Campbell House seeks donations for new door glass

BY TIM BRYANT

A burglar climbed over the wrought iron fence and broke into the Campbell House Museum in downtown St. Louis.

Museum officials are unhappy over the resulting monetary loss: The $98 the burglar stole from the cash box. What really upsets them is that the thief got into the house by heaving a football-size piece of concrete through an intricately etched and frosted glass window that dates from the 1880s.

Officials are asking the public to donate money to help pay craftsmen to build a new window to replicate the original.

The panel is one of two mounted within the Campbell House’s interior front doors. Officials say that at about 10 p.m. Monday the burglar jimmied the lock on the heavy exterior doors, then got inside the house by smashing the glass window on one of the interior entry doors.

Campbell House officials have yet to determine the cost of replicating the broken window, which is 18 inches wide and five feet high. Craftsmen will be able to use as a template the companion window, which was undamaged.

The Campbell House, built in 1851 on what is now Locust Street, is operated by a private museum foundation that gets no government support. The museum houses an esteemed collection of Victorian decorative arts and 300,000 pages of recovered documents chronicling the economy of the West. Robert Campbell, the home’s first occupant, was a player in the early fur and real estate trades.

from stltoday.com