ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI—Archaeologists from the Missouri Department of Transportation have recovered the first physical evidence of a French colonial home in St. Louis beneath layers of concrete and bricks. It had been thought that all traces of the city’s early, fur-trading days had been wiped out by nineteenth-century construction. The home had been built with vertical wood posts, rather than the horizontal logs used by Anglo-Americans, according to principal investigator Michael Meyer. And, French documents confirm that the house was built in 1769 by Joseph Bouchard, then later owned by Philip Riviére, a member of a prominent local family. Another house nearby contained a piece of tin-enameled Spanish majolica. “They’ve actually found remnants of this exciting period of time that lasted for 40 years in the early history of St. Louis before the Louisiana Purchase,” National Park Service historian Bob Moore commented to St. Louis Public Radio.
