Frenchtown in St. Charles grew from early French settlement and became known for North Second Street’s busy shops, where butchers, bakers, tinsmiths, and saddle makers worked and often lived above their businesses, while farmers brought grain to a mill in the 900 block and stayed at a boarding house at French and Second Street. Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, a fur trader of French and African descent who founded Chicago, spent his last ten years in a brick house at Third and Deactur Street and was buried in St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery. The neighborhood is noted for the Midwest’s largest concentration of French-Colonial architecture, with simple buildings from about 1820-1850 that have extended main roofs over raised open-air galleried front porches and double front doors leading to living and dining rooms. Industrial growth came with the St. Charles Car Company, organized in 1872 and bought by the American Car Foundry in 1899, whose works stood between Second Street and the Missouri River; by the 1890s it employed more than 1800 men, by 1910 at least one member of every household in Frenchtown worked there, in World War I it made more than 50,000 army escort wagons, and in World War II it produced hospital cars and eleven tanks a day. Lewis and Clark dined at a Frenchtown home before leaving on their western exploration, and their journal described St. Charles as having about 100 houses and about 450 inhabitants, chiefly French. The arrival of the railroad and a large wave of German immigration in the 1830s were spurred by published accounts of the new frontier, and by the mid 1800s Frenchtown had become a city within the city.
