Antebellum House Witnessed the Birth, Decline and Renewal of a Frontier Railroad Town 

By Pauline Masson –

The LePere plantation house on South Denton Road was thought to have been built by slaves, creating hand fired bricks on the site. The bricks were later covered over with stucco. Marking time – it was home to a dozen families including a Franklin County pioneer, a plantation owner, a doctor, a St. Louis chef, a future Pacific mayor and the son of an industrial park developer.

Last week it changed hands one more time with the sale of the adjoining Dailey Industrial Park.

When the late Neil Brennan took me to see this house on a history tour in 2001, I snapped a photo of it and later used photoshop to remove an above ground swimming pool that sat near the front of the house from the picture. 

Neil said the plantation style structure with the columns and verandas across front was once home to Virginia and Thomas W. B. Crews, the couple that built and occupied the grand brick manor house that now welcomes visitors to Shaw Nature Reserve.

The house above was built between 1858 and 1870 when the property was owned by Thomas Watson, an early Pacific owner of a general store that provided sleeping accommodations for travelers. That structure still stands at North Second and Osage streets and houses St. Bridget of Kildare parish office.

In 1978 Joe Dailey bought the hundred-year-old, by then dilapidated, house, above, and adjoining ten acres to add to his Dailey Industrial Park. In 1982 he sold the house and one acre to his son and daughter-in-law Tom and Cindy Dailey.

“Cindy cried when Tom told her he wanted them to live in the house,” Virginia “Ginny” Dailey (Joe’s wife and Tom’s mother) wrote in her 1998 history research of the property. “After 16 years of restoration and repairs, Tom, a carpenter, replaced the second story balcony that runs the whole length of the front of the house. It now resembles the grand home it once was meant to be.”

“It was awful,” Cindy recently recalled. ”the veranda was pulled away from the house and some of the columns were split. Inside the ceilings were all pulled down.”

According to Ginny’s research, the original structure was two storied, two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs with a central hallway and stairs. Each room was heated with a fireplace. There were no closets because closets were considered rooms and were taxed.

The date the house was built is uncertain but it was prior to the Civil War. In 1854 when the Pacific Railroad built its St. Louis and San Francisco (Frisco) branch, the tracks ran right in front of the plantation house. The house bore the scars of a Confederate cannon ball fired into the northeast corner of the foundation as troops used the railroad right-of-way to enter the town for the Oct. 1, 1864 raid on Pacific. Later Denton Road was constructed parallel to the rail line.

A log structure that might have been a slave quarters stood at the back of the house but was later made into a smokehouse. Through the years it deteriorated and eventually it was torn down.

Ginny’s research indicated that after 1858 Thomas Watson bought approximately four acres where the house stands. Records show he owned the house and property in 1870.

By 1898 Virginia crews owned the house and had expanded the grounds around the house to 500 acres.  

Virginia Crews was the daughter of Cuthbert Swepson “Swep” Jeffries, a transplanted Virginia plantation owner, one of the area’s earliest settlers and a leader in the formation of Franklin County. Virginia married Thomas W. B. Crews, scion of another Virginia plantation family.

According to Evelyn Alt Knoble, a neighbor of the property, Virginia and Thomas Crews and their sons Gideon and Swepson (later mayor of Pacific) lived in the house before the bricks were covered. They were assisted by former slaves, Bill and Polly Thomas, who lived nearby.

In 1900 a Mr. Wunderlick lived on and tilled the lush bottom land of the farm, producing record wheat crops, and mined a red gravel operation that Gideon and Swepson Crews had started.

That same year, Virginia Crews entered into a contract with local realtor C. C. Close to sell the 500 acre farm and buildings. Close advertised the farm saying he would be willing to cut out tracts to suit any buyer.  The Alt family purchased 120 acres, establishing the Alt Farm adjacent to the property, leaving 380 acres for sale. In 1901 while Wunderlick was threshing a 300-acre wheat crop the local newspaper printed 500 posters for a big sale at the property, offering farm stock and farm machinery.

The big farm was about to enter into a heyday of plantation life. 

Philip LePere, a wealthy land owner, and his wife Elizabeth, “Lizzie,” bought the farm for $10,000, a vast sum at the time ($371,823 today). The LePeres moved from their much larger and very productive farm in the Flat River, Missouri mineral belt, which they leased out under a mineral lease. Newspapers noted the LePeres also owned vast tracts of land in St. Louis County.

Pacific residents were alerted to the future of the old Crews farm, in July 25, 1902 when the LePeres arrived with “a train of wagons” loaded with household goods. LePere immediately put laborers to work improving the old brick plantation house. The bricks were covered with stucco. Two large rooms, two small porches, and a bathroom were added to the back of the house. A windmill and spring house was put in to supply water indoors. 

Several barns, out buildings and frame homes were built on the property to house the large entourage it took to operate a real plantation. In addition to wheat fields, a fruit orchard and kitchen garden were planted at the back of the house.

During the LePere occupation of the antebellum house, the farm and the family were constantly in the news. In his first full year on the farm  the Pacific Transcript reported that LePere had the largest crop of wheat of the season. Threshers, Brundick and Wunderlick reported threshing 600 sacks of wheat from 120 sowed acres, a crop that weighed out fully 1,500 bushels- 12 1/2  to the acre, and of superior quality. “Who in this section of the state can beat this crop?” the editor asked.

I collected fifty Pacific Transcript news clips on the family between 1902 and 1919, including a 1912 item noting that the St.Louis Globe Democrat had printed a feature story on the house complete with illustrations. I’m still trying to track down the Globe Democrat article.

The house would thereafter be known as the LePere House. When LePere and his wife Lizzie bought the Frank Freeman house on Osage Street in 1907, moved into town and transformed their new home into “the prettiest house in the town,” according to the Pacific Transcript, their daughter Amelia and her husband Arthur G. Weber moved into the plantation house.

After 1920 the house passed through several hands including Clinton Booghers, Lee I.  Nieringhaus, Doc Powers, Gladys Fisher, Jay Downey and Dennis Vickery.

Although ignored in recent years to respect the privacy of the last residents, this house qualifies on architectural, historical and cultural grounds as a local landmark. It is a rare specimen that has remained standing through the transition of a frontier farm hamlet to a railroad boom town, to an economic decline at the waning days of the industrial revolution, and to the recent renaissance that has sparked a renewal in the 1870s downtown.

While there have been some changes the building still retains its original two-story veranda across the front, reminiscent of a bygone era, thanks to the painstaking restoration by Tom Dailey. 

Tom and Cindy Daily sold the house last month as part of the sale of the Dailey Industrial Park.