Jonathan O. Pierce House

“Cracker Castle”

Dates:

c.1868, demolished 1896

Location:

Southwest corner Chouteau and St. Ange Avenues, St. Louis, Missouri
Architect: Charles B. Clarke, St. Louis, Missouri
cost:

$115,000

"Cracker Castle" in 1875 from St. Louis, the great metropolis of the Mississippi valley (1876) The Pierce house as illustrated in Missouri’s Contribution to American Architecture (1928).

This house was designed for Jonathan O. Pierce and built about 1868. Pierce was the partner in a cracker firm which prospered during the Civil War, when it received a contract for providing hardtack to the Union Army. For this reason, the house became widely known as “Cracker Castle.”

The design conveyed the same kind of dramatic intensity that was later to characterize Clarke’s final and most significant work, the Fagin Building. The east façade on St. Agne Avenue reflected a popular late-1860s composition of a symmetrical Italianate villa with a Second Empire tower at center. The second floor of the tower featured a projecting balcony with a concave Italianate awning. This tower, however, did not contain the expected front entrance, but rather a pair of tall windows. The entrance appears to have been in the large tower facing Chouteau Avenue. This tower was exceptionally large for a private residence, being over five-stories high and nearly one third the width of the house. Its roof employed a complex profile of three different slopes topped by a concave mansard roof. There is a clear emphasis on the vertical and a certain dramatic energy that seems to have reached fruition in the Fagin Building nearly twenty years later.

The house combined a variety of stylistic elements in a somewhat novel manner. The massive scroll brackets hearken back to their mid-19th century predecessors while also suggesting the developing “neo-Swiss” style that would become the Stick Style of the 1870s. There were brick and limestone arches suggesting the so-called “polychromed Gothic” and much corbelled brickwork and window hoods suggesting the more conventional Italianate. The verticality of the towers was heightened by the exceedingly narrow windows while the unusually wide attic windows emphasized the spreading bracketed eaves. The verandahs seem to have been somewhat boldly executed, with typical Italianate elements used in atypical configurations. As with many of Clarke’s other documented works, the house seems to convey a sense of bold individualism. The exuberant individualism of late-nineteenth century architects was seem as somewhat of a professional embarrassment to the academic architects of the next generation. When John Albury Bryan wrote about the Pierce House in Missouri’s Contribution to American Architecture (1928), he conveyed the typical academic bias of his time:

"The conspicuous example of a house that was considered up-to-the-minute in 1869 was that of J. O. Pierce, built at Chouteau and St. Agne Avenues in St. Louis, and which was soon nicknamed "Cracker Castle" because the owner had accumulated a fortune by making "hardtack" and crackers during the Civil War. We may wonder, as we look at the picture, how any architect could have designed a building so ugly; but if those critics have the right idea who contend that an architect should make his buildings reflect the fads of the era in which they are born, then C. B. Clarke succeeded admirably in his design of the Pierce residence, for where could there be found a better background for a generation of women who wore bustles and men who wore Prince Albert coats and stove-pipe hats? Certainly nothing on land was more suggestive of the Victorian Era."

Pierce sold the house to prominent lawyer Fidelio C. Sharp sometime before 1875. After Sharp’s death the house was sold to Major James Pearce. Shortly before 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday, May 27, 1896, a tornado (estimated at F4-F5 on the modern Fujita scale) ripped through the heart of St. Louis and across the river into East St. Louis, Illinois. While the business district was largely unharmed, the area south of Chouteau Avenue and west of 10th Street suffered extreme damage. Lafayette Park was nearly obliterated and Shaw’s Garden received considerable damage. Hundreds were killed and a large amount of property destroyed. The Pierce house, located near the hardest-hit part of the city, seems to have been heavily damaged and the ruins were demolished.

Detail of the east tower Detail of the large tower