Rodham Kenner and Pauldingville

by Bob Brail

   Most people find it very easy to lose things, whether they be eyeglasses, car keys, or cell phones. Locating these items is a rather straightforward process of looking for the actual item until it is found. Finding places that are “lost” is not so simple. Because there may be little or no physical evidence of the place's existance, the search may best be undertaken in records and documents. Such is the case of a village in western St. Charles County. The place was called Pauldingville, and the man mostly responsible for its existance was Rodham Kenner.

Little is known of Rodham Kenner's early life. He was born in Virginia on December 3, 1791. Federal censuses indicate that he lived in Fauquier County in 1820 and 1830. He was also a slave owner, with five in 1820 and six in 1830. More is known of his military career, which was brief, but long enough to eventually gain him some significant financial benefits. He enlisted at Warrenton, Fauquier County, on July 30, 1814, for three months, and he served with Capt. Seth Combs' company in Col. Camper's regiment of the Virginia militia. He was discharged after two months, in late September, even though the war was not yet over. Several years later, because he had served in the military, he would be given a pension and forty acres of bounty land.

   A few years later Kenner married for the first time. Although it is not possible to determine for certain the details of this marriage, Kenner married Elizabeth Johnson in Virginia, probably in 1817. The Kenners' son George was born there on July 22, 1818. William followed in 1827, and twins Winder and Rodham, Jr., in 1832. In an article written in 1964, Edna McElhiney Olson, a well-known local history writer in St. Charles County, states that Kenner and Johnson were married in 1837 at the Nathan Boone home near Missouriton in St. Charles County. If this were true, it would mean that all four Kenner sons had been born to a previous wife. However, engraved on the tombstone of the oldest son George are the words, “Son of Rodham and Elizabeth Johnson Kenner.” Also significant is the fact that there is no marriage of Kenner and Johnson recorded in St. Charles County.

   In 1834 Rodham Kenner and his family came from Fauquier County, Virginia, to St. Charles County for reasons that are now unknown. They lived one year in the Missouriton area. In 1835 Kenner and his wife moved to the west-central edge of St. Charles County in Callaway Township. He eventually settled just east of what is now the intersection of Highways T and N. Sometime in the latter half of the 1830's, he began his career there as a inn or tavern keeper on what was then called the Boones Lick Road. This road stretched from St. Charles to Franklin. The road had initially been used by the Boones in the early 1800's to travel to their lick northwest of Franklin, but in the years after the Louisianna Purchase, many settlers began using it to trek westward. One newspaper account from Franklin in 1819 recorded that “immense numbers of wagons, carriages, carts, etc. with families, have for some time past been daily arriving.  During the month of October it is stated that no less than 271 wagons, four-wheeled carriages and 55 two-wheeled carriages and carts passed near St. Charles, bound principally for Boon’s Lick.” In 1821, travel on the new Santa Fe Trail began at the western end of the Boones Lick Road, and traffic greatly increased. Much of this traffic passed by Kenner's tavern.

 

   Eventually Kenner's tavern became a popular stopping place along the Boones Lick Road, and he “made a fortune.” An 1846 court document states that it was “commonly known as the Pauldingville Inn.” The establishment had twenty-six rooms and was noted for its good food. Senator Thomas Hart Benton was said to have stopped there. Kenner dug an artesian well near the tarvern and then built a structure over it with benches under cover. A boardwalk stretched from the well to the tavern. Soon people came to believe that the water was effective in treating rheumatism, so some began to visit to “take the water.”

   Kenner, a talented fiddler, must have been an ideal host. According to remarks made at the D. A. R. dedication of a granite marker placed at the location of Kenner's tavern in 1913, it was “[s]uch a jolly place to put up at in the days of yore where the weary and worn traveler received a hearty welcome. Mr. Kenner, when he heard the stage coach approaching, or the dogs with their bark of welcome, would take his seat outside the door, his fiddle in hand, and play 'Money Musk,' 'Arkansas Traveller,' or some other lively tune; the stage coach would draw up with a great flourish and cracking of whip, and everyone would tumble out midst hearty cheers.” The writer of Kenner's obituary stated that when visitors returned to the tavern, even “if in 5 or 10 years after, Mr. Kenner remembered and saluted each by name, for he had a wonderful lmemory for faces and names. It was never at fault.”

   Kenner was also a man noted for his sense of humor, “full of jollity and jokes.” According to one story, Kenner's practice was to give clergy a fifty percent discount. On one occasion, after enjoying a night's lodging and breakfast the next morning, a minister was shocked when Kenner gave him his bill and said, "Why, Mr. Kenner you have charged me full fare and I am a minister." Kenner replied, "Yes, for last night, I watched you and you did not say your prayers before laying down, but went to bed like a sinner and you must pay like a sinner." 

