Esley Hamilton, the preservation historian for St. Louis County, wore his over-big glasses and tweed jacket
to a recent meeting between local preservationists and officials from the Missouri Department of Transportation.

The mild-mannered Clark Kent outfit and job title disguises Hamilton’s power. He has been known to change
the course of highways – bending steel, if you will – by the force of his historical documentation.

Participants met that day to discuss which houses in the impending path of rebuilt U.S. Highway 40 (Interstate
64) were eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Making the list does not assure that a building will
be spared, but it helps.

At risk were three homes on Bennett Avenue, a street of unpretentious ranch houses on the north side of Highway
40 near Laclede Station Road. The neighborhood had already been rejected by the state preservation offices as
insufficiently historic to qualify for the register.

Esley to the rescue. Hamilton’s students in a landscape architecture class he was teaching at Washington
University traced every title of every property on Bennett Avenue, uncovering a dramatic story of African-American
settlement in the county. Hamilton presented his facts straightforwardly, letting them speak for themselves.

He said that in the years after Shelley vs. Kramer (the Supreme Court case that resulted in open housing) when
African-Americans were able to move into St. Louis County, they mostly moved into existing homes. But a new
development of mostly brick ranch houses was planned for Bennett with the prospect that blacks would be moving
in.

The city of Richmond Heights did everything possible to keep the homes from being built, including attempting to
pass a bond issue to purchase the area for a park. So while the homes aren’t very old – just 50 years or so – they
are part of civil rights history, Hamilton said.

The panel of Transportation Department archaeologists and engineers all nodded gravely, acknowledging the merit
of the account. They had heard it before, in newspaper stories that Hamilton alerted reporters to. Someone
announced that the department designers had been able to “tweak the design” for the new road.

Lesley Hoffarth, project manager for the new highway, stood up, declaring, “I did the tweaking; I’ll show where
we tweaked.”

Net result: Three old homes will remain standing, for whatever future blessing they may bestow.