This Old Road House

For you and I, living in modern America, it is perhaps hard to imagine what a pub can contribute to our lives (besides the social benefits). But the value of a public house or tavern cannot be overstated. Early America relied on its taverns as meeting places to conduct business, both personal and official. For instance, the birthplace of the Marine Corps is famously celebrated as Tun Tavern in Philadelphia. Road houses were sometimes just a place to wet one’s whistle, but often they included general stores or other shops. If you live in parts of Europe, where pubs are still common, or the rare urban areas of the United States where corner pubs can still be found, it might be obvious that these gathering places used to be an indispensable part of life. But let me introduce you to one that used to exist in North St. Louis County.

A man named F. M. Dyson owned a road house on Bellefontaine Road in the 1870s. It was known as Dise’s Twelve-Mile House, because of its location, being a full day’s journey by horse (roughly 12 miles) from the St. Louis riverfront, and being on the route to Fort Belle Fontaine, which for many years was the only permanent military installation in the St. Louis region.

There is no documented history of this road house, so I am going to provide some here. First, we know the house was set on property that Dyson purchased in 1872, on the east side of Bellefontaine Road, where today there is now a Schnuck’s supermarket (at Larimore Road). We also know that it was, during a time when the primary modes of travel were still horse-powered, a place where one could water their horses, or even have them re-shoed, as there was a blacksmith’s shop on the premises. We don’t know if Dyson constructed the house himself or if it was already built on the property when he bought it. But we do know that it was part of the estate of General Daniel Bissell, commander of Fort Belle Fontaine, who had once lived just across the road to the west.

After Dyson’s purchase, the house became the designated polling place for the district in which it stood, and residents of what was then called St. Ferdinand Township visited the Twelve-Mile House to cast their ballots in numerous county elections. One of these votes resulted in the Great Divorce of 1876, which separated St. Louis city from the surrounding county. The election judges for this location, appointed by the St. Louis County Court, were F. M. Dyson himself, as well as his neighbors, John Henry Twillman, and Charles F. Prigge. The three men oversaw numerous elections together at the house throughout the 1870s. We can find no references to this Twelve Mile House after 1879, so we can only speculate that the property was sold and the house was repurposed, or perhaps it fell into disrepair and was no longer suitable for public use. But it is clear that it served for many years as a valuable gathering place for residents of the 48th district of St. Louis County.