kknowles-I found this on another website, and it provides some good info about St. Gen. They had 'The Great Flood' in 1993 and the town scrambled to 'hold back the water' so that these great old French houses wouldn't be ruined. Their sandbags worked.kknowles wrote:Since you are a History Prof was hoping you could tell me the significance of St Genevieve that is used in a song off of Trace. What is her story and why would she "hold back the water'?
Here's a vacation trip you hadn't thought of, and don't lie and say you had: St. Genevieve, Missouri, along the Mississippi River about an hour south of St. Louis. We admit we'd never heard of it either -- until we heard Son Volt's eerily fascinating song "Tear-Stained Eye," which tells of the 1993 St. Genevieve flood. The town itself is actually the first acknowledged settlement west of the Mississippi, founded by French settlers around 1725, and is one of the rare places in America where you can still see the French "poteaux en terre" style of house construction, which means "posts in ground." Don't lie and say you knew that either. To build houses in this style, vertical posts were placed directly into a deep trench and earth was packed in to hold them upright. The spaces between the posts would soon become walls, filled with a combination of stones, earth and plaster. These walls were then given a finished coat of plaster on the interior and exterior, and then whitewashed. Tall, narrow openings were filled with casement windows, and had exterior shutters. At least two-thirds of the first St. Louis buildings were constructed this way, but most are gone now. The Amoreux House in St. Genevieve is one of the fine examples of this almost extinct style. While there, be sure to see the Bolduc House, designated a National Historic Landmark, built in 1770 and moved to its present site in 1784. Regarded as the first, most authentically restored Creole house in the nation, it's accurately restored with the original 18th century furnishings, stockade fence, frontier kitchen, living quarters, 18th century culinary and medicinal herb gardens and grape arbor.
