Pevely Glass

The yard is full of glass, this has been well documented. Most of it is tiny pieces of indeterminate trash. Vintage trash, but trash nonetheless. Occasionally, if I'm really digging, I'll kick up old medicine bottles or busted soda and beer bottles. Those are fun to find.

A couple weekends ago, when I wasn't looking for any glass, I found this while spreading some excavated dirt:

I didn't know what to make of it -- 10 ounces of PE-something. I was thinking soda or medicine (beer would have been brown/amber glass), Google wasn't much help, and I was pretty content to let this thing be a mystery. Later in the day curiosity got the better of me and I tried a little more research.

I don't remember how I figured it out, but I figured it out -- and I should have figured it out much sooner. 

It's a 10 ounce jar that contained a Pevely Dairy product, like sour cream or cottage cheese. Here's a picture I found online of an intact, 10 ounce Pevely jar:

Pretty similar, eh? It's gotta be a 10 ounce Pevely jar fragment. 

Pevely Dairy was once a massive, local dairy operation that got its start in 1887 in Pevely, MO. A farmer there named Mark Kerckhoff started running butter and milk to St. Louis, and the products' popularity grew following Kerckhoff's son Daniel winning a prize for the dairy products at the 1904 World's Fair (held at Forest Park in St. Louis, MO).

At that time, Pevely was still a small business, operating out of 1312 South 7th Street, just south of present day downtown St. Louis.  

Sanborn Map Company, St. Louis, MO, 1908 December, sheet 097 -- these buildings are long gone

The business would quickly grow, necessitating multiple larger facilities. In 1917, Pevely Dairy moved to the corner of Grand and Chouteau, which is about a mile north of my house. 

Pevely, Grand & Chouteau, looking west

The factory was expanded in 1943, 1945, 1975, 1985, and 1997. A garage was built nearby in 1928, and the smokestack, barely visible in the above pic, was built in 1943. Business was good for many, many years.

Pevely, Grand & Chouteau, looking northwest

In 2008, Pevely Dairy was bought by Prairie Farms Dairy, another prominent name in the local dairy scene. Prairie Farms closed the Grand & Chouteau factory and sold the property to St. Louis University (SLU) in 2011.

Sadly, despite being listed in the National Register of Historic Places, protests, and general public uproar, SLU tore the Pevely complex down in 2012. I wrote a 100-page graduate report on just how shitty St. Louis University is when it comes to urban land (re)development, and that was BEFORE this happened. But, SLU has deep, deep pockets and apparently threatened to move their entire medical campus to St. Louis County if St. Louis City didn't allow the demo, so...it all came down.

To be fair, the site is now home to SLU's new hospital, and a new children's hospital is currently under construction. The hospital complex is a good-looking set of buildings, albeit not the same architecture as the buildings they replaced.

Can't preserve 'em all, and there are worse things that could have happened to the property.

All that said, this little chunk of glass isn't my first connection to Pevely.

In the 1920s-1940s, Pevely Dairy had a 700-acre farm in an area known as Crescent, MO, which is about a 30 minute drive from my house down HWY 44. 300 cows, 200 employees, greenhouses, barns, the big Kerckhoff family mansion...the farm property was quite an operation.

Today, it's all gone, replaced by houses and golf courses. 

Except it's not ALL gone. Not entirely.

---

Many years ago, when Roscoe was still pretty young, I discovered that he was born to walk trails. Like, any terrain, any weather, any distance, no collar, no leash, no problems. I started replacing our trips to city parks with excursions to more primitive areas a little farther from home. 

Around 2017 I stumbled across a park along the Meramec River that wound up becoming Roscoe's 2nd home. 

At the time I didn't know that Pevely's dairy operation had been nearby, many decades ago. To me, the park was just a big suburban flood plain field next to a wooded area next to a river, with a bunch of trails running through all of it. And, a railroad track bisected the park; we always stayed on the river side of the tracks.

One day, when Roscoe wanted to keep going after our usual jaunt to the river and back, we crossed the train tracks to explore that part of the park. Just on the other side of the tracks, we were greeted by this: 

If I see an old building, I instinctively need to know its story. I went home, did some digging, and that's when I realized that the park land had, at one time, either been part of the Pevely dairy farm or adjacent to it.

The structure in the picture is one of the Pevely farm pump houses. A little further into the woods there's an old, moss-covered concrete wall that must have served some farm purpose at one time. 

Over the subsequent years, Roscoe and I walked every square inch of the lower portion of that park. All weather conditions, all terrain types, all distances. Every hike there was a great hike. 

When Roscoe got himself a little sister (Freckles), he got to show her around the park a handful of times before age caught up with him and his legs stopped cooperating. 

Puppy Freckles was as exploratory and high-energy as they come, she didn't hesitate to check out the Pevely farm remnants. 

When Freckles got herself a little brother (Farley), she carried on the tradition and showed him around the place.

Roscoe passed away almost 2 years ago and we don't visit this park and the Pevely remnants quite as often as we used to. Freckles, who's almost 6, and Farley, who's almost 2 and definitely every bit of 120 pounds, are high-energy pups that prefer running, swimming, and playing fetch; they're not laid back trail dogs like Roscoe was.

But, a year after Roscoe died we took his ashes out there to scatter some of them in the river, and I'll always think of the park as the place where I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with my buddy. Because of that, no matter how spazzy any dogs ever are, I'll take 'em there from time to time to walk the trails, splash around in the river, and sniff out what's left of the old Pevely place, just like Roscoe did. 

Finding what turned out to be old Pevely glass in the yard was kinda cool, but being reminded of the many trips Roscoe and I took to the old Pevely farm was even better.