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.

Missouri’s hot summer days and dark winter afternoons cry out for air circulation and light. Before electricity, transom windows supplied both.

Fortunately for its inhabitants, Tappmeyer Homestead has a transom in almost every room. Downstairs, where the ceilings are 10’ 6”, the transoms are large; upstairs where the ceilings are lower and sometimes sloped, the transoms are smaller, but all serve the same function.

The windows, which are known as early as the fourteenth century, get their name from the transom, a transverse structural beam or bar separating a door from a window above it. The windows are the width of the door and, in older homes, open to provide ventilation. (In modern homes, transoms provide light or architectural accents but aren’t necessary for air flow so don’t open.)

Most transoms open from a hinge on the bottom or top. A chain determines how far the window will open and a long pole mounted on the doorframe releases the latch that keeps the transom closed. Less commonly, transoms open from the side, just as a door does. These allow the user to determine how wide to open the window and provide the greatest amount of airflow. Tappmeyer’s transoms open from the side.

The doors and transoms in the formal parlor and the family living room are designed opposite one another so that when open, the house gets as much air circulation as possible. The family parlor also has a transom over the door to the original kitchen and another from the kitchen to the porch. The hall door to the porch has one too. The transoms over exterior doors allow air in and the interior ones allow it circulate through the house.

Upstairs, the transoms are over the hall doors to the bedrooms to let in as much natural light as possible, which is why they are sometimes called “Borrowed Lights.” They, too, open to circulate air from the windows through the sleeping areas.

We often think of a high chair as a simple chair with long legs to raise it high enough for an adult to feed the baby easily. Indeed, most high chairs are exactly that, but through the years, designers experimented with all sorts of features.

Very early high chairs, dating from the 18th century, often consisted of a small chair atop a storage cabinet. These were difficult to move, so they gave way to chairs on long legs, but innovation didn’t stop there.

Some designers resisted the idea of single-purpose furniture and wanted expensive high chairs to serve several purposes. The Victorians delighted in convertible chairs, ones whose legs could collapse and turn into rockers or strollers. Perhaps the oddest combination came later in the 1930s: Lammerts 1933-34 catalogue features an expensive high chair that came with a porcelain insert of pot and lid so that it could convert from a station for feeding (with the lid down) to one for eliminating (lid raised). The chamber pot was removable for cleaning.

Mostly, though, families were content with high chairs designed to keep the child
safe and confined. They wanted three features: a chair high enough for an adult to
comfortably feed a baby, a tray on which to place food, either for spoon-feeding or
for the baby to feed herself, and a footrest for stability. Of these, the footrest made
the biggest difference to the child. Without it, she must hold herself steady, destabilizing her core muscles, and making eating difficult; with it, she can relax and focus on eating, which improves motor skills and eating habits and lessens the chance of choking.

Tappmeyer has three high chairs in its collection, though none are original to the
house. They all have footrests and feeding trays (one is missing its tray) and date
from the late 19th to early 20th century, the heyday of manufactured furniture, a time of innovations in machinery and materials that made furniture affordable. Before the Civil War, each piece of furniture was handmade and expensive. After it, mills made legs, chair backs, etc., which furniture makers combined into finished pieces. When the price came down for adult furniture, it made it possible for families to afford high chairs as well. The late 1800s and early 1900s saw many elegant high chairs, often with high-end furniture details like caning, spoon carving, exotic woods, and turned legs.

Tappmeyer’s sleekly elegant phone allowed subscribers to speak to others in the
community and even to someone in St. Louis, a long-distance call. Our phone,
donated by Ann and Bob Kallemeier, is the 1909 version of Western Electric’s model number 317. Its box boasts well-finished oak, a Picture Frame Front, and nickel-plated metalwork. To save construction costs, this phone was designed to be used on a party line: the linemen strung a single wire from house to house, including as many as ten phones on the line before reaching the exchange.

To use our phone, a caller stood in front of it, raised the receiver, and rotated the
crank, which activated the dry magnets inside the box, sending a signal to the
central switchboard located in the back room of the Dierberg’s grocery. Some
companies allowed the signal to activate every phone on the line but others varied
the frequencies so that only the switchboard was alerted. However, when the
operator completed the call, every phone on the line was activated, so subscribers
quickly learned to recognize their unique ring and ignore the others.

Placing the call was itself a social activity. The caller would give the operator a
number or simply the name of the person she wanted to speak to. In slow times, the operator might chat for a minute or pass along news while making the connection, so even if no one answered the phone, there had been a social interaction. Once connected, the people speaking had to remember that security was nonexistent: anyone on the line could (and some did) listen in without identifying themselves.

Creve Coeur got phone service in 1906 when a group of civic-minded (and
undoubtedly profit-minded) citizens incorporated the Creve Coeur Mutual
Telephone Company (CCMT). Because it was a mutual company and subscribers
were also owners, each prospective subscriber was required to buy a share for $25 (now a whopping $769), an investment that paid off handsomely in 1931 when Southwestern Bell paid $600 per share ($11,400 in today’s purchasing power). By then, the CCMT had rented office space on the second floor of the Creve Coeur Farmers Bank at Old Ballas and Olive.

When Bell bought the CCMT, it immediately replaced the wall phones like ours with dial phones, which sat on a desk or a table. Creve Coeur, always a leader, became the second dial phone system in St. Louis County, even though there were fewer than 500 users in the area.

As Bell bought the independent telephone companies, it regularized the phone
numbers so that all began with a two-letter exchange followed by a four-digit
number (for example, OLive 6500 or FOrest 1234). In the 1960s, the phone
companies stopped printing the letters, though people continued using them
informally for years. Even now, Laura Dierberg Ayers remembers her Tappmeyer grandparents’ number: HEmpstead 4-4395. Many people remember favorite phone numbers, but listening for one’s own unique ring, standing to make or receive a call, and chats with the operator have become a distant memory.