Rodham Kenner

   It was soon after he began his career as an inn keeper that Kenner started his plans for Pauldingville. In 1833, a resident of Warren County, Walter Dillon, had purchased 160 acres just across the line in Section 6, Township 46N, Range1E, of St. Charles County, including much of what would become Pauldingville. It is not known how Dillon and Kenner met, but the sixty lots of Pauldingville were laid out by Kenner and Dillon in 1836. The lots, about sixty-five by one hundred feet, were located on both sides of the Boones Lick Road. Ten of the lots were located east of the current Pauldingville Cemetery and fifty to the west. By March, 1837, lots had been sold to seven individuals. In 1838 Kenner purchased about 195 acres in Section 6 from the government; on the same day, Dillon purchased eighty-five more. By that time the two men owned at least two-thirds of Section 6. (Dillon would be declared insane later in 1838, and Kenner would act as his guardian for the next ten years).

   During the next twenty years, Pauldingville would come to have a general store (possibly called Johnson and Sedgewick's) and a blacksmith shop, besides a shoemaker and a tobacconist. In 1852 the Pauldingville Masonic Lodge was organized. Although the 1860 federal census notes a post office in Pauldingville, there is no other documentary evidence for the existance of a post office there. In the early 1850's, the St. Charles Western Plank Road Company incorporated. The road location was to be determined by a majority of stockholders. Books for subscription opened at Pauldingville, among other towns. However, this project failed within a few years.

   The railroad eventually was the death of both Kenner's tavern and Pauldingville. The North Missouri Railroad Company was incorporated on March 3, 1851. It was called “the great central rail route to the West.” Because most of the incorporators were from St. Charles County, originally the railroad was to commence in St. Charles, but plans were changed so the tracks began in St. Louis. Rodman Kenner was one of thirty county men, the “Friends of the North Missouri Railway,” who attended a November, 1852, meeting in St. Charles no doubt to determine, among other things, the route of the new railroad. Simply put, Kenner and Pauldingville lost out when it was decided that the train would take a more northerly route when construction began in 1854.

   Pauldingville, and Kenner's tavern, would miss the railroad's new route by less than four miles, as it passed to the north of the village by 1855. Millville would be the name of the new town, although the post office that opened in 1858 would somewhat confusingly be called Snow Hill. Millville was laid out by J. A. Davis, a local farmer, in 1856. It had thirty-four lots and, most importantly, a train station. In 1931, a eighty-three year old former resident of the area remembered that Pauldingville “loaded up and moved to the new[railroad] station at Millville.” Within twenty years, Millville was renamed Foristell.

   It appears that Kenner's tavern ceased operations about the time the railroad reached Millville. Although some biographical sketches state that he operated the tavern until his death, documentary evidence suggests otherwise. For example, in the 1850 federal census Kenner identifies himself as both a farmer and innkeeper. However, in the 1860 federal census Kenner identifies himself simply as a farmer. Also, in the 1863 federal tax assessments, Kenner is not taxed for income from the sale of “retail liquor,” although several other men in the county are. Because it is highly unlikely that the operator of a tavern would not be selling liquor, it seems safe to say that Kenner was out of the innkeeping business by this time. It is also possible that the death of Elizabeth Kenner contributed to Kenner's decision to close the tavern. Kenner married Eliza J. Swope, a widow, in Fulton, Missouri, on February 12, 1856.

   Pauldingville spent several years in decline. Although a one-room school, Meridian School, was was built just west of the village in the latter half of the 1800's and was used until the middle of the 1900's, the village as such eventually disappeared. In Campbell's Gazeteer of Missouri, published in 1874, Pauldingville is not even listed as a minor town in St. Charles County, in spite of the fact that other very small communities such as Dalhoff, Missouriton, and Schmucker's Store are described. In an 1875 atlas of St. Charles County, the town map showing the original platting is included, but Pauldingville is not named on a larger map of the township. In a 1905 county atlas, the town is indicated on the township map, but the smaller village map on the next page shows only two dwellings and a Baptist church, which closed in 1915. Newspaper articles refer to Pauldingville well into the twentieth century, but these instances seem to indicate more a general area than a specific village.

   Like so many other Virginia natives living in St. Charles County, Kenner was a slave owner yet his attitude toward slavery seemed to change over time. Court documents and other official papers from the era provide the names and ages of several of Kenner's slaves. In 1854 Kenner owned Melissa, who was about fifty at the time, and her two sons Aaron (11) and Eli (10). In an 1863 document, former Kenner slaves Henry (44), George (25), and Thomas (21) are named. Another Kenner slave, Frank, is named in an 1862 court case. Kenner apparently came to Missouri with two slaves and never increased that number until the early 1850's, owning nine in 1852. By 1859, he owned only one.

