Emerson Center · Missouri History Museum
Mill Creek Valley: The Soul of St. Louis
The neighborhood that anchored Black St. Louis from the 19th century until the 1959 demolition — told through the people who lived there.
- Opens
- September 21, 2024
- Closes
- December 31, 2026
- Curator
- Gwen Moore, Curator of Urban Landscape & Community Identity
From the 1870s until 1959, Mill Creek Valley was the densest Black neighborhood in the Midwest. Churches, businesses, schools, and 20,000 residents — bulldozed in a single coordinated act of urban renewal. This exhibit returns the neighborhood to its full scale and refuses the polite version of the story.
What you'll see
Photographs from the Sievers and Polk-Stuart collections. Oral histories recorded with residents and their descendants. Maps that show what was demolished, building by building. And a wall-length reckoning with the federal, state, and municipal decisions that made the demolition possible.
We did not leave Mill Creek. Mill Creek was taken from us.
Gallery
Related programs
Museum · Sun, May 31 · 10:00am – 12:00pm
Mill Creek Valley Walking Tour
A guided walk through the bulldozed neighborhood's surviving boundaries, with maps and photographs.
Society · Fri, Jun 12 · 7:00pm – 8:30pm
St. Louis Historians Speakers Series
A new lecture series featuring local historians on the long backstory of contemporary St. Louis.
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Washington Park Cemetery Card Index
Name-index cards from the historically Black cemetery in Berkeley, MO, operated 1920–1989.
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Sievers Studio Collection
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Loyal Legion Portrait Albums
Studio portraits of Civil War veterans who became members of the Loyal Legion in the decades after the war.
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Clark Family Collection, 1766–1991
Manuscripts from the William Clark family — correspondence, business records, and frontier-era documents spanning more than two centuries.