, when and why it was built.  I don’t say anything about landscape.

My second thought: these 30 West Virginians are coming on my tour anyway; so I had better figure out what to tell them about the landscape of St. Louis.

My brilliant third thought: St. Louis exists because of its landscape.

In 1763, Pierre Laclede sailed up the Mississippi from New Orleans, found the grand meeting of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.  He turned around and travelled 25 miles southward to this spot.

Here he saw a small escarpment which stepped up to a medium escarpment, which stepped up to a final escarpment.  He ignored the first escarpment, envisioned a village on the second, and farming fields on the third escarpment, which was flat and fertile and stretched westward for miles.  All of this was uninhabited, and --- best of all --- it would never flood.

Laclede came back in February 1764 with 22 workers and started building.  Settlers poured into St. Louis, and by October, it had a population of 400 men, women, and children.  Instant village!

The village was laid out parallel to the Mississippi, only two blocks wide.

I plan to ask the West Virginia landscape architects why the village hugged the river.  They will probably answer: so it was a short walk to their supply of drinking water.  I will then surprise them: it was also a short walk to their supply of firewood.  After all, who would bother trek up to the third escarpment and chop down a tree when there were trees drifting down the river all the time…

So, the landscape made St. Louis a success.

Maybe I will stop there, because these folks are landscape architects.  I will skip the rest of the story. 

Back then, there was no priest in the village.  There was no governor.  There were no soldiers.  Land was free.  The nearby Indians were friendly and intermarried with the settlers. 

The landscape was beneficial, but the rest of the story says that people came here because St. Louis was a colonial utopia.  If they had a chamber of commerce in 1764, it would have proclaimed: “What happens in St. Louis, stays in St. Louis.”

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com