The first school building to bear the Stoddard name, a two-story Italianate brick schoolhouse at the corner of Lucas and Ewing Avenues in what was then the newly developed Stoddard Addition west of downtown.
The Stoddard School at Lucas and Ewing Avenues was one of the St. Louis Public Schools constructed as the city expanded westward into the Stoddard Addition in the 1850s. Named for Captain Amos Stoddard (1762–1813), the U.S. Army officer who formally accepted the transfer of Upper Louisiana from France in 1804 and briefly served as civil commandant of Missouri, the school served white students in a rapidly growing residential district. A C.A. Bauer engraving from ca. 1860 — now in the Missouri History Museum collection (N33345) — shows a handsome two-story building with a pedimented entrance and arched windows, children playing in the unpaved street in front. When the St. Louis Board of Education opened a larger, purpose-built replacement at 2840 Lucas Avenue (the second Stoddard School) in 1867, this original building was retired and demolished. The name "Stoddard" traveled with the white school to the new address. Decades later, as the neighborhood's population shifted, that second building was renamed Banneker — following the same naming convention that gave the white school one name and the Black school another.
