Charles S. and Mary Warder Rannells House

This historic house was originally part of a substantial farm that included several hundred acres and was built circa 1850 in the Greek Revival architectural style with some Gothic influences. The only non-original parts of the home are the east-end carport extension and the sun porch. The interior is unique for its period and architectural style because the staircase isn’t in the center hallway but instead on the north side of the house.

The home was renovated several but by 2006, suffered from deferred maintenance and only avoided demolition thanks to advocates of historic preservation. With the support of the non-profit organization Friends of Woodside whose goal is to maintain the house, work continues on preserving the structure in the hopes that the property will be sold to a new entity willing to fund restoration efforts. The home remains the oldest Maplewood.

David V. Rannells, publisher of the newspaper “Washington Union,” and Mildred S. Clarkson married in Bourbon County, Kentucky in 1809. That same year, David became the president of Bourbon Academy. They had several children together including Charles S. Rannells who was born in 1814 in Mason County near the Ohio River. Mary Warder’s father (Jeremiah Warder) was also a newspaper publisher, but their family had a background in shipping. This has led to some confusion over whether she was born in Pennsylvania or Scotland. Jeremiah married Ann Aston on February 14th, 1805. The family lived in Philadelphia by 1813 where Jeremiah was working as the Director of Pennsylvania Company for insurances on Lines and Granting Annuities. In 1812, Jeremiah’s father John purchased 2,400 acres in Ohio and by 1830, Jeremiah and Ann along with their nine children were living in Springfield, Ohio. Four years later, Ann’s uncle died and left his Philadelphia plantation known as Woodside to her. She sold it and the Springfield homestead became known as Woodside.

Mary Warder and Charles Rannells married in 1842 in Springfield, shortly after which they moved to St. Louis. Charles worked as a lawyer and a Sunday school teacher at Reverend William S. Potts’ Second Presbyterian Church. In 1843, Charles was appointed Circuit Attorney pro tern of St. Louis Circuit Court’s criminal division. He partnered with another Sunday school teacher and lawyer Charles D. Drake throughout that decade. One of their cases involved defending two slave owners charged with illegally holding four freed people known as Catherine, Felix, William, and Minta. They had previously been emancipated but were taken by their former enslaver who was in debt, rendering the emancipation invalid. Drake had defended and prosecuted several slave owners before this case and Rannells was a slave owner who had defended but never prosecuted enslavers.

Charles and Mary were beginning to experience upward mobility as they rose through the political and social ranks. In 1849, the Cholera epidemic created a need for a new cemetery outside city limits and Charles was one of the Bellefonte Cemetery’s eleven trustees. The following year, he was elected to the state senate from St. Louis County as part of the anti-immigration party known as the Know-Nothing Party. He served on the Committees on Claims, the Judiciary, and Engrossed Bills. He also voted for Harry S. Geyer, a St. Louis attorney, over Thomas H. Benton for U.S. Senator from Missouri in 1850. These actions led him to be reelected four years later.

By 1850, Charles and Mary were living on 460 acres, 320 acres of which was purchased from Ann McElderry, presumably in the house that is still standing at 2200 Bredell. This house was also referred to as Woodside, according to the 1909 St. Louis Atlas. They had a full house which included Mary’s brother William, Charles’ brother Nathan, two female servants from Ireland and Missouri, and several enslaved people including a woman, three men, and four girls. Charles had grown up with slaves while Mary had come from a Quaker family who did not believe in slavery. The household actually had more hired farmhands than enslaved people, an indication of the tension between the Rannells and the Warder family over the issue of slavery. Mary’s parents had been colonizationists, which was an anti-slavery ideology at the time but is considered a moderate movement. They believed that enslaved people should be freed but that they should be sent to live in an English colony in Africa in order to avoid the difficulties of integration. This was a common ideology amongst those with anti-slavery sentiments but was even popular among slave owners who saw it as a means of avoiding insurrections.

Before the outbreak of the Civil War, Mary’s brother William left for Ohio. It is unclear if this was motivated by the tension caused by the issue of slavery, but he remained involved in the estate’s affairs. At some point, Mary and their children joined her brother in Ohio. After Charles’ slaves were emancipated in 1864, he became an alcoholic and following an instance where he fell out of a buggy while drunk and wasn’t found until three to four days later, a jury of twelve men concluded he was “so addicted to habitual drunkenness as to be incapable of managing his affairs." Robert M. Renick then became the court-appointed guardian of both his person and his estate and would remain so until Charles died. Charles’ property was deemed insufficient to pay off his debt, which included the $3,800 still owed by McElderry that they were expected to pay off. Some of his property and land was sold for subdivisions. William tried to help Charles by purchasing ten parcels of the land. He also wrote a letter to him urging him to quit drinking for the sake of himself and his family. The Warder family sent him to Media, Pennsylvania to receive treatment from Dr. Joseph Parrish who had opened the Pennsylvania Sanatorium for Inebriates. Parrish was an abolitionist Quaker and was one of the first to treat alcoholism as an illness rather than a moral failing. In 1870, he founded the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates (AACI).

It is unknown how long Charles was under Dr. Parrish’s care or how the treatment affected him, but nonetheless the family was reunited on their property by 1870. He was still unable to manage his land and Renick had it platted as 74 lots in 1871. Six years later on August 4th, 1877 Charles died after a short illness. Following his death, Mary sued the purchasers of the land sold by Renick under the claim that her Dower Rights had been ignored. The defendant claimed that the sale would be as effectual as if it had been made by Charles himself and the purchase happened with Mary’s knowledge and consent, but the court still ruled in her favor because Charles was not seen as a sane man when the purchase happened due to his history as an alcoholic who’d been treated at a sanatorium. After the ruling, Mary lived at Woodside with her son Edward who was still farming the land and her daughter Elizabeth as well as Elizabeth’s husband Howard Brown. They also had two Black servants from Tennessee named John Boyd and John Brun. Mary died on September 26th, 1896 and Edward and his family occupied the house afterward.

National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, MO State Parks. Accessed October 7th, 2022. https://mostateparks.com/sites/mostateparks/files/Rannells%2C%20Charles%20S.%20and%20Mary%20Warder%2C%20House.pdf.

CHARLES S. RANNELLS HOUSE “WOODSIDE”, Missouri Preservation. November 5th, 2003. Accessed October 7th, 2022. https://preservemo.org/charles-s-rannells-house-woodside/.

Colonization, Yale, Slavery, and Abolition. Accessed October 7th, 2022. http://www.yaleslavery.org/TownGown/coloniz.html.