The Desloge family, (/dəˈloʊʒ/)[1] centered mostly in Missouri and especially at St. Louis,[2] rose to wealth through international commerce, sugar refining, oil drilling, fur trading, mineral mining, saw milling, manufacturing, railroads, real estate, and riverboats. The family has funded hospitals and donated large tracts of land for public parks and conservation.[3][4]

History

The family's progenitor was Firmin René Desloge, a descendant of French nobility[5][6] who emigrated to Missouri in 1823 to join his uncle Jean Ferdinand Rozier who had arrived in Missouri in 1810 with Rozier's business partner John James Audubon.[6][7][8]

The family's businesses in lead and mercantile in Missouri date from around 1824, when Firmin Rene Desloge built his own smelting furnace as an extension of his Potosi, Missouri, mercantile business. They grew to include the Missouri Lead Mining and Smelting Company in 1874 and the Desloge Lead Company in 1876, inclusively one of the largest and oldest lead mining companies in America.[9][10]

The family moved to St. Louis in 1861, at the outset of the American Civil War, after various attacks at Potosi, Bonne Terre and upon the family lead mining works by both Federal and Confederate armies who sought lead for weapons.

The main line and connections of the Mississippi River & Bonne Terre Railway, built to serve lead mines in southeastern Missouri

Firmin Rene Desloge's son, Firmin V. Desloge II, expanded mining operations and expanded management to Bonne Terre, Missouri; a charter was requested and granted to the Missouri Lead and Smelting Company on June 5, 1874. The corporate name was later changed to "The Desloge Lead Company" on February 21, 1876. Three shafts were sunk during 1876 and 1877 and a new mill was built. In 1886, a fire destroyed the concentrating mill plant and damaged the rest of surface plant of the Desloge Lead Company.[11] Rather than rebuild, Desloge II sold the firm to the St. Joseph Lead Company. In 1887, the land was cleared and company houses for his staff were constructed at the location which became known as Deslogetown: present-day Desloge, Missouri.[9] Desloge II then founded a new company, the Desloge Consolidated Lead Company.[12][13]

To serve his mines, Desloge II also built the first railroads to penetrate the disseminated lead field of St. Francois County, Missouri: the Desloge Railway, the Mississippi River and Bonne Terre Railway[14] and then the Valley Railroad. Desloge II was also involved with the development of the Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad (aka the Iron Mountain Railroad) from St. Louis, Missouri, to Texarkana, Arkansas. The St. Joseph Lead Company built a 13.5-mile narrow gauge railroad from the mines to a junction with the Iron Mountain Railroad at Summit in Washington County.[15] St. Joe paid two-thirds of the construction costs; the Desloge Company the rest.

Around 1916, the Desloge Consolidated Lead Company moved its corporate offices from Desloge, Missouri, to the Rialto Building in downtown St. Louis. While "St. Louis, with its French ancestry, has been noted as a fur capital, more money passed through St. Louis as a result of the lead business in Missouri than did because of the fur business", wrote Doe Run Company CEO Jeffry Zelm.[16] The oldest St. Louis-based lead family is Desloge.[17]

Firmin V Desloge, IV owned and was President of Smokey Oil Company.[18]

In 1922, Desloge II's grandson Louis Desloge (from Jules Desloge) founded Watlow — the name alludes to low-watt heaters to replace steam heat — to manufacture electric heating elements for the shoe industry. In 2011, Watlow, still a Desloge family business, employed 2,000 employees in 13 factories in the United States, Mexico, Europe and Asia; had sales offices in 16 countries; and distributed globally. In 2021, the family sold a majority stake in Watlow to Tinicum LP, a private-equity firm.[19][20]

Desloge II's son, Joseph Desloge, designed an industry-specialty electric fuse that would "kill the arc" and founded Killark Electric in 1913. Joseph Desloge also owned Minerva Oil (a confusing misnomer as it was primarily mining zinc and fluorspar); founded Louisiana Manufacturing Company and Atlas Manufacturing Company; and pursued fluorspar mining in southeastern Illinois. Joseph Desloge's son Joseph Jr. owned uranium mines near Moab, Utah, which he and his partner sold to General Electric; he also made money in natural gas exploration in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania.[21]

The Desloge family entertained Russian ballerinas and Shakespearean actors, King Hussein of Jordan, the exiled Chancellor of Austria Kurt Schuschnigg (deposed by the Nazis in 1938 and then incarcerated; freed May 1945 and came to America),[22][23] and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.[24]

