AFRICAN AMERICAN MINERS AND NEIGHBORHOODS IN CHELTENHAM / DOGTOWN

Information found in:
DISCOVERING AFRICAN AMERICAN ST. LOUIS: A GUIDE TO HISTORIC SITES

Second edition
By John A. Wright
St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002
page 99

African Americans, along with settlers of English, German, French, and Irish descent, were early residents of the Hill section of St. Louis, now the city's principal Italian neighborhood. Blacks came to the area in the 1880s to work in the local clay mines. Most lived in the Fairmount District around the mines, where by 1890 terra cotta and brick industries had sprung up along the Frisco and Missouri-Pacific railroad tracks. Two settlements formed the nucleus of the community: one near the Pattison Avenue Baptist Church, 5232 Pattison Avenue, which was organized in 1897; the other near the Pentecostal Church on Sublette near Manchester. By 1903, more than three hundred black laborers worked in factories in the Hill area.