You are invited to join the Alliance Française and la Société Française de St. Louis in celebrating the founding of St. Louis with our annual wreath-laying ceremony at the Pierre Laclède statue in front of City Hall at 11:00am.

The ceremony will be followed by a luncheon at Schlafly Tap Room at 2100 Locust St. The wreath-laying ceremony is free for all to attend.

Each person will be responsible for paying for their own lunch. We hope to see you all there!

The Founding of St. Louis

In 1763, the French merchant Pierre Laclède and his young lieutenant Auguste Chouteau set out from New Orleans to establish a fur trading post in the Upper Louisiana territory. Seeking a location that offered both strategic river access and safety from seasonal flooding, they identified a limestone bluff just south of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. In February 1764, the fourteen-year-old Chouteau led a party of thirty men - many of them voyageurs and craftsmen - to clear the land and begin construction on the settlement Laclède had envisioned.

The fledgling village was named Saint Louis in honor of King Louis IX of France, the patron saint of the reigning monarch, Louis XV. Although the Treaty of Paris had recently ceded the land east of the Mississippi to the British, St. Louis quickly became a sanctuary for French settlers from Illinois who wished to remain under French cultural and legal influence. Laclède’s urban design, inspired by the grid of New Orleans, featured streets like la Grande Rue and rue de l'Eglise, forming the foundation of a prosperous "Mound City" that would remain a bastion of French language and Creole culture for decades to come.

Every year, the Alliance Française de St. Louis partners with our friends at la Société Française de St. Louis in honoring Laclède’s vision with a wreath-laying ceremony at his statue at City Hall, connecting us to our French heritage and the bold dreamers who built this city.