New book discusses Ste. Genevieve's multicultural history

For almost 10 years, professor Bonnie Stepenoff of Southeast Missouri State University has led students to historic Ste. Genevieve for field research. They've done notable excavation on the Dellasus-Kern house and examined records of the town's free black population before the Civil War.

Now Stepenoff has assembled much of that research into a new book focusing on Ste. Genevieve after it officially became part of the United States in 1804. The book is titled "From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century," and is published by University of Missouri Press.

The 1800s were difficult for Ste. Genevieve's French aristocratic families. Many of them had been there for more than a generation and under American governance these families were forced to defend their land claims in the federal court system. They fared poorly there due to scant or non-existent French record-keeping. In the end, only about half of French land claims were successful.

But Stepenoff describes the handover to the United States after the Louisiana Purchase as a mixed blessing for ordinary people in Ste. Genevieve. Trial by jury and representative government were introduced. Both were unheard of under the French and Spanish monarchies.

But other citizens, like women, blacks and American Indians, actually found their rights more restricted after the handover. Within 20 years of the Louisiana Purchase, virtually all tribal land had been confiscated. Laws against gambling and drinking were also strengthened.

"Some people were more free, and some less so," Stepenoff said.

Ste. Genevieve was far from being the flag-bearer of democracy that would eventually produce five U.S. senators. Stepenoff writes that in December 1807, the territorial governor, Frederick Bates, described Ste. Genevieve as a place that resisted republican ideals and failed to grasp the concept of liberty.

So what changed?

Stepenoff shows that the transformation to democracy that occurred in Ste. Genevieve and other former colonies was not instantaneous. It took decades and was led by people more so than the federal government.

"All democracy is local," she wrote. "It may be untidy and uncertain, but freedom can survive only if people are willing to embrace it as their own."

Those people were a mixed bag. Ste. Genevieve, the author contends, rightly cherishes its French architecture and heritage, but is also a product of the German, Anglo-Saxon and African-American settlers who came later.

"I had a feeling that just to look at the French resources was like putting on blinders," Stepenoff said of her research. "Part of the story was all the cultural blending that occurred."

Stepenoff uses her extensive primary-source research to support her thesis of Ste. Genevieve history as a melting pot.

She introduces readers to 19th-century German immigrant John Kern, an ambitious farmer and sometime vintner. Citing medical bills, deeds and other legal documents, she shows how Kern grew his estate to the substantial value of $2,500 in 1871. Kern and his brother, Matthew, were large contributors to the growth of the town.

Stepenoff even recounts the story of how Kern nearly gave shelter to Jesse James at his farm the night before the outlaw robbed a Ste. Genevieve bank.

Fast-forward more than 100 years, and Stepenoff tells that in 1985 a crew of architectural historians uncovered walls of a French Colonial house under the clapboard of the Kern house. The researchers believed it was once owned by Ste. Genevieve aristocrat Pierre Delassus, and this connection drew much attention.

Research in the 1990s called the discovery into question and stalled the home's restoration.

Stepenoff believes this is unfair. "Why should a brief and tenuous link to a wealthy Frenchman outweigh more than a century of occupancy by a hardworking German-American family?" she writes.

She says her book was meant in part to set the record straight. "I think the German investment has been largely left out of past histories of Ste. Genevieve," she said. "They provide a good example of the ethnic mingling that went on in the American frontier."

The book is currently available from Amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble.

tgreaney@semissourian.com

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