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In the front yard of the home at 9 Hill Drive in Glendale are three gravestones, one dating to 1836, as the 1808 Glendale home is for sale on Wednesday, April 27, 2022. The owners are trying to sell the home and land to buyers who will preserve the house, built 13 years before Missouri became a state. Photo by Robert Cohen, rcohen@post-dispatch.com
GLENDALE — The home on Hill Drive stands apart from the neighborhood that has sprung up around it.
The oldest part of the white farmhouse, thought to date back to around 1808, is one of the oldest standing residences in St. Louis County. Original log walls are exposed inside. On the lawn, gravestones of former residents who died in the 1830s still sit, faded by time — though the bodies have since been exhumed.
Then, last week, 9 Hill Drive went up for sale.
Estate sale browsers look over the final items inside the home at 9 Hill Drive home in Glendale on Sunday, April 24, 2022. The 1808 home was built 13 years before Missouri became a state. Photo by Robert Cohen, rcohen@post-dispatch.com
The family that owns the property, the Mohlers, hope to find a buyer who can save the house. But the structure sits on a valuable piece of land. A few new homes in the area have recently been listed for more than $1 million.
The roughly half-acre property is listed for $600,000.
The home was named a historic landmark by the St. Louis County Historic Buildings Commission, but that doesn’t protect it from demolition.
“I’m not sure what the probability of that is at this point,” said family member John Mohler. “We need the right buyer to come along.”
A photo of the home at what is today 9 Hill Drive taken in the 1930s. Photo courtesy of Dave Oesch.
Logs still covered in bark line the top of the cellar of 9 Hill Drive in Glendale. Photo by Erin Heffernan.
A clip from the June 05, 1938 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discussing plans to move the bodies buried in the yard of the home at 9 Hill Drive.
It might not look like it from the outside, but 9 Hill Drive started as a one-room log cabin.
Today the home is a 1.5-story farmhouse with Victorian Gothic touches. It is believed that early frontiersman and Irish immigrant Bernard Guilhuly built an original cabin around 1808, when the region was still considered wilderness, according to historic records collected by former inhabitants.
In the cellar underneath that original cabin, there are bark-covered logs supporting the wide-plank wood floors.
A second cabin was added, separated from the original by a breezeway known then as a dog trot.
The home was expanded again after it was purchased by Thomas Yeats in 1831. The gravestones of Jane, Amanda and Melinda Yeats remain on the property. All three died during a cholera epidemic between 1832 and 1836.
Plans for their bodies to be moved began when the surrounding subdivision was developed around 1938, according to a Post-Dispatch story from the time.
The home’s longest and most prominent residents, the Armstrong family, lived on the property for nearly 100 years, from about 1845 through 1939.
Early pioneer Clinton Armstrong traveled with his family and several enslaved people from Tennessee in a wagon train to settle the area. The family released all the slaves two years after arriving in 1847, according to a family obituary.
A story from the August 23, 1914 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch explains how Clinton Armstrong placed a walking stick in his yard that turned into a tree. Even then the tree was described as "historic."
Residents have long thought that Ulysses S. Grant likely visited the house. He knew Armstrong and lived within an easy horseback ride during the six years the future president lived in Missouri, from 1854 through 1860.
Clinton Armstrong’s son, Luther, served under Grant for the Union Army in the Civil War before returning home.
For more than 20 years, Luther ran a flower farm on the land. He would transport the flowers on the local streetcar to his florist shop in St. Louis, according to newspaper accounts.
Luther Armstrong was considered the oldest man in what was then Kirkwood after he died at 88 in 1926.
“He refused to permit electric lights or plumbing in the house and employed several servants to do the housework in the old manner,” the Post-Dispatch wrote in Luther Armstrong’s obituary.
Dave Oesch grew up in the home until he was 14.
His parents, Ronald and Marilyn Oesch, both local public school educators, bought the home in 1970 from the Schislers, the family who bought it in 1939 and lived there for more than 30 years.