Desloge II's new company operated until 1929, when it was sold to the St. Joe Lead Company for $18,000,000($306,767,442 today[25]). "With the absorption of the Desloge concern by the St. Joseph Lead Company, one of the oldest mining companies of the district goes out of existence as a company."[26][27][28] The sale made the family worth more than $52 million,[29] alongside W. K. Vanderbilt ($52 million) and A. W. Mellon ($50 million) but only half as wealthy as the Astors ($100 million).[30] Desloge II died that same year, one of the wealthiest men in the world.[30]

Society

Three members of the Desloge family have been "Queen of Love and Beauty" at the Veiled Prophet Ball, a debutante ball held in December in St. Louis: Anne Kennett Farrar Desloge (daughter of Joseph Desloge, Sr.) in 1946, her cousin and goddaughter Diane Waring Desloge (daughter of William L. Desloge) in 1962,[31] and Katherine Falk Desloge (daughter of Stephen F. Desloge) in 2013.[32][33]

Reputed Kennedy connection

Durie Malcolm, wife of Firmin V. Desloge IV, was long rumored to have been briefly married to John F. Kennedy in 1947 in Palm Beach, Florida. Accessed FBI reports under FOI request lend weighty evidence of the accuracy of the marriage.[34][35][36][37][38] In 1998, Malcolm's sister-in-law, Mrs. William L. Desloge, endorsed the story in a personal interview: "Of course it's true, we were all there at the parties in Palm Beach with them."[39]

Philanthropy

The 1932 bequest of Desloge II funded the Firmin Desloge Hospital, today known as St. Louis University Hospital;[40] a separate bequest one year later from his wife, Lydia Desloge, built a Desloge Chapel at the hospital.[41] Desloge II willed his original 47 acres of his hand-dug pits of the original lead mining operations and the deeply rutted wagon tracks on a property in Washington County. The family then donated this land for a park, today named Firmin Desloge Park, and dedicated it to the mining families in the area.[42]

In 1955, Joseph Desloge donated to the state of Missouri some 2,400 acres of land acquired over 17 years in Reynolds County.[43] The land, which included a shut-in region and more than two miles of river frontage, today composes the bulk of Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park.[44] He continued donating money to improve the park.[45] Desloge also donated land for Sunset Park in north St. Louis County on the Missouri River; and sold to St. Louis County the 2,300-acre Pelican Island in the middle of the Missouri River (for just $91 an acre[46]) as a nature preserve.[47]

