Cheltenham, St. Louis

Cheltenham is a neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, within a section known as Dogtown. It is bound by Forest Park on the north, Macklind on the east, Manchester Avenue on the south, and Hampton Avenue on the west. Businesses located in Cheltenham include the St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, which is built on the site of the former Forest Park Highlands amusement park. It is also the former home of FOX-affiliate KTVI, as well as the St. Louis Arena.HistoryIn October, 1856, Icarians, led by Frenchman Etienne Cabet, settled in St. Louis, Missouri. The Icarians were a 19th-century French utopian movement which had established a number of egalitarian communes in the United States.The Icarians led by Cabet were dissident Icarians from Nauvoo, Illinois. These dissidents left in three different groups on October 15, 22, and 30. Cabet left Nauvoo with the final group on October 30, 1856. Cabet and his 180 loyal followers settled in "New Bremen" in the German section of St. Louis. Cabet had a stroke and died on November 8, 1856. Mercadier became the community's new president. The situation in St. Louis was not ideal and the group had lost of number of dissatisfied members.On February 15, 1858, the remaining 151 Icarians had chosen a site west of St. Louis and settled on a few hundred acres in Cheltenham. They purchased the land for $25,000 at 6% interest with a $500 down-payment. Here they established workshops of tailors, joiners, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, painters, and shoemakers. The Cheltenham commune published a journal and a number of books, and it maintained in Paris, France, 'the Bureau' which printed and circulated brochures across France proclaiming the success of the commune. Schools wee opened for the boys and girls, and a "salle d'asile" - a sort of kindergarten - was opened for the smallest children. The revising of the community's constitution, however, proved to be problematic.