Monday 24th August 2009 – It’s That Man Again

St Louis, it has to be said, is a remarkably spacious city. Downtown provides very little shade for the sun-shy like me. It has a recent addition, "the Arch", which is a remarkable piece of engineering. When I was in Columbia, at the U of Mizz, looking for old documents about the man for whom Glasgow MO was named, they had a photo exhibition showing how the Arch was constructed, which held me fascinated for hours. It dominates downtown St Louis, and there is a city ordinance that nothing will be taller than it, a bit like Washington, dc, and the Washington Monument.

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All men are, in some way or other, jealous of their father. William Glasgow, jr., seems to have been jealous of the fact that his father (James) had a town named after him. When they all came back to St Louis, the family seems to have become a considerable influence in the town. William married the mayor's daughter. He set up a research farm and called it "Glasgow Place". When he sold it off (it's known as the "Glasgow Addition" to St Louis, one of the streets became "Glasgow Place". That's now part of a park, but Glasgow Avenue survives.

He seems to have bought land at the very northern tip of the city

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(if you can make out the name nearest the bend of the river)

Around 1930, the family, William presumably being long dead, platted this, and named the new street "Glasgow Drive" (you saw a picture of it yesterday). The plat for that reveals that the area was known as "Glasgow Woods". There can be little doubt that the rest of the original plot, outside the city in St Louis County, when it was developed around 1950, got to be called "Glasgow Village" after him.

So it wasn't named after the same Glasgow as the one on the Missouri River, it was named after his son. They were both born in Delaware. And there is a Glasgow in Delaware too. Do you think it might be possible that that one was named after the Grandfather? That would be quite remarkable, wouldn't it?

Later that night, having previously vacuumed up all the beer in the house, I tried to do penance by replacing some. But then I vacuumed that up too.