On a sweltering day in August, 2010, at a little past one, Martin Luther King Drive in St. Louis, had something special to offer. A funeral procession with horse-drawn hearse and a small cortege of mourners came rolling up the street. Now Martin Luther King Drive in its 4200-block is a busy place with lots of shops and businesses, yet all activity ceased for a few minutes. Body shop guys; people buying fruit at the produce stand; bedraggled-looking pickers, their shopping carts brimming with cans—everyone stopped to watch the approach of this wonderment. Which century was it? The first thing to draw attention was a sound that is not very often heard: The clop-clop-clopping of draft horses on the asphalt. As impressive as these horses were—large, yet graceful; wearing the finest tack; feathered plumes adorning their heads—the coach itself was the spectacle. It was a thing of grandeur, white and massive, the steel-rimmed wheels a good six-feet in diameter. The main section, nearly the size of a parlor, had glass sides so one could view the closed casket within. Who was this personage to warrant such a stylish send-off? The coachman, bedecked in white as well, a top hat shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare, looked neither to the left or the right, but held his gaze steady on the horizon. He was in it for the long haul; the cemetery was a good distance off.

“That’s one lucky stiff,” uttered one fellow, none too original, as he went back to his tuck-pointing.

It was something out of a movie or a book, perhaps a fairy tale. For a while, every bystander was transported  to a time when Martin Luther King Drive was named Easton Avenue and all the conveyances were horse-drawn. Indeed, there were clues to augment this reverie, for there were signs,  viewable in the immediate environment, that hearkened back to the horse-and-buggy days. The funeral procession passed directly below one such anachronism. On the east wall of a large brick building located at 4234 MLK, approximately 16-feet above ground level on what would be the second-story, is a rectangular banner sign that reads “SADDLERY.” That’s all, no other reference. Black lettering on a red-orange field with a black outline; this sign was likely exposed through demolition of an adjacent building in the last five years or so. Had it been there for decades the colors would have washed away in the sunlight.

A similar artifact may be found less than a mile away on another east-west thoroughfare, Delmar Avenue. This west-facing sign is equally brief, having one word only, “HORSESHOERS.” The sign is positioned near the roofline of the three-story edifice, giving it prominent view to east-bound traffic on Delmar. Interestingly, someone has drawn the figure of an old man on some durable paper stock and affixed it to the building at ground level so that the figure appears to be looking up at the old sign.

It is nothing short of remarkable to be able to look through 21st century eyes at signs that were painte

d on buildings in the 19th century.

Likewise, over on the 2100-block of Cass Avenue on the city’s Northside, there was another similar dated wall sign, this one a well-preserved beauty advertising SCHACHT & COOK HORSE SHOERS. I photographed this sign in 1980; the building itself is long since gone and there is no reference to the named business on any available database.

Not far away, just north of downtown, may be found the text-rich sign painted on the south wall of the former Mound City Buggy and Auto Company, located at 1500 N. Broadway. This wall is actually hodgepodge of faded remnants of various signs, some painted over others. In places, the letters appear jumbled, text from disparate ads mixing together, giving the broad, brick face a sort of mishmash effect. How does this happen? The elements have washed away the primer used to cover up the previous ad copy.

What’s nice about this old wall is how the advertised products connect the horse-drawn era to the horseless carriage era. The top line advertising MOUND CITY BUGGY COMPANY is quite legible. Less so, the next line down reading HALLADAY AUTOMOBILE, which is partly obscured by another line of copy, likely painted at a later date, and reading “Mfrs Of Inland-1-Piece Piston Ring.” In terms of ad copy, it is loquacious by modern standards. The casual observer, with diligent study, may decipher the full message found on the lower levels: “Machine Tools, Jigs, and Dies” “1,600,000 In Use And Going Strong.” There is even more verbiage on this wall, but it remains a mystery—a good th

ing, as we don’t want every thing simple and straightforward.

By 1900, the Mound City Buggy and Auto Company had offices variously at 2007 Locust Street and on S. Broadway between Papin and Chouteau. The extant building on N. Broadway [pictured here] must have been the company’s manufacturing plant.

Because of all the Indian mounds found on both sides of the river, St. Louis was once known as Mound City and there were, and still are, numerous enterprises that carry the appellation or prefix Mound City. In St. Louis, by the 1880s, virtually all of the mounds were gone, sacrificed to urban development. Tod

ay, only one remains in the 4500-block of Ohio Street, alongside I-55. There is a house built on top of it.

