History

Princeton Club of St. Louis has had a rich history from its founding in 1876. 64 Club presidents have presided over the Club during that time.

The Club has celebrated its with 146 Annual Dinners (145 in person and 1 virtual in 2020) welcoming speakers from the Princeton University to engage our membership and all the more bring the Princeton to St. Louis.

Excerpts from A Short Early History of the Princeton Club of St.Louis by Jamieson Spencer '66

The Princeton Club of St. Louis: Its Infancy

The Princeton Alumni Association at St. Louis was one of the College of New Jersey's first in 1876. It was a group which almost from its inception provided the driving force behind the movement toward a National Alumni Association, a goal that would take nearly a half century to accomplish. There are several key players in the actual founding of the city's Alumni Association-the group's original name until an 1889 amendment changed it to The Princeton Club of St. Louis.

The Founding of the earliest Princeton Alumni Associations

The founding of the earliest Princeton Alumni Associations coincided with an era of vital rejuvenation for the College of New Jersey-a period of collegiate growth that began a particularly impressive spurt with the end of the Civil War. And what were the Association's goals?

"To promote the acquaintance of Princeton alumni, to strengthen the connection between the alumni and the college,

and to advance the interests, influence and efficiency of Princeton."

That the University was both aware of, and generally supported, this local enthusiasm for Princeton is amply borne out by the frequency of visits by its leaders and luminaries. Such visits became annual affairs, carried out by President Patton, often with Political Science Professor Woodrow Wilson in tow; by Wilson solo as University. representative; and ultimately by Wilson after his election to the Présidency in 1902. Favored sites for both men were New York (whose club had been founded in 1866), Philadelphia (1868), Baltimore (actually the “Princeton Association of Maryland," 1885; Wilson spoke frequently here, for he was a lecturer at Johns Hopkins before being hired at Princeton in 1890), and regularly as well in Washington ("The District of Columbia and the Southern States," 1872). Trips likewise were arranged with growing regularity to “the West," and came to include such destinations as Cincinnati and Pittsburgh ("Western Pennsylvania") whose clubs were both founded in 1875, Chicago and St. Louis (1876) and St. Paul (the “New. Northwest", 1886).

Several of these Western expeditions would come to play a vital role in the evolution of the University in the years immediately following its sesquicentennial. Association's growing regional extent, and indicate as well the dedication of Princeton men willing to undertake a considerable annual journey to St. Louis for Club business. Hewes would remain as a Vice-President through 1890, and Martin logged Frequent Railroad miles during his two full decades of sèrvice (until 1905).

In fact, the geographical extent of club membership reflects the seminal and organizing role of Princeton alumni associations during these early days, when the concept of a national alumni association was just being formed:

Of the St. Louis Club's 78 members in 1889 (there were also 8 local undergraduates), barely half were city residents. Other members on the roster lived as far away as Texas (1), Arkansas (5), Colorado (3), Nebraska (2), Indiana (3) and Wisconsin (1), along with a healthy handful from outstate Missouri and Illinois.

Coming of Age: The Club's Tenth Anniversary, 1886.

Shortly after its tenth anniversary, the Princeton Club of St. Louis began to play an accelerating role in the life of the University. In the quarter century that roughly centered on the World's Fair year of 1904, St. Louis was at its cultral peak. It lay at the heart of the West, which from the 1870s onward was a region of rapidly expanding enthusiasm for Princeton. St. Louis at this time in its history boasted the nickname of “The Fourth City', and was thus a logical port of call for Princeton administrative luminaries, especially President Patton (as earły as 1888) and Political Science Professor Woodrow Wilson.

When United States President Woodrow Wilson addressed a huge St. Louis audience in 1916, he noted: “I have made a good many visits to St. Louis before you started counting, sometimes merely as a Princeton man interested in the Princeton crowd, sometimes upon purely private errands.” The majority of these visits, particularly the Princeton ones, neatly straddled the turn of the century, and culminated in a series of trips connected with the 1904 World's Fair. During the fourteen years from 1897 to 1910, the city was the scene of several events that would prove of profound significance both for Princeton and Wilson.

These journeys fall into two major groups. The first involves events of a purely social, intellectual or political nature. The other, the business of Chapter Three, consists of a pair of meetings of a newly formed Alumni association, the Western Association of Princeton Clubs.

Reports in the St. Louis Republic for December 30 and 31, 1897 provide a detailed sketch of Wilson's agenda. His message to the members of the University Club should come as no surprise from a man who had just a year before spoken of Princeton in the Nation's Service. He asserted that

"The college of today is not the cloistered place that it once was; it is a place to look forward and around andits graduates should be a purveyor of thought in the community. The college is a place to furnish yeast for society."

Crowing to St. Louis boosters about the growing freshet of St. Louis blood flowing into and swelling the University's waters: “We have 25 students from St. Louis this year” (thať's a figure not much smaller than today's a century later) "and the institution is growing in favor with the people of this community every year.”

First Fifty Years: End of an Era

The Club's first fifty years were in some ways its most remarkable. Many club founders were intimately and continually involved not only with the life of the club, but with vital changes in university affairs. They were present at the creation of the newly expanded national university, and elped to promote its educational progress, as well as to ease the inevitable growing pains that accompany such advancement.