A plain, square-built school of red brick, three tall stories over a raised basement, under a low hipped roof lined with chimneys and a ventilator. Shallow brick pilasters divided the long front into bays. The top floor had round-arched windows set in recessed arches, and the lower floors had tall flat-headed windows, some with shutters. A white band set off the basement. A small arched entrance at the head of a double stair served the art hall on the main front, and a pedimented portico marked the entrance on the side street.
Bonham's Female Seminary was a day and boarding school for young ladies and children at Sixteenth and Pine Streets, with L. N. Bonham, A.M., as principal. It issued a printed catalogue for the 1863-64 school year, and a stereograph view of the building, published as No. 46 in a series of St. Louis views, shows the entrance to its art hall. An 1868 lithograph shows the building with a flag flying from the roof. The school also took part in the city's scientific life. When fire nearly destroyed the library and museum of the Academy of Science of St. Louis in May 1869, the largest meteorite in its collection survived because it was at the Bonham Female Seminary among the mineral specimens of Dr. Shumard, the Academy's geologist.
