Downtown St. Louis hides a time capsule with curtains. The Campbell House Museum, built in 1851 on fashionable Lucas Place, was the home of fur trader and businessman Robert Campbell and his wife Virginia — and it survives today as one of the most completely documented Victorian interiors in America.
When the house became a museum in 1943, an extraordinary share of the Campbells’ own furniture, carpets, portraits and household objects came with it, matched against period photographs so precise that rooms can be arranged almost exactly as the family left them. The result is the grandest Gilded Age house tour in the city: parlor, dining room and bedrooms glowing with 1880s St. Louis at its most prosperous.
Every downtown walk should detour to Locust Street.
Campbell House Museum is at 1508 Locust Street. Tour hours at campbellhousemuseum.org.