St. Louis is and has been a beer-soaked town. In the city, on nearly every other block, the corner tavern may be found. It’s nothing new; beer has been flowing from local taps for 200 nears now. The  difference between beer served a century ago and what is served today is that today’s brew is colder, subject to having gone through more processes, and, in many cases, lighter on the alcohol content. Yes, beer came in bottles Way Back When; even today,  it is not uncommon to find discarded, mostly intact 19th century beer bottles, some beautifully embossed, in creek beds, home cellars, and at the bottom of old privies that once dotted every back yard.

The earliest known brewer here was John Coons, who was putting out the suds back in1809, only five years after the territory was purchased by the United States. A year later, Jacques St. Vrain, one of the city’s original French residents and a former military officer, opened the St. Vrain Brewery. In the following decades, St. Louis’ collective thirst became even more prodigious. By 1860, a landmark year for beer production, the city had 40 breweries in operation. After that, the industry scaled back a bit. In my book, Mound City Chronicles, I list 18 local breweries operating in the year 1887. Most of them had names which are German in origin—the Anton Griesedieck Brewing Company, H. Grone Brewing Company, the Wilhelm Stumpf Brewery, Schilling and Schneider Brewing Company, and, of course, the one that would become world-renown, Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. In fact, beer-making and beer-quaffing in St. Louis took a quantum leap only when the waves of Germans who emigrated here in the years prior to the Civil War became the Beer Barons and the men who worked their breweries.

Of course, it all came to a crashing halt with the passage of the Volstead Act in1919. Prohibition caused the lay-off of hundreds, possibly thousands of brewery workers. Those breweries which did not close their doors for good tried to survive by making alternative products. Falstaff made brewer’s yeast, while other companies flirted with “near beer” in the form of malt beverages—The Louis Obert Brewery producing Trebo [Obert spelled backwards], and Anheuser-Busch bottling Bevo, actually, a fairly popular drink during the 14-year dry spell.

The party was over—or was it? In response to the now outlawed pastime of imbibing heady beverages, a black market sprung up. By and large, tippling was alive and kicking. It simply went underground—small batches of home brew fermenting in basements; larger batches of beer, wine and whiskey finding their way to speak-easies and private parties, organized crime overseeing the distribution. This bustling and clandestine trade ended with the repeal of Prohibition on April 7, 1933, a banner day for St. Louis watering holes, once again filled with working stiffs too long denied the opportunity for a cold one after work—or any time, for that matter. Appropriately, The Milton Ager / Jack Yellen classic “Happy Days Are Here Again” is associated with the repeal of Prohibition.

In 2011, as I write this, there are still signs of those once proud breweries around town. I speak of commercial signs, ads painted on the sides of brick buildings, faded yet legible after so many years of exposure. None of these beers are in production today, and, with the exception of Falstaff, they have not been seen on the shelves for over fifty years.

A large wall bearing an ad  for A.B.C. Bottled Bohemian Beer [American Brewing Company] was photographed in the early 1980s on the south face of the former Rose’s On The Hill, now Lorenzo’s Trattoria. Likewise, the very faded ad for Green Tree Beer [H. Grone Brewing Company] was found on a quiet side street of The Hill neighborhood. Hyde Park Beer—“Seldom Equaled, Never Excelled”—was brewed in St. Louis and I have located three existing wall signs for the product: Edwards and Shaw on The Hill; Itaska and Delor on the Southside; and another, featuring a wee walking man, in a Northside neighborhood, the location of which I can’t recall. Columbia Brewing’s flagship product, Alpen Brau—“It’s the Tops!”—has two known wall signs in St. Louis, a pretty faded one at 39th and McRee, and a spot-on re-do located in the gangway of Seamus McDaniel’s Saloon, in Dogtown. Falstaff Beer has two decent examples in the city limits, one on North Broadway and another at Arsenal and Macklind, exposed as recently as 2009. Piros Signs, still operating in Barnhart, Missouri, had the contract with Falstaff to paint and letter all their out outdoor advertising. The last fading beer sign is found across the river in Illinois. Oltimer Beer was brewed by the Star Brewery in Belleville, which ceased operations in 1957. This large and busy ad is still apparent on South Main in Belleville, above what is now a hair salon. Oltimer Beer’s quirky slogan—“10 cents worth of 15 cent beer.”

For a definitive history of St. Louis brewing check out the richly illustrated tome by Henry Herbst, Don Roussin and Kevin Kious titled St. Louis Brews: 200 Years Of Brewing In St. Louis, 1809 – 2009.

