Laumeier Sculpture Park is a 105-acre open-air museum and sculpture park located in Sunset Hills, Missouri, near St. Louis and is maintained in partnership with St. Louis County Parks and Recreation Department. It houses over 60 outdoor sculptures and features a 1.4-mile (2.3 km) walking trail, and educational programs. There is also an indoor gallery, an 1816 Tudor stone mansion, which was the former residence of Henry and Matilda Laumeier. Laumeier is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. The park sees about 300,000 visitors each year and operates on a $1.5 million budget.
The land upon which Laumeier Sculpture Park now stands came to the U.S. through Spanish and French land grants of the 1830s. James C. Sutton, farmer, blacksmith, and inventor of the Sutton Plow, purchased the 143-acre parcel from the U.S. Government in 1835. It was one of two large parcels of land Sutton purchased for farming in the mid-1800s that became part of St. Louis County in Missouri. Sutton’s contribution to St. Louis County lives on today, as an image of his plow is seen at the center of the official seal of St. Louis County.
The first unit of the Sutton parcel that became Laumeier Sculpture Park was a tract of 47.67 acres on Rott Road was owned by Joseph Griesedieck, the owner Falstaff Brewing and president of Vahlaus Realty, until 1916. In September of that year, Griesedieck sold the tract through Valhaus Realty Co. to Roland L. Kahle, a department manager of the Rigen Stove Company. Kahle was the grandson of George August Kahle, one of the founders of the American Stove Company. In 1901, the Rigen Stove Company merged with the Quick Meal Stove Company to form the American Stove Company. Now known as Magic Chef, the company endures today as a well-known maker of cooking stoves and components.
In April 1917, Kahle obtained a building permit for a stone house, later adding the stone garage to the property in 1931 and the gatehouse in 1936. Although he listed himself as the owner, builder, and architect, the house was actually designed by Ernst C. Janssen, an architect with a practice of more than sixty years centering around the German-American families of St. Louis’ south side. (St. Louis County) The mainstay of his practice was brewery architecture, and his characteristic style for residential buildings has been called “Brewer’s Baronial”. Between 1894 and 1911, Janssen designed more than a dozen St. Louis houses, as well as the Grand Boulevard entrance pillars to the Compton Heights subdivision in the City of St. Louis, and the 12,000 square-foot “Magic Chef Mansion”, built in 1908 for American Stove Company co-founder Charles Stockstrom.
After Kahle’s death in 1938, his wife, the former Ada B. Riegel, sold the property to Henry Laumeier in 1940. In 1941, Laumeier married Matilda Cramer and recommenced construction to restore and modify the house, including glazing the large south porch and expanding the estate.
After Laumeier’s death in 1959, Wayne C. Kennedy, director of the St. Louis County Department of Parks and recreation was searching the diminishing areas of rural land for acreages to add to the park system. He was urged by Laumeier’s nieces to talk with Matilda about her estate and met with her in 1963. Mrs. Laumeier was enthusiastic about park use, but not for playing fields. She favored uses that would maintain the general character of the landscape, possibly with such features as a formal garden, a conservatory building, and plantings compatible with the specimen trees she and her husband had placed in the broad lawns and meadows. Upon her death in 1968, Matilda bequeathed the grounds and buildings, including the seven-room Estate House, to the St. Louis County Department of Parks and Recreation in memory of her husband, Henry Laumeier. The will gave their land and country house to the county, and specified that would be used for passive purposes (e.g., no sport fields). The park was 76 acres (0.31 km2) at its opening in 1975, but did not attract many visitors until a year later, when St. Louis sculptor Ernest Trova donated about 40 pieces of his work to the park. It soon became a popular tourist attraction, and received an additional 20 acres (0.081 km2) from the Friends of Laumeier. The additional land was mostly woods and is for site-specific sculptures, including an abandoned Depression-era concrete pool from the Orchard Valley estate that once occupied the land which was transformed into Pool Complex: Orchard Valley, 1983–85, a large sculptural installation by Mary Miss.
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