First Methodist Episcopal Church, South

A brick church of the round-arched Romanesque type, 106 by 65 feet, at the northwest corner of Eighth Street and Washington Avenue. As built, its gabled front carried a large rose window over a round-arched entrance, arched corbel tables traced the eaves, and a slender square tower more than 140 feet tall rose at the corner, its open belfry capped by a steep spire. A parsonage stood next door on Washington. The church later disappeared inside a ring of storefronts. Arcades of round-arched shop windows lined both streets at sidewalk level, and above them crenellated parapets and rows of turrets with tall conical caps gave the whole corner a castellated look. The corner tower was gone, and the old front gable picked up a fringe of hanging arches and pinnacles, with large ventilators along the roof ridge.

The congregation, the oldest Methodist body in St. Louis, had worshiped since 1830 in a brick church at Fourth Street and Washington Avenue, and in 1845 it joined the newly formed Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In December 1852 it bought a 95-by-116-foot lot at the northwest corner of Washington Avenue and Eighth Street from Silas Wood of New York for $13,000, and the next April sold the Fourth Street property for $50,000. George I. Barnett designed the new church, and Sage and Webster built it. On July 2, 1854, the congregation marched in procession from Fourth Street to the basement of the new building, and the finished church, seating 900, was dedicated on December 31, 1854, by Rev. Charles B. Parsons of Louisville. With the move the Fourth Street Church became the First Methodist Episcopal Church. Ground, church and parsonage cost about $55,000, the parsonage standing on an adjoining 27-foot lot on Washington. In 1874 and 1875 the vacant ground around the church was built up for business, and the Tudor-style store fronts became part of the building itself. The church stayed in use behind them. Early in 1882 the congregation sold the property to Leighton and Chapman, who began tearing it down in March 1882 to build warehouses. The congregation met at Tenth and Locust and then in the former YMCA church at Eleventh and Locust while its new stone church at Glasgow Avenue and Dayton Street, begun in 1882, went up.