RE-IMAGINING THE RED HOUSE

Cape Girardeau founder Don Louis Lorimier's famous Red House may not have been red.

That is just one of the uncertainties to be reconciled by the committee planning to build a cabin similar to the founder's trading post as part of the community's bicentennial commemoration of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The committee also wants to conduct an archaeological dig on the site it believes the Red House occupied and a re-enactment of Lewis and Clark's stop here on their way up the Mississippi River. In 2003 and 2004, C-Span's cameras will follow as re-enactors in a keel boat and pirogues retrace the explorers' journey day-by-day, from leaving President Thomas Jefferson at Monticello to arriving at the Pacific Ocean.

On Nov. 23, 1803, Lewis dined with Lorimier and his family at the Red House while William Clark continued upriver with the boats to Cape Rock.

Members of the committee working on the project are basing their design for the Red House on a drawing made from memory.

Lorimier arrived in the area in 1792 and is believed to have lived close to Cape Rock initially. Construction on the Red House began in 1799. Based on a 1822 deed transfer, the committee believes the Red House was located just east of the current site of Old St. Vincent's Church.

As the daughter of George Frederick Bollinger, who founded a German settlement at Burfordville, Mo., in 1800, Sarah Bollinger Daughtery visited the house often as a young girl during the first half of the 19th century. As an old woman in the last half the of the century, she was asked to recall its features for a drawing that has been preserved.

Diana Steele, a member of the bicentennial committee and research assistant at the Center for Regional History at Southeast, thinks Daughtery should have had a good memory of the house. "As Bollinger's daughter, she would have seen it repeatedly," Steele says. Daughtery later recalled Lorimier holding her up on the house's dormer balcony and would have been about 13 when Lorimier died in 1812.

Mission church

Daughtery's children were baptized at the Red House, Steele says. From 1827 to 1838, the Vincentians came down the river and used the house as a mission church where they did missionary work and baptisms. Eventually they established a permanent church and college and convent here.

The Red House and the original St. Vincent's Church were among many buildings destroyed by a tornado in November 1850. In his description of the disaster printed in the St. Louis Republican newspaper, the clerk of the steamboat Saranac assessed the destruction in the town but concluded, "I can find no language to describe this awful scene the heart-rending cries of the distressed mothers and children were agonizing in the extreme."

The Red House was not rebuilt, but the church was.

Another drawing of the Red House exists, made by French naturalist Charles Le Sueur (sometimes spelled Le Sieur) in 1826. But the view is from the Mississippi River, some distance from the Red House. This drawing shows in more detail a building the committee believes was Lorimier's warehouse nearer the water. The warehouse is labeled with the French word for red, but Le Sueur did not label the building the committee believes to be the Red House.

Though Goodspeed's "History of Southeast Missouri" states the trading post was called the Red House, no one on the bicentennial committee is assuming that the house was even red.

The raw materials for making red paint -- vermilion and milk -- were easily obtained, says Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast. And two kegs of paint of unknown color were among his possessions when Lorimier died in 1812.

But Linda Nash, a Jackson teacher who is at work on a history of Don Louis Lorimier, says the trading post could have been called the Red House for a different reason other than its color. Lorimier governed under the auspices of Spain, where the Alhambra was the citadel of the Spanish kings. The literal translation of Alhambra is "red house."

Calling Lorimier's trading post the Red House may have been a tongue-in-cheek joke, Nash says.

"That's my theory and I'm sticking to it."

Other theories on location

There are other theories about the location of the Red House.

In his booklet "The Historic Founding of Cape Girardeau," Jim Bequette maintains that the house can't be precisely located but concludes it may have sat on the gentle slope west of Indian Park, where most historians believe the Indians who visited the trading post camped.

In his booklet "New Information on Lorimier & Cape Girardeau 1803-26," Scott City, Mo., writer Edison Shrum concludes that the building in the middle of Le Sueur's sketch is the Red House, not just a warehouse.

Last week, the bicentennial committee approved a Red House reconstruction design by members Steve Strom and architect Ron Grojean, who based their work on the Daughtery drawing and on similar houses that still exist in Ste. Genevieve, Mo.

The cost of the materials required to build the 40-by-20-foot vertical log cabin is about $37,000. The round logs will cost another $5,000, but the committee hopes to have those donated.

The house will include two fireplaces.

The idea of building a version of the Red House is not new. The Cape Girardeau Bicentennial Commission considered the project for the citywide celebration in 1992. Artist Mark Farmer produced a sketch and dimensions were worked out. But Melvin Gateley, then a city councilman, says the commission ran out of time to get it all done.

"We were so busy with all the activities and getting funds raised," he said.

The Strom and Grojean plans will be taken before the Cape Girardeau City Council for approval in the spring. The committee hopes to build the house on a strip of city property east of Main Street and north of Old St. Vincent's Church. The tentative plan of action calls for fund raising to begin this summer and for the slab the cabin will sit on to be poured in the fall. Construction of the building would begin in the spring of 2002 with completion in the fall.

An archaeological dig is being planned in hopes of finding a foundation and whatever artifacts might remain. The dig would concentrate on an area between the current Old St. Vincent's Church and Temple B'nai Israel to the north.

Last week, the Old St. Vincent's Church Board of Directors gave its unanimous approval to conduct the archaeological dig on the church grounds. The board is going to check with the Springfield Cape Girardeau Diocese before giving final approval, Nickell said.