Sugar Creek

I serve on a board of a needlepoint store operated by the alum club of my college sorority.  Don't like sororities?  Think needlepoint belts are silly?  Deal with it.  The store is entirely volunteer run and profits are donated yearly to deserving charities.

We had a board meeting recently and I really wasn't in the mood to coordinate the logistics of making it to the meeting with my husband out of town.  But I made it and imagine my surprise to see this structure on the property of the hostess of the party.

This description from the city of Kirkwood says I better than I can:

Henry Hoch purchased 40 acres along Sugar Creek from the U.S. Government in 1837 for a farmstead which grew to include a dogtrot cabin, farmhouse, barn and stone smoke house. The property ran up the side of a steep hill and was heavily wooded. First he built the dogtrot cabin with space between the two end rooms for a horse and cow. When a barn was built a year or two later, the cabin's middle room was converted to a kitchen. 


In 1870, the Hoch family hired Kossuth Strohm, a carpenter who lived across Sugar Creek, to build a two-story frame house. During the years, family quarried limestone on their property for the foundations of early Kirkwood buildings. Philip and Mary Hallet Gronemeyer, nationally recognized artists, made this farmstead their home for many years. The property has been subdivided and ten new houses have been built. The cabin was carefully dismantled and reassembled elsewhere. The barn and stone smoke house remain


The way I understand it, the barn sat between two new houses.  The hostess of the party bought it from her neighbor to the east, who I think are the Gronemeyer folks or their descendants.  Leave it to the girl from Soulard to show up at a party and talk about old houses with the hostess' husband.