   Like another Virginian before him, Thomas Jefferson, Kenner had no difficulty proclaiming liberty for oppressed people while keeping slaves himself. In 1851 Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth came to the United States and gave a seven-month speaking tour, advocating freedom from Austrian and Russian oppression for Hungarians. His efforts “unleash[ed] a brief outburst of pro-Hungarian emotions” in the United States, including St. Charles County. In April of 1852, Rodman Kenner was one of about twenty county men who formed a committee in response to Kossuth's speeches. This apparently included a financial contribution by each of these men. How ironic that Kenner would advocate liberty for the Hungarians while owning nine slaves himself.

   Eventually, however, Kenner would have a change of heart about slavery. In a letter he wrote in January, 1873, Kenner stated, “I sent 5 negro men into the Union Army and should have gone in myself if I had been young enough, one year before the proclamation.” If this reference is to the Emancipation Proclamation, Kenner sent the five men in early 1862. Kenner did sign an oath of allegiance to the United States early in the war. Henry Kenner, born in Virginia, and George Kenner and Thomas Kenner, born in St. Charles County, enlisted in Union army late in 1863. They are all identified as former slaves of Rodham Kenner. In 1860 Kenner owned three male adult slaves but owned none the next year. So, although, there doesn't seem to be much evidence to support Kenner's statement about “one year before the proclamation,” it does look as though Kenner freed his slaves before the war started, and that at least three enlisted in the Union army. (The previous mentioned slave Frank may have been a fourth.) Although there is no record, Kenner, who was worth over $30,000 in 1860, may also have purchased a few slaves and then freed them to enlist.

   Toward the end of his life, Kenner donated two acres in Pauldingville for a church and paid the entire cost, $1600, of its construction. The Congregation Church, the first in St. Charles County, was organized in 1872, and Kenner his wife were charter members. Kenner was elected a deacon soon after. In 1885 the congregation still had thirty-five members, but the church closed in 1889. Eventually it was a Baptist church. The last services were held there about 1915.

   Rodham Kenner died on June 17, 1876, and was buried in the cemetery next to the church he had provided his community. Today nothing is left of that church, and there is almost no evidence of Pauldingville either, other than the the small D. A. R. stone monument marking the location of Kenner's tavern. The cemetery, hidden behind a mass of brush and trees, is no longer visible from the road. Kenner's grave monument is in pieces and weathering away, the last physical trace of an apparently forgotten man. The truth is that Rodham Kenner was an important figure in St. Charles County, especially in the years before the Civil War, and that the village of Pauldingville once echoed with the sounds of wagons, horses, and travellers going back and forth along the Boone's Lick Road, passing in front of Kenner's tavern.

Sources: 1860 Slave Census (ancestry.com); 1875 Atlas Map of St. Charles County, Missouri; 1905 Atlas Map of St. Charles County, Missouri; Along the Booneslick Road (Dan Rothwell); “The Booneslick Road in St. Charles County,” Missouri Historical Review, October 1953; Booneslickroad.org; Campbell's Gazeteer of Missouri (Robert A. Campbell); Cityoftruesdalemo.org; Der Demokrat (digital.shsmo.org); Federal Population Censuses; War of 1812 Pension Files (Fold3.com); Fulton Telegraph (digital.shsmo.org); Heritage Treasures: An Anthology of Articles From the “St. Charles County Heritage”; History of St.Charles, Montgomery, and Warren Counties, Missouri; “Hungarian Americans” (Wikipedia.org); “Lajos Kossuth” (britannica.com); General Land Office Records (glorecords.blm.gov); Land Records: Recorder of Deeds Office (St. Charles County); Lion of the Valley (James Primm); Missouri Judicial Records Database (s1.sos.mo.gov): Missouri Post Offices, 1804-1981 (Robert G.Schultz); Missouri Supreme Court Historical Database (s1.sos.mo.gov); Missouri's Union Provost Marshall Papers, 1861-1866 (sos.mo.gov); Pauldingville file (Boone-Duden Historical Society); Pioneer Families of Missouri (William Bryan and Robert Rose); St. Charles County Place Names, 1928-1945 (shsmo.org); St. Charles County State Census for 1852 (Boone-Duden Historical Society); St. Charles County Tax Records (St. Charles County Historical Society); Small Glories (Dan Brown); U. S. IRS Tax Assessments Lists, 1862-1918 (ancestry.com); Warrenton Banner (digital.shsmo.org); “Westward Along the Boone's Lick Trail in 1826,” Missouri Historical Review, January 1945 (digital.shsmo.org).