The Hyde Park Brewery in St. Louis operated from 1878 to 1948, with a twelve-year hiatus during the prohibition era. It was, in fact, one of the few local breweries to reopen upon repeal of the Volstead Act. The beer’s slogan was the modest proclamation “Seldom Equaled, Never Excelled.”

There are three known Hyde Park walls in St. Louis: Marconi at Shaw on The Hill; North City [cannot recall exact location], and Bates Avenue at the I-55 on-ramp.

Location: St. Louis Avenue and Garrison, North St. Louis. As so often happens, this wall sign for Dau Furniture was suddenly exposed a couple years ago, circa 2009, after an adjoining building was razed.  The west-facing sign on the side of what is now a hair salon is quite lengthy in copy and likely dates to the 1950s.  The first four lines reads:  “What Dau Promises / Dau Always Does / With A Promise of Satisfaction / Which Will Always Be Kept.” This is followed by a proclamation sure to please any thrift-conscious housewife of the period, namely that “We Give And Redeem / Eagle Stamps.” Note the tiny chair highlighted in the middle of the ad, a rather curious image to showcase their product line—almost as if they are saying “Doll Furniture.” Nevertheless, Dau Furniture still operates today, with stores in Grover, Ballwin and Wildwood, Missouri.  This is not the case for Eagle Stamps, which got their start in May Company department stores at the end of the 19th century. The trading stamps were given out with purchases and pasted into booklets which could be redeemed for merchandise. The Famous-Barr chain in St. Louis issued them for decades until the early 1980s, when they were canceled.

No wonder there are so many extant wall signs for Royal Patent Flour in the Mound City—the flour was the flagship product of the Stanard-Tilton Milling Company and the Stanards were Captains of Industry in St. Louis during the 19th and 20th centuries. William K. Stanard—son of Edwin O. Stanard, former governor of Missouri—was president of the company, while his son, Edwin T. Stanard, a 1906 Princeton graduate, was, at various times, vice-president, general manager and secretary of the mammoth business concern.  With principal offices in St. Louis, Stanard-Tilton owned mills, warehouses, and elevators in Dallas, St. Louis and, in Illinois—Rockford, Jerseyville, and Alton.  The company was eventually bought out by Pillsbury Flour Mills, which maintained a plant in North St. Louis until it, in turn, was bought out by Archer-Daniels Midland [ADM], which still operates the milling facility located at I-70 and Shreve Avenue.

The Painted Ad has located five different Royal Patent Flour walls in the St. Louis city limits, and there are likely a few more out there undiscovered.  One particularly faded specimen located at Virginia and Idaho, in far South St. Louis, asks “Why Experiment With Other Brands?”  In 2007, veteran walldog Lonnie Tettaon was commissioned by the Dogtown Historical Society to “redo” a seriously faded Royal Patent Flour ad on the west wall of the former Central Cash  Grocery & Market on the corner of Central and Wise.  Like other such ads, this one bore the image of a flour sack with plenty of [now] antiquated ad copy. Tettaton repainted the sign in green and yellow colors common to the original layout of Cash Markets, which were a small chain of stores. The restored sign is now a minor landmark in Dogtown.

