The Families of Stringtown. Stringtown was that community, made up mainly at first of families of French Canandian decent and then latter of German, that farmed the area along and around what is now Howdershell Road. This area was located in the Common Fields of St. Ferdinand from the right bank of the Cold Water Creek to the left bank of the Missouri River. The Common Fields made up the bulk of the Spanish land grants in the Florissant valley. At one time the old dirt covered country lane was commonly referred to as Rosary Road. How the road got that name one can only guess. But the presents of the St. Stanislaus Jesuit Seminary and Novitiate half way down the lane might have something to do with such a name as Rosary. There is a special devotion to the mother of Jesus found throughout the history of that order going back to its founding. It was not uncommon to see groups of young novitiates walking down the lane saying the rosary on their way out into the community to minister to the Creole families living on the small farms that lined the road or that dotted the bottoms. How the community obtained the name Stringtown may be related to the name of the road. When one looks at the 1878 Pitzman U.S. survey map of the St.Ferdinand Common Fields, township 47, range 6, Howdershell Road resembles a string of rosary beads with all the farm houses, barns, and shops that are represented on the map. That is only conjecture on the part of the author but its as good an explanation as any. What is known is that as early as 1857 the name Stringtown was printed on the Gustavus Wagner’s map of St. Louis County. It was still referred to by that name as late as just before WWII. Some folks had high hopes of the community getting its own post office with the name Rosarytown when the Holy Rosary Church was erected in 1872 to serve the spiritual needs of the rural community. The church stood next to the Rosary tree at a sharp bend in Howdershell Road. The road made an “S” shaped bend in order avoid a deep hollow which drained the immediate area. Several years ago the county straightened the road by putting a culvert in the ravine. But before that the road went through what is now Rosary Tree Ct. in the Riverwood Trails Subdivision. The tree is still there giving the court its name but the church was burned down in the early 1950s. The hoped for post office never materialized and the old name for the community remained. The location of Stringtown can be thought of as the southwestern rim of the Florissant valley. If one were to locate Howdershall on a U.S. Geological Topographical map it is easy to see that Howdershell, with its southwestern end starting at Utz Road near what is now the Prairie Commons Branch of the St. Louis County Library follows along the top of a ridge more or less. It moves in a somewhat northeasterly direction as it heads towards Charbonere Road. The ridge, which averages near the 600 ft. mark in elevation, overlooks the whole Florissant valley and is high enough at points that one is able to see the Gateway Arch. This ridge formed what at one time in our distant past was the outer boundary to a prehistoric glacier lake. Running the entire length of the Florissant Valley. The southern reaches of the lake extended south of I-270 to I-70. This wide and shallow end of the lake formed the flat fields which later became the runways of Lambert field. The dimensions of the lake averaged about two miles wide and twelve miles long depending on climatic conditions. The lake naturally attracted a variety of animal life including the Missouri version of the elephant called the mastodon. A few of their remains has been discovered in the valley over the years, mostly along the steep banks of the Cold Water Creek. One such mastodon bone is on display at the St. Stanislaus Museum at the shrine in Old Town. It was this lake, long since gone, that gave the valley its rich, fertile soil. And it is the soil that attracted the first hand full of French Canadian families to settle and farm the land. And it was those families that gave the valley its name. But the Creoles were not the first to be attracted to the benefits of the valley. Apparently the valley, with its stretches of prairie broken up by wooded islands of foliage, attracted an abundance of wildlife, especially deer. In fact, it was the early Spanish in the mid 1700s that first named the region the valley of the deer and named the creek the river of the deer. It was this animal life that attracted the first people to the valley - the Indians. Evidence of various time periods of American Indian culture have been found in a variety of locations in the region. A display of a great number and variety of arrow heads and stone tools are on display at the afore mentioned museum. These artifacts were found by the hard working Jesuit brothers on the priest farm, as it was known in times past, as they worked the fertile soil to provide the needed crops for the cloistered religious community. Father DeSmet is credited for discovering an Indian burial mound on the top of the cliff at the Charboneare over looking the Missouri River in the winter of 1832 and with the help of some fellow novisiets unearth some human remains. These bones were brought back to the seminary for examination and latter returned to the mound and reburied. This mound has since then been known as DeSmet's Mound. A dining pavilion was built on it as part of the rustic complexe that gradually grew up over the years in what became known as the Villa, a place of weekly recreation for the seminary students. There is a local legend that the mound on which the Jesuits buried their dearly departed for the first seventy years was an Indian burial mound. The Indians were gone by the time the village was established although a few would wander through from time to time as the story of the massacre of 1794 attest to. There were, on occasion, bivouacs of Sac, Iowa, and other Indian hunting and fishing parties, set up in the low lands across the river in St. Charles County. They were reported to have been viewed from the Charbonere Bluff by early Florissant residents. But these Indians did not call the area home and by 1820s became rare and eventually disappeared all together. The families that first farmed the area which latter became known as Stringtown did not actually live on the land they farmed. At first they all lived in the village and came out to the fields to farm the thin strips of land granted to them by the village commandant. The story of Stringtown will continue next with an explanation of the land grants and families who received them.