A three-story brick public school of 1872, seen here in an 1890 photograph on its corner at Carroll and Second Carondelet Avenues. Built to the St. Louis Board of Education's standard twelve-room plan, it was symmetrical and Italianate, centered on a projecting entrance pavilion under a steep gable and flanked by wings beneath a hipped roof with cross-gables, iron finials, and tall paneled chimneys. Round-arched windows, grouped in twos and threes, climbed the brick walls in vertical tiers above a raised basement. A projecting porch carried the name "PEABODY SCHOOL" over arched doorways, and an iron picket fence enclosed the corner yard and its young trees.
Peabody School opened in 1872 on the near-south side, at the corner of Carroll and Second Carondelet Avenues, one of a group of twelve-room schools the St. Louis Board of Education built to a standard plan in the early 1870s. With seats for about 700 pupils, it also housed the city's Branch High School No. 3, part of the early network that carried secondary instruction into the neighborhoods before dedicated high schools were common. The school honored George Peabody (1795–1869), the Massachusetts-born merchant and banker whose education endowments made his name a frequent choice for American public schools. Its design was published among the model plans in the Board's 1876 annual report. Peabody served the crowded blocks around it for decades before it was demolished; the surrounding area was later cleared and rebuilt, and the Peabody name carried forward — joined with Clinton's — in the Clinton-Peabody public housing that stands nearby today.
