Lee Hess

Hess opened the Cherokee Caves as a tourist attraction; and it was once used by the Lemp and Minnehaha breweries for storing and aging beer.  He built the Hess Museum at the mouth of the cave.  He then turned the upstairs portion of the house into two apartments, and used first floor to store relics for the Hess Museum.

In the late 1950's the Missouri Highway Commission bought the house from Hess and began planning Interstate 55, which originally was to be built though the Mansion, destroying the once elegant old home.

By 1961, the Landmarks Association of St Louis was able to get the route changed; and civic minded Union Electric bought the house for $40,000 as a gift to the people of St Louis for the city's Bicentennial.

Money was raised from private donations across the country to refurbish the old home.  Both the DeMenil and Chouteau families donated furniture, family china, crystal and other important memorabilia.

In 1965, the Landmarks Association deeded the completely restored house to the Chatillon-DeMenil House Foundation, and the Mansion was registered a National Landmark.  It has been open to the public ever since.

The house remained in the hands of custodians until 1940 when it was sold to Lee Hess, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, who converted the second floor into two apartments, one of which he and his wife occupied.

An accidental discovery made by Hess gives an added dimension to the house's history. As previously mentioned, the property and area around it is inter laced with caves. One cave, the Cherokee Cave (which runs into the Minnehaha Cave), has its entrance near to the house. Hess had the idea of converting it into an entertainment center, an underground beer garden. While investigating the possibilities, he discovered some animal bones. He sent them to The Museum of Natural History. George Gaylor Simpson, Curator of Fossil Mammels and Birds, was quite excited by the discovery as they were of an extinct peccary, Platygonus compressus.

Thus, in 1945, the house became a laboratory for prehistoric animals that had once thrived on the land upon which it was built. George Simpson and his assistant lived in the house and used its kitchen to clean the bones and the floor of the drawing room to dry and catalogue them. It was the first time Simpson had ever seen the bones of the peccary turn up in the heart of a large city. Although cities have been built on the graves of the creatures that lived and ruled before man, it is only rarely that this early history becomes part of the city again.