A two-story brick public school of 1859 in a plain Greek Revival manner, photographed in 1876 at Kingsbury Street near Gravois Road with its teachers and pupils gathered along the fence. Shallow pedimented gables crowned the ends of the symmetrical front, and shuttered windows in flat stone surrounds punctuated the brick walls above a raised basement, with a tall chimney rising behind. An iron fence set on a rock-faced stone wall enclosed the corner yard along the unpaved street.
This was the first Charless School, opened in 1859 among the ward schools the St. Louis Board of Education built as the near-south side filled in, and named for Joseph Charless Jr. (1804–1859), the St. Louis merchant and banker who was murdered on a city street that year. A modest two-story building of about eight rooms, it stood at Kingsbury Street near Gravois Road — Kingsbury being one of the many builder-given street names the city would later rename or erase. Emil Boehl photographed it in 1876, its classes turned out along the fence for the camera. About 1893 the Board replaced Charless with a far grander Romanesque building at 2226 Shenandoah Avenue, and this original was taken down. Whether the two stood on the same ground under changing street names, or on separate lots nearby, is not yet settled.
