Eden Theological Seminary (Wellston)

A four-story seminary building of red brick on a raised basement, set among lawns and orchard trees. A square tower at one corner rose above the roofline to a clock stage and a tall mansard cap with a dormer on each face and iron cresting at the top. The long wings had rows of tall shuttered windows with stone sills, a decorative brick cornice, and a roof broken by small gabled dormers and a line of heavy chimneys, with one much taller chimney rising from the rear.

German pastors founded the seminary in 1850 at Marthasville, Missouri, as the Deutsche Evangelische Predigerseminar, the seminary of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. In 1883 the Synod moved it to a new campus on Easton Avenue northwest of St. Louis, on land that later became Wellston, to be closer to urban ministry. The campus stood about a mile from Eden Station on the Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railroad, and the school became known as Eden Seminary. The four-story main building held classrooms and forty-bed dormitory rooms. By the early 1920s the Synod judged the Wellston grounds too cramped and too hemmed in by business and industry, and in 1923 it sold the campus to the Normandy school district and began building a new campus in Webster Groves. For the first year Normandy High School shared the old main building with Eden students, and in the fall of 1924 seminary classes were still held there until the new campus was ready. The seminary building served the high school until 1959, when it was replaced by Central Hall.