References

    1. ↑ The article is the condensed version of 900-page historical monograph supported by materials at historical societies, over 230 bibliographic sources under ISBN, with copyright and Library of Congress application
    2. ↑ Stevens, Walter B. St. Louis The Fourth City 1764–1911. 2 vols. St. Louis-Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1909 and 1911.
    3. ↑ History of Southeast Missouri. Robert Sidney Douglass, Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1912
    4. ↑ Missouri Historical Society Archives, St. Louis, MO, Desloge Family Collection, (Item A0378)
    5. ↑ "Descendance de Joseph-Gilles Desloge". 2 pp. typewritten, n.d. Translated by Rosemary T. Power. Missouri Historical Society Archives, Joseph Desloge Collection
    6. 1 2 Huger, Lucie Furstenberg. The Desloge Family in America. St. Louis: Nordman Printing Co., 1959
    7. ↑ Sharpe, Mary Rozier and James, Louis, Between the Gabouri, History of the Rozier Family, 1981
    8. ↑ Arthur, Stanley Clisy. Audubon: An Intimate Life of the American Woodsman, 1937
    9. 1 2 Desloge Consolidated Lead Company records at Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, MO
    10. ↑ Thomas A. Rickards. A History of American Mining, Maple Press Co., New York, 1937
    11. ↑ Bouchard, W. L., A Trip Through Bonne Terre Mines and Surface Operations, published by The Lead Belt News, Flat River, St. Francois Co. MO, Fri. March 4, 1949.
    12. ↑ HISTORY OF THE LEAD BELT OF ST. FRANCOIS COUNTY MISSOURI By A. J. Norwine (1924)
    13. ↑ History of St. Joe Lead Company http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mostfran/mine_history/stjoe_history.htm
    14. ↑ Sullivan, John J., History of St. Joe and Desloge Railway and Missouri River and Bonne Terre Railroad, handwritten, Railroads Collection, Desloge Railway, Missouri Historical Society archives
    15. ↑ Missouri Short Line Railroad
    16. ↑ McHenry, Robert E. (2006). Chat Dumps of The Missouri Lead Belt.
    17. ↑ "The History of the Desloge Family in America", by Christopher Desloge, lulu.com (2013). Yale University professor and Director of French American history on the American Frontier Jay Gitlin (Faculty: Environmental History at Yale Archived January 27, 2012, at the Wayback Machine) called "The History of the Desloge Family in America" "one of the most serious and major contributions on the subject…a foundation of work for thousands of academics and historians", in his foreword to 2012 "Desloge Chronicles". Missouri History Museum, Research and Reference Building, St. Louis, Missouri.
    18. ↑ Obituary Firmin V Desloge, IV, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 23, 1970, accessed Newspapers.com January 22, 2022.
    19. ↑ Watlow, one of St. Louis' biggest manufacturers, to be acquired by private investment firm
    20. ↑ "Tinicum L.P. Acquires Controlling Interest in Watlow | Watlow". www.watlow.com. Retrieved October 14, 2021.
    21. ↑ Joseph Desloge Jr., Passport To Manhood, 1995, p102
    22. ↑ Missouri Historical Society Archives, St. Louis, MO, Joseph Desloge Collection (Item A0380)
    23. ↑ Cooperman, Jeannette (August 20, 2015). "The Desloge Family: Getting the Lead Out". St. Louis Magazine.
    24. ↑ Missouri Historical Society, William L. Desloge, President
    25. ↑ 1634–1699: McCusker, J. J. (1997). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700–1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800–present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800–". Retrieved May 28, 2023.
    26. ↑ May 31, 1929, The Lead Belt News
    27. ↑ McHenry, Robert E. Chat Dumps of The Missouri Lead Belt, St Francois County. With an Illustrated History of the Lead Companies that Built Them, Flat River, Bonne Terre, Desloge, River Mines, Leadwood, Elvins, Leadington, self-published, 2006.
    28. ↑ Thompson, Henry C. Our Lead Belt Heritage. Flat River, Mo., 1955
    29. ↑ Probated will of Lydia Desloge, source Farmington (Missouri) Press, December 1932
    30. 1 2 "List of the Richest Men in the World", The New York Times, May 20, 1923, accessed by ProQuest Historical Newspapers, via St. Louis County Library.
    31. ↑ "*Diane Desloge veiled prophet queen". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. October 3, 1962. p. 1.
    32. ↑ "The Court: Veiled Prophet Ball | Town&Style". January 8, 2014.
    33. ↑ "VP Ball 2014 | ST LOUIS STYLE". Archived from the original on March 26, 2019. Retrieved March 26, 2019.
    34. ↑ US Dept of Justice, FBI, Freedom of Information Act request no.1371232-001, December 11, 2019, number 1371232-001
    35. ↑ Memoranda to FBI Director Hoover, 11-14-1961, etc
    36. ↑ "The Press: An American Genealogy". Time. September 28, 1962.
    37. ↑ Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour Hersh, Little Brown, 1998
    38. ↑ The Smoking Gun http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/tale-jacks-first-wife
    39. ↑ First Person Interview and witnessed; published in History of the Desloge Family in America, Christopher D Desloge, p. 212, 2013, accessed at the Missouri History Museum, 2017
    40. ↑ "The Southeast Missourian - Google News Archive Search". Retrieved August 2, 2015.
    41. ↑ Missouri History Museum, fully executed bequest documents in the possession of the Missouri Historical Society Archives, St. Louis, MO, Joseph Desloge Collection, http://www.mohistory.org/files/archives_guides/Guide_to_the_Archival_Collections_A-Z.pdf (Item A0380)"legal contracts concerning the building and endowment of the Firmin Desloge Hospital"
    42. ↑ Christopher Desloge, Desloge Chronicles, lulu, 2010 pp 757
    43. ↑ Missouri History Museum, http://collections.mohistory.org/resourceMgr/103225.html
    44. ↑ "Johnson's Shut-ins State Park | Missouri State Parks". www.missouri-vacations.com. Archived from the original on June 20, 2008.
    45. ↑ "Johnson Shutins, Auctioneers, and Joe Desloge. - St. Louis Auctions, St. Louis AuctioneerAuction St. Louis". auctionstlouis.com. Retrieved August 2, 2015.
    46. ↑ Joseph Desloge, Jr. Passport To Manhood, 1995, p.18 & 103
    47. ↑ Christopher Desloge, Desloge Chronicles - Tale of Two Continents, lulu, 2010, pp 758
    • Southeast Missouri Mining and Milling. Doe Run Company. 2004
    • Potosi (Missouri) Historical Society
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