Pattison’s Whisky has seen the light of day after 111 years. In yet another example of a beautiful old sign suddenly revealed, this west-facing brick wall on Folsom Avenue in near-South St. Louis was exposed in June, 2011, when an adjoining building collapsed. Don Bonnell, who owns both buildings plus a third connected house that holds a machine company, explains that the sign had to be painted prior to 1900 because the building bearing the sign was built in 1895 while the adjoining tumble-down building dates to 1899. This four-year window coincides with the short-lived commercial history of Pattison’s Limited of Edinburgh, Scotland, a distillery which incorporated in 1896 and went bankrupt in 1898. The company spent a veritable fortune on advertising—60,000 pounds in1898 or what would today be 4.3 million pounds—and, indeed, that was a factor in their demise. Yet, a century later, here, across the Big Pond, in a Midwestern city, their legacy lives on.
Three months after the building collapsed, not an uncommon occurrence in old brick cities, the damage has yet to be attended to, meaning that the building is still in a state of collapse—the facade folding in upon itself; the roof jutting earthward, giving in to gravity; the once-stalwart storefront now a gaping mouth vomiting bricks and mortar. Broad, yellow crime scene tape surrounds the condemned building, fastened to anything upright, hoping against hope to contain the rubble. This urban eyesore is not the fault of Bonnell, who has paid a contractor to tear down the derelict structure and haul away the debris. The contractor is busy on another job and will get to it when he can. Hopefully, before the citations are issued; Housing Court can be a real bringdown.
At any rate, driving east on Folsom Avenue, mid-September, one may see just a fraction of the old advertisement and, from what is seen, it looks like a classic. At far left, large letters start to spell out, yes, “Old Pa—” The line of copy below starts with the letter “W.” Letters are white on a field of dark green. With so little of the sign actually visible, how do we know it is an ad for Old Pattison Whisky? Because the other side, the east-facing wall, of this very building once bore the exact same sign. Bonnell says he admired that one, too; then he painted his own sign over it.
What is entirely legible at the top of this building, above the currently obscured whisky sign, is the name of the business which once flourished here: Star Saloon and Cafe. It’s only natural to paint a whiskey ad on the side of a saloon, especially when that saloon was across the street from the old Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, one of several plants belonging to one the oldest and most successful tobacco companies in America. The factory, a sprawling complex occupying several blocks, shuttered after a major fire in the late 70s, but while it operated it’s a safe bet that the Star Saloon & Cafe was a busy place throughout the day—and night, likely populated by hungry, thirsty factory workers coming off or going on their shifts. It certainly was convenient—have a little snort and then head off to make tobacco products. In fact, the name of the saloon is tied in to their customer base. One the company’s most popular products was Star Chewing Tobacco, and just up the street, one block to the west from Bonell’s building, is a large, west-facing wall sign exhorting passersby to “Chew Star Tobacco”. These signs and the few scattered buildings that remain on this section of Folsom Avenue are the only noticeable reminders of a once-thriving city neighborhood.

St. Louis KETC’s Jim Kirchherr video on Ghost Signs in St. Louis including an interview with our very own Wm. Stage. You have to love our city’s history. Jim does a great job surveying our town.

While searching for a subject that would combine a design-oriented composition with his detailed drawing / painting technique, Dana Forrester developed the brick wall series that has become central to to his national reputation.  In addition to his brick wall paintings, Dana also explores other aspects of commercial advertising in his art — old signs, storefronts, and neon signs.  Dana refers to his work as photorealism. Though he uses photographs as a beginning for many of his watercolors, he frequently prefers to delete some items while adding others to enhance his paintings.  Thus, any given wall sign paintings may contain disparate elements from multiple wall signs in different locations.  “Photography, ” says Dana, “should serve as a reference for authenticity, and not as a crutch which limits … creativity.”

Dana has painted professionally since 1973,  and taught advanced art at the high school level until 1987, when he began to paint on a full-time basis. He has won many awards in regional and national exhibits and, in 1981, when he was elected as a member of the American Watercolor Society, he became one of the few painters to be a member of both the American and National Watercolor Societies. Dana Forrester lives in Independence, Missouri.

Many a lubricated patron of the taverns and restaurants that make up the Soulard neighborhood  has at one time or another pondered this large and friendly sign, one of the best remaining examples in St. Louis. Dr. Hoffman’s Red Drops rests on the north face of a building on Ninth Street at Allen. There are four distinct lines of copy, the first two boldly speling out the brand name of this patent medicine. The third line is mostly readable, and the fourth line less so. It is the third line that intrigues, for Dr. Hoffman’s claims to cure or relieve “Colic, Cramps and Cholera Morbus.” Cholera? There hasn’t been a serious outbreak of cholera in St. Louis since 1866. The fourth and last line reads “World’s Greatest Diarrhea Cure.” Wow, this must have been some really good stuff!

It is quite possible this sign has lasted more than 120 years. The Lemp Avenue Archaeological Sites, on their website, shows a Dr. Hoffman’s Red Drops medicine bottle, excavated from a privy not far from this building. The raised letters on the bottle, dating to the 1880s, say it was used for relieving menstrual cramps. Additional evidence comes from the owner of the building adjacent to the old sign. Oreon Sandler stated that his building dates to 1879, and since the architecture of the Dr. Hoffman’s building is similar, we may surmise the wall as well as the sign painted on it is of like vintage.

Walter Sheppe of Akron, Ohio submitted this photo, exposed in 1990, saying it is his favorite wall sign of all that he has seen. It is an ad for the Euclid Ave. Carriage Company, said to date from 1895. The picture in detail shows a folk-art rendition of a Victorian-era couple in their new carriage.  The carriage ad was painted over an older ad for milk.  Walter Sheppe said that the sign was preserved by an adjacent building that had recently been demolished.