Anne Desloge Werner Bates (photo by Clyde Thomas)

Asked what his granddad, Joseph Desloge, was like, Wesley Fordyce offers a story: “He had a factory downtown, and they used clarified lard as the lubricant. This cutting oil smelled horrible, and one of the guys was saying it had to be bad for you. So my granddad took a cup and dipped it into this lard that was full of metal shavings and totally rancid... Somebody knocked the cup out of his hand—I don’t know whether he would have drunk it or not. But he was pretty fearless.

“And that’s how he brought up his children and grandchildren,” Fordyce adds. “There was a lot of fearlessness encouraged.” They all grew up swimming in the river, for example: “Logs, catfish big as people, eddies that will suck you down to the bottom and spit you out. Nothing terrible.”

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The second son of older parents, Joseph grew up in a hotel on Washington Avenue. After school, he fought as an officer in the French artillery during World War I and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for defending the town of Vouziers. Then he came home and recreated that French village in Florissant.

His Vouziers was a 10-bedroom chateau on the bluffs of the Missouri River. The hand-carved wood paneling of the Gothic reading room on the third floor was shipped overseas from an old English parsonage; the staircase was rose marble; the family emblem, an oak tree, was carved above the door; a 4,000-square-foot ballroom was built into a hillside.

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Zoe, Joseph Jr., Bernard, and Anne Desloge all grew up at Vouziers. Anne might have been teasing, just a little, when she told a Post reporter that life there was “almost a Little House on the Prairie existence.” But it was remote, and rustic, and the neighbors were farmers. The Desloge kids roller-skated in the ballroom, and sometimes on Christmas morning they found their present had been led inside to wait for them in the gallery room, whinnying and neighing.

An industrialist, philanthropist, conservationist, historic preservationist, and sportsman, Joseph took a sharp and far-ranging interest in science and history, nature and culture. “It seemed to us that Papa chaired everything,” Joe Jr. wrote in a memoir. At Vouziers, the family entertained Russian ballerinas and Shakespearean actors, King Hussein of Jordan, and the archduke of Austria (giving him brief shelter after he was deposed by the Nazis).

Because Joseph lived in Florissant, “he was a little bit over the horizon for nice people in Ladue,” Fordyce says. “They all thought, ‘God, how can you live out there?’ People still ask me that.” But being surrounded by rural folks guarantees perspective: “There was very little snobbery involved. We were always ‘those rich people on the hill’ at first, but once they get to know that you’re a nice person, they treat you normally.”

The chateau, just west of New Halls Ferry and Shackelford roads, is now the Boeing Leadership Center, bought for a cool $7 million. But Fordyce still lives next door, with some of Missouri’s last old-growth forest shading the land between his house and the river. “The county seal has a plow on it,” he once told a reporter. “It should have a bulldozer.”

He even farmed his land for a while. He’d earned an MBA thinking he’d be working at the family’s Killark Electric company—but by the time he finished school, they’d decided to sell it. The other electric company in the family, Watlow, is owned by his second cousins.

The Desloge family’s American saga began in 1823, when Firmin René Desloge left France to work in his uncle Ferdinand Rozier’s dry goods store in Ste. Genevieve. Elise Desloge Tegtmeyer has read the early letters Firmin René sent home to France. (He copied out each letter for his files; they now fill six volumes in the Missouri History Museum archives.) “There’s an awful lot of ‘I’ll send six hogs’ heads and butter down to New Orleans,” she remarks dryly—the exception being a tender letter to his future bride, Cynthian McIlvaine, confiding that she’d captured his heart.

“I have a feeling Firmin was very careful, very methodical,” Tegtmeyer says. “My mother used to say, ‘Oh, you are being so Desloge deliberate!’ I see a lot of that in the family.”

In the New World, the Desloges traded furs, smelted lead, mined zinc and uranium, built railroads, made heat and light—and with the profits, supported just about every worthy cause in the region. Some folks just write checks; the Desloges also gave us Pelican Island; Johnson’s Shut-Ins, a boulder-strewn natural water park; and Firmin Desloge (now St. Louis University) Hospital, which first specialized in industrial accidents. Its namesake, Joseph’s father, died one of the wealthiest men in the world, but never lost his sympathy for the factory workers.

Back in 1991, the family had a reunion—400 Desloges descendants, some traveling all the way from Singapore. Steve Desloge and Ellen Desloge Gray acted the part of their ancestors, and they all took a river boat cruise to Ste. Genevieve, visited early family homes in southern Missouri. The first Firmin Desloge had settled in Potosi, where he hung out with John James Audubon, did some fur trading, began finding lead veins, and built a smelting furnace. His son Firmin Vincent “won a plot of land in a poker game and developed it into the Desloge Lead Company,” as Fordyce puts it. Firmin Vincent expanded the family’s mining operations in the Lead Belt around Bonne Terre and consolidated them into the Desloge Lead Company, which would grow into one of the largest lead mining companies in America. He had two sons, Firmin Vincent Jr. and Joseph.

Once you’ve counted the Firmins, you start on the surnames—all those families they married into, like the Clarks, Mullanphys, Stiths, Valles, Biddles, Bains, Farrars, Howards, Kennetts, Hugers (Lucie Huger wrote the history of the family in America) and Fuszes.

“I’m in the Jules Desloge branch,” Tegtmeyer says, “and that’s where all the Mullanphys are. That’s a family! The Browns of Brown Shoe Company were Mullanphy descendants—and Buster Brown was a real person. Uncle Buster! And he really did have a dog named Tige. And a stupid haircut.”

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Josephine Desloge married Lou Fusz, and before the Fuszes started selling cars, they worked for the Desloges’ lead company. Three Desloges have been Veiled Prophet queens, and Anne Kennet Farrar Desloge Werner Bates was fondly referred to as “the queen” long after the ball was over, because she was smart, stylish, funny, and irreverent. After her first husband was killed in a plane crash, she married William Maffitt Bates Jr. (yes, a Chouteau descendant, as well as a Maffitt and a Bates).

Zoe Desloge, Fordyce’s mother, had the same charm. “My dad was mostly absent, but my mom was very down to earth, very kind, generous, tolerant, utterly without prejudice or class distinctions,” Fordyce says. “She was an incredible athlete—a 12-letter girl in high school—and at a cocktail party, she could hold a broom in her hand and jump over it.”

Rick Desloge took his family’s affability into journalism, humanizing St. Louis’ corporate world with his color pieces in the St. Louis Business Journal. (His son Rick is currently touring with Wicked.) Another Desloge owned the St. Louis Stars soccer team. Anne’s cousin George Taylor Stith Desloge, known as Taylor, grew up in St. Louis Hills, not a chateau. He loved acting in community theater and was always the first out on the dance floor, but he also earned a law degree, raised seven children, and helped direct the Missouri History Museum’s growth for 35 years. (He also served on many other boards, including the Independence Center, which his cousin, Richard Stith, helped found). Taylor’s grandson and namesake, Taylor Desloge II, fell close to the family tree’s roots—he’s the Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellow in American culture studies at Washington University, with a focus on early-1900s American history and urban reform.

All those minerals in the first Firmin’s land were pure luck. The Desloges don’t forget that.

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