“The day we looked at it, it was in such neglect that the real estate lady wouldn’t come inside,” Ronald Oesch told the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in a 1977 story about their renovation of the property.
He added: “The house was slated for demolition in 1930 and survived. Now it is our turn to take care of the house.”
Dave Oesch, who is today in his 50s and lives in Sappington, was pictured in the Globe-Democrat article as a 6-year-old peering through the front door.
”It was a great place to grow up. I appreciated it even as a kid,” he said. “There were these giant old, gnarly trees in the front yard … . In one of the original windows, I found the name Armstrong etched in one corner into the glass.”
The Oesch family did a major renovation of the home, cutting away plaster to expose the original log walls on the interior front rooms. The couple also converted a garage into a living room to add more space to the back of the home, using 100-year-old wood from a cousin’s barn in Iowa to keep the historic look.
They found cobalt glass, pieces of China and a 1904 World’s Fair souvenir spoon on the property, but their most notable discovery came when they peeled back the plaster of one upstairs room to find the inner wall papered with newspapers from the 1880s.
Articles found in the walls included a stern letter from one neighbor to another complaining about them walking through their potato patch. “If you should trespass on me again, there will certainly be some trouble,” the neighbor wrote in the Watchman Advocate newspaper found in the walls, according to accounts of the discovery in the Post-Dispatch at the time.
Oesch recalled the home being a favorite in the neighborhood, which had by then become a suburban community.
It was especially popular during Halloween because of the three gravestones in the yard. Marilyn Oesch would hang a boar’s skull over a sheet-body above the graves for dramatic effect, he said.
Oesch said he hopes the home will continue to stand the test of time, but knows that might not be a reality.
“The costs in that area makes it hard,” he said. “The neighborhood is unattainable for the average person today.”
The most recent residents were history-loving empty nesters, Martha and Merrick Mohler.
The couple bought the home for $389,000 in 2002 after their four sons were grown.
“We knew that they loved it and that made us love the house,” said their son John Mohler. “They were in their 60s when they bought, and we thought they were crazy. They were already in an old house and they moved into a much older one.”
Martha was an antique collector whose style fit the home. Merrick, a former president of heating equipment business, Thompson Supply Co., had been a historical reenactor and was the longtime president of the Glendale Historical Society. He researched the home’s past and proudly kept the koi pond and garden meticulous, always hoping to find some historic artifacts along the way.
Martha Mohler died in 2021 and, since then, her husband has moved into a memory care unit for treatment for dementia, prompting the family’s need to sell the property.
“We’re not going to knowingly sell it to someone we know will tear it down,” son David Mohler said. “When you own a home like that, you’re a custodian of it. It was our parents’ honor to hold onto that part of history, and we hope we can find someone who wants to do the same.”
Anyone interested in purchasing 9 Hill Drive can contact realtor Sally Harris from Berkshire Hathaway Select at 314-560-0350.
Josh Renaud of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
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Erin Heffernan is a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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In the front yard of the home at 9 Hill Drive in Glendale are three gravestones, one dating to 1836, as the 1808 Glendale home is for sale on Wednesday, April 27, 2022. The owners are trying to sell the home and land to buyers who will preserve the house, built 13 years before Missouri became a state. Photo by Robert Cohen, rcohen@post-dispatch.com
Estate sale browsers look over the final items inside the home at 9 Hill Drive home in Glendale on Sunday, April 24, 2022. The 1808 home was built 13 years before Missouri became a state. Photo by Robert Cohen, rcohen@post-dispatch.com
A clip from the June 05, 1938 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discussing plans to move the bodies buried in the yard of the home at 9 Hill Drive.
A photo of the home at what is today 9 Hill Drive taken in the 1930s. Photo courtesy of Dave Oesch.
A story from the August 23, 1914 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch explains how Clinton Armstrong placed a walking stick in his yard that turned into a tree. Even then the tree was described as "historic."
Logs still covered in bark line the top of the cellar of 9 Hill Drive in Glendale. Photo by Erin Heffernan.
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