Edward and Julius Hutawa's map of the city of Saint Louis in 1846. Contains numbered local landmarks., The Western metropolis : or St. Louis in 1846 / compiled by W.D. Skillman.
Hutawa came to St. Louis from eastern Europe in the early 1830’s with family members and settled in St. Louis, a home base for a lithography business which lasted for many years and which specialized in maps—some of the very first west of the Mississippi for an American city of any kind—and of the American west. See also Fracl. Township 45 N. R. 7E.: Confirmed Claims., Atlas of the County of St. Louis, Missouri by Congressional Townships compiled by Edward Hutawa. (St. Louis: Hutawa, 1848)
Various illustrations and text from a page from a volume of Frank Leslie's Illustrirte Zeitung (Illustrated Newspaper). There is an illustration of the then-new Custom House and Post Office, Natives of the Gold Coast on an English steamboat, a worker's strike on English ships in Sierra Leone, people waiting for pubs to open in London, and a street fight between government troops and Carlists. The text surrounding the illustrations is not relevant to the illustrations.
This lithograph shows a street view of the St. Louis Courthouse in 1840. The image includes pedestrians on the street and looks North from Market and Fourth Streets.
"Above is shown a proclaimation of 1847 and envelope discovered recently in New York by a collector of early unstamped postal letters, of which even the government had not previously had a copy. The document was issued by Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott, and it bears the name of an officer believed to have been stationed at Jefferson Barracks."
1849 description of Leon Pomarede's Mississippi Panorama. Mississippi panoramas were a phenomenon of the mid to late 1840s where artists would travel the length of the river taking sketches and compile their efforts into a single rolling canvas which would be displayed on a stage behind them as they presented scenes from their journeys. Pomarede's panorama was considered of higher quality as it was based off original detailed oil paintings rather than quick sketches.
This document contains the third annual report for the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association published in January of 1849 about the year 1848. The first and second reports were not published, which makes this one the very first.
Which Assembled in the City of St. Louis, on the Fifteenth of October, 1849. To Which is Prefixed the Proceedings of the Primary Meetings of the Citizens of St. Louis, Held Previous to the Meeting of Said Convention
The meeting record of the Saint Louis Lyceum is a large hand-written book recording the institution's founding constitution, by-laws, and meeting minutes as recorded by various elected secretaries. It documents the organizations membership, lectures, and debated questions from 1838 into the 1840s.
Comprising: I. Sermon on Jesuit Instruction, by W. S. Potts II. Review of Dr. Potts' Sermon, by O. A. Brownson III. Reply to Brownson's Review by W. S. Potts
These papers were saved alongside the circulation and meeting records of the Saint Louis Lyceum. They include drafts, drawings, and some meeting related materials.
Albert Koch owned the St. Louis Museum until he sold it to William McPherson in 1841. During the later years of the 1830s he began traveling to excavate fossils to display in his museum. The Missourium, like his later Zeuglodon skeletons, was a specimen so great that Koch closed his museum and took it on a tour to Europe where it was eventually sold. This publication of Koch's description of the Missourium was published in St. Louis prior to his departure and accompanied his exhibitions.
Description of St. Louis, Missouri in the year 1846 with a historical description and list of residents. There is also an almanac for the year with important dates.
Speech given to the Independent Order of Odd Fellow, the Masons, and the Sons of Temperance in Saint Louis advocating for a new temperance organization.
This published constitution and by-laws for the Mechanics' Institute of St. Louis contains the list of officers, the board of managers, and the officers of the board.
The Saint Louis Lyceum was a public forum for lectures and debates in early St. Louis. It was founded in 1838 in the spirit of the Lyceum Movement, a national effort towards self-improvement and community led education for adults. It maintained and built upon the library of the city's first subscription library, the St. Louis Library Association, which was founded in the early 1820s. The Lyceum overlapped in activities and collections with the Young Men's Lyceum and the Mechanics' Institute of St. Louis. The archives and books of these early libraries were bought by the Mercantile Library in the early 1850s, and became a cornerstone bibliographic collection at the Mercantile. This collection was reassembled from the stacks of the Mercantile through study of the original accession records concerning the acquisition in 1851.
The larger collection consists of approximately 500 printed books and pamphlets from this early book collection, some with association annotations, original ownership marks, or bookplates. Most of the scanned materials relate to the week to week meeting minutes, circulation records, and founding documents.