When the Tappmeyers built their homestead, Creve Coeur was a farming community. Naturally, the farmers studied the weather as it determined planting, harvesting, butchering, and other essential activities. Companies who sold to farmers quickly understood that to get their name in front of their customers, they needed a permanent reminder. Some of them gave the local diner or feedstore a thermometer to hang on the wall. The national companies wanted a sturdy but inexpensive sign so they typically supplied a large, brightly colored metal sign, often circular but sometimes rectangular, with a thermometer in the center. The proprietors hung these on their outside walls.

The owners of the Creve Coeur Farmers Bank wanted to remind their neighbors about them, but they gave their thermometers to individuals, who might balk at a large metal sign on their porch. Thus, the Bank designed an elegant, small, wooden sign with the thermometer as the key component, the Bank’s name legible but not dominating, perfect for the back porch. It’s of high quality, too, as it still reports the temperature accurately.

That attention to detail was typical of the bank from its inception in 1906. In 1911, William F. Dierberg bought a controlling interest in the bank. The next year, he took over leadership of the bank when its first president, Dr. John D. Pfister, died of injuries sustained in an automobile accident, the first such fatality recorded in Creve Coeur. Under Mr. Dierberg’s leadership, the bank expanded from simply accepting deposits to financing automobiles, an activity that was a little unorthodox in the beginning. Loans created the need for the bank to insure the cars, homes, and industries it financed; thus the bank became the dominant insurance agency in the area. Eventually, the bank offered a full financial service with the addition of a Real Estate Sales Department and a Trust Department.

At first, the bank operated from a rented frame building with hitching posts in front for horses and carriages. In 1922, after the bank had accumulated assets of about $200,000, it designed and built an elegant two-story brick building at the corner of Old Ballas and Olive Street Road. It had fine fixtures of English-veined Italian marble with verd antique marble base and mahogany superstructure, but the building was also highly practical: fireproof, fully electrified, heated by steam heat, and protected by an electric burglar alarm system. In 1954, the bank moved across the street, and in 1967 moved to its current location.

The 1930s were hard on the bank. It endured two robberies in 1932, after which the employees volunteered for a ten percent pay cut – and got it. One of the robbers was caught in Paducah, KY; the papers don’t report whether he had any money. Many banks failed due to the national depression, but the Dierbergs kept the Creve Coeur Farmers Bank alive and solvent. During a bank run, William Dierberg took cash outside and doled it out from apple bushel baskets, later saying you can’t run from trouble.

Then in 1941, the president, William Dierberg, Sr., became suspicious of the cashier who was living better than his salary accounted for. When he was caught, having embezzled $45,000, Mr. Dierberg replaced it with his own funds.

The name has changed from Creve Coeur Farmers Bank to Creve Coeur Bank to First Missouri Bank in 1973 and First Bank in 1986. The Dierbergs still own and run it, but they no longer give their customers wooden thermometers.