Eugene Field House - St. Louis, Missouri
Posted by: 
BruceS
N 38° 37.201 W 090° 11.524
15S E 744460 N 4278351
Birth place of children's poet Eugene Field, located on southside of the St. Louis central business district. House now recognized for the role Eugene Field's father played in the legal history of the United States.
Waymark Code: WM2Z47
Location: Missouri, United States
Date Posted: 01/13/2008
Views: 37
From Missouri - A Guide to the "Show Me" State - St. Louis
section:
The EUGENE FIELD HOUSE, 634 S. Broadway, is a three-story red-brick house,
with a recessed entranceway flanked by Doric pilasters. A walled formal
garden surrounds the house on the north, east, and south sides. This
house, together with eleven others which formed a solid block known as Walsh's
Row, was built about 1845. Threatened with destruction in 1934, it as
saved through the efforts of a citizen's group and dedicated as the Eugene Field
Museum in December, 1936. It is maintained by the Board of Education.
Within a year or two after their marriage in 1848, Eugene Field's parents,
Roswell M., and Frances (Reed) Field, moved to this Broadway address and here
Eugene was born September 3, 1850. In 1856, his mother died and Eugene was
sent to live with a cousin in Amherst, Massachusetts, remaining there until
about 1869, when he returned to attend the University of Missouri. When he
was 21 he received a legacy and went to Europe. He returned here to begin
his journalistic career on the old St. Louis evening Journal.
The home was operated as a museum by the Board of Education until 1968, it
continues as The Eugene Field House and St. Louis Toy Museum, now operated by
the Eugene Field House Foundation. The museum has items from the author
Eugene Field along with toys.
In recent years the importance of the home has been recognized more for
Eugene's father Roswell Martin Field, who served as Dred Scott's attorney when
he sued for his family's freedom in 1853. This suit led to a landmark
Supreme Court decision affecting all African-American's and is recognized as one
of factor precipitating the Civil War.
In 2007 the house was listed as a National Historic Landmark with this
announcement from the Secretary of Interior:
"Field House, St. Louis, Missouri, is the home of Roswell Field, the attorney
who formulated the legal strategy that placed slave Dred Scott’s lawsuit for
freedom before the Supreme Court. In Scott v. Sandford, one of the most
controversial cases of the 19th century, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B.
Taney declared that no slave could be a U. S. citizen and that the Missouri
Compromise of 1820 (that abolished slavery in the territories) was
unconstitutional. The 1857 decision widened the political gap between the North
and the South and helped precipitate the Civil War. The most effective critic of
the decision was Abraham Lincoln, a relatively unknown Illinois lawyer, whose
attacks on the case thrust him into the national political scene. Anger over
Taney’s decision energized the Republican party and led the nation’s first
antislavery political party to victory in 1860. It took the Civil War and
post-war constitutional amendments to overturn the Dred Scott decision."