Every family has stories. Many of these get passed down from one generation to the next. And occasionally, a story will have just the right mix of mystery and appeal to achieve legendary status. So it has been within our family when anyone speaks of Moscow Mills.
The town, in Lincoln County, about an hour’s drive west of St. Louis, has a compelling history all its own. But within the context of our family history, when someone says Moscow Mills, they are not referring to the town, but rather a single building inside the town: a two-story dwelling once known as Mrs. Calloway’s Riverside Hotel. Constructed at an irresponsible distance from the banks of the Cuivre River, on Front Street, the hotel stood for something close to a century (perhaps longer), playing host to traveling salesmen, makeshift offices for doctors, and other colorful characters who called Moscow home.
We’re not sure what year the hotel was built, but we do know it existed at the time the “short line” railroad was laid through town in the late 1800s joining Hannibal, to the north, with Gilmore, to the south. The hotel appears on a 1909 street map of Moscow Mills (Sanborn Map Company) – this is the earliest paper record of the hotel’s existence. In 1926, according to the oral history of our family, the hotel was owned by a doctor who was having trouble maintaining the property. A street map from 1919 provides evidence of this fact, as the hotel itself is labeled “in bad repair.”
So, our ancestor Charles Martin Burmeister entered into an agreement with the good doctor and bought a share of the property. We don’t know the exact terms of the arrangement, but it gave our family access to this country getaway for the next 10-15 years. Charles and his wife Dora (Twillman) hosted many weekend retreats for members of their church and the Walther League. There were so many events at this facility, and so many stories told by the family, that everyone grew up knowing the words “Moscow Mills,” even if we didn’t know what they meant, or where it was exactly. From a fun place to host a raucous family reunion, to a scenic destination for test driving your new automobile, the Riverside Hotel represented a special place of solace and revelry, to escape both the Roaring 20s and the Great Depression.
This building has mythical proportions within our family, but although we’ve have been researching its fate for most of this year, we still have very few concrete details. We know that the town of Moscow Mills endured an historic flood in 1941 (see photo below), and because our family history includes no record of this event, we assume that our family no longer owned the property at this time. Given the obvious damage that the building must have suffered, it might also be reasonable to assume that this spelled the end of the illustrious hotel’s history. But in fact that was not the end of the story.
Curious descendants of Charles Martin Burmeister have gone hunting for the hotel in the intervening years, and they found it still standing and in remarkably good condition. We have photos from these expeditions in both 1968 (at the top of this post) and again in 1981, so the subsequent property owners were good stewards in the decades after we gave up ownership. But all good things must come to an end, and our friends at the Lincoln County Historical Society provided some evidence that the hotel was knocked down in 2011 and we learned that the land on which it stood was eventually incorporated into Mill Site Park.
This is where the story ends, but knowing the shenanigans that went on there just during the brief time that our family owned the hotel only makes me yearn for a deeper dive into the rich history that this building must have no doubt witnessed. So, dear reader, If you have any stories about the Riverside Hotel in Moscow Mills, Missouri, please leave us a comment below.
