Long Neglected Celebrity Home to Get a New Life

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By Pauline Masson –

A long neglected and somewhat disheveled house that was harboring a significant past is to get a chance to regain its place as a St. Louis Street landmark.

Jason Clark with McDonough & Smith LLC, Eureka has purchased the abandoned and overgrown bungalow at 319 West St. Louis Street and two adjoining lots east of the house. He plans to completely restore the house as wine tasting venue and build a vintage outdoor wine garden on the two adjoining cleared lots.

Henry Hirth built the house for his wife Rosalie and son Kennth in 1926. On December 3, the local newspaper reported that, “The Henry Hirth family moved into their fine new home on St. Louis Street, Monday.”

Hirth and his partner and brother-in-law Lorenz Leber, who were known in the local newspaper as, “the picture show men,” had owned and operated the Royal Theater in a small frame building at the corner of Third and St. Louis, four doors east of Henry’s new house since 1913.

Rosalie’s mother Mrs. Bertha Leber, widow of Lorenz Leber Sr, who was ill at the time, moved into the new house with them. She would die in the house three months later in February 1927 without getting to see the grand brick Art Deco movie theater that her son and son-in-law would build on the same block three years later.

Henry Hirth was a craftsman, a tinkerer and builder. For his house, he stepped away from the elaborate Queen Anne houses that dotted the town and turned to a new style of architecture, the Arts and Crafts style, known as bungalows.  

The original Hirth house was stucco and was painted green with white trim. Kenneth Hirth, son of the builder, who lived in the house from 1926 until his death in 1992, put on crisp white siding in 1990. 

Inside bungalows, were more roomy and efficient, finished with polished wood. The Hirth’s gleaming kitchen was finished with ceramic tile. Outside the traditional roomy front porch was shaded by a generous overhang held up by strong square posts. In the huge basement Henry, and later his son Kenneth, tinkered away in a huge workshop equipped with an agglomeration of tools and materials.

Outside the house, “The yard was always kept perfect,” Kenneth’s daughter Georgia Clark said. “Rosalie and later my mother had flowers everywhere.”

For 80 years, from 1912 until Kenneth Hirth’s death in 1992, the local newspapers, the Plowman and later the Transcript, gave the Hirth and Leber families the celebrity status of the famous stars who appeared in their movies. No element of their lives was too mundane to be reported.

When Henry Hirth and Lorenz Leber traveled for business to St. Louis, Jefferson City or nearby Washington, it was reported. When the family members shopped, visited relatives in Red Bud, Illinois, entertained guests in their home or even sat in the swing on the front porch, the town could read about it. When Jefferson and Franklin County debated whether to build a new bridge across the Meramec near Pacific, Henry Hirth was in the delegation that lobbied the two counties for the new bridge.

When Henry and Rosalie drove to St. Louis to hear Warren Harding speak they took Kenneth, a toddler at the time, along to hear the president. When Kenneth was five the town grieved that, “Little Henry Hirth, age 5, broke his wrist, while playing.” At age 12 he won a bicycle by collecting tobacco tags. Kenneth’s daughter Georgia still has the bicycle.

Henry Hirth built a large rental apartment at the rear of the house. When that was demolished, Kenneth restored a portion of it as a small white frame house, adjoined by a stone root cellar. Eleanor’s mother Helen Kern lived in the small there until her death.

Rosalie Leber HIrth died in 1937, after only eleven years in the house. When Henry and Lorenz Leber died a few months apart in 1951 it was left to Kenneth to run the motion picture theater. He and his wife Eleanor lived in the house and raised their two children Georgia and Billy there. Georgia sometimes worked as a projectionist at the theater.

After Kenneth and Eleanor’s deaths, also months apart, in 1992, Georgia sold the house and adjoining property to Jack Akers. As Mr. Akers aged, he was unable to care for the extensive properties and they fell into repair that was so pervasive and lasted so many decades the illustrious history of the house was all but forgotten.

It was left to the developer Jason Clark – no relation to Georgia – to revive the time ravaged landmark.

Jason’s company McDonough and Smith specializes in buying old properties, restoring them and selling them. But Jason, who says he is intrigued by history, has a tie to the famous Harney Mansion in Sullivan – another ravaged by time historic landmark – through relatives in the Bledsoe family who helped to restore it.

“When I realized the historic significance of the house at 319, I just wanted to keep it and help it to reclaim its historic significance,” he said.

“It was in terrible shape. There had been a hole in the roof for some time and all the plaster, plumbing and electrical service had to be removed,” he said. “The building was ostensibly gutted. The only thing we were able to save was the wood trim and hardware.”

When Jason turned to Georgia for some family history of the house he convinced her to walk through. The ceramic tile of her mother’s once gleaming kitchen peeked out from a pile of debris that was waist high. She ventured to the basement that once housed her grandfather’s and her father’s workshop.   

“My brother had printed his name on the back of the basement stairs and it as still there,” she said.

One other historic house remains on the block. Immediately west of the Royal Theater the home of Lorenz and Maidie Leber still stands.

“Maidie lived in the house until her death,” George said.

During the golden age of movies and big movie theaters, this block on St. Louis Street was the heart of the city. Pacific families loved the movies and filled the theater every night of the week.

“I went to the movies every night as a boy,” the late Neil Brennan once told me. “Some times I’d fall asleep there and they’d wake me up at the end of the movie and send me home.”

Everybody went to the movies in the summer because – ever the innovators – Henry Hirth and Lorenz Leber had installed a large generator where a huge fan that blew through dripping water and spread the cool air across the theater.