A ca. 1819 residence of Jean Pierre Chouteau (1758–1849), one of the founding Chouteau family whose fur-trading dynasty shaped early St. Louis. Chouteau was the son of Pierre de Laclède and Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau, the matriarch of the family that dominated the Missouri River trade. The house stood in the original city plat on Main Street — what the Americans would later call First Street — in the heart of the original French settlement.
Jean Pierre Chouteau was a half-brother of Auguste Chouteau, the teenage co-founder of St. Louis who helped lay out the town in 1764 under Pierre de Laclède. Jean Pierre became a major figure in the family fur trade, operating extensively along the Missouri River and into Osage territory. His house on Main Street placed him at the center of early American St. Louis, near the river commerce that sustained the city. The property was lost in the largest urban clearance in St. Louis history: the 1939–1942 demolition of 37 blocks and 486 structures to create the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (now Gateway Arch National Park). Preservationists condemned the clearance, but the project proceeded with federal and city funds, erasing nearly all physical traces of the original French colonial city. Main Street in 1819 corresponded to what was later numbered First Street — the first major street parallel to the Mississippi, west of the levee road (Front Street). That entire grid is now beneath the Arch grounds.
