In 1904, when the newly widowed Mrs. Saxton of Sulphur Springs decided to open her farmhouse to paying guests to help make ends meet, she didn’t know a woman who would become a nationally renowned poet would become a regular visitor there.
Sara Teasdale, just 20 when she started frequenting the farm, was a member of a group of creative young women from St. Louis who called their literary circle the Potters. The Potters were made up of artists, photographers and writers who retreated to Saxton Farm to confer and create. Teasdale, a poet, would later win both the Columbia University Poetry Society prize (the forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry) and the Poetry Society of America annual prize for her collection of poems, Love Songs, published in 1917.
James Burgess Jr. first surveyed the property in 1849 that later became the farm that lay along the Mississippi River. He would also plat out land in Sulphur Springs (just east of Barnhart) in 1860. The Saxton family purchased 58.5 acres of the property in 1887 and later bought another 35 acres, so the farm totaled 93 acres, according to local historians consulted in the “Glaize Creek Study,” produced by Jefferson County.
The Potters regularly visited the farm from 1904 to 1907, according to an article in the Handwritten Newspapers Project website. In addition to Teasdale, members included artists Caroline Risque and Petronelle Sombart, photographers Grace and Williamina Parrish, and writers Vine Colby, Inez Dutro, Celia Harris, Edna Wahlert and Guida Richey.
“Their mentor, Lillie Rose Ernst, was a botany teacher at Central High School (and later an administrator with the St. Louis Public School System), and she alternately encouraged and challenged them,” according to the article.
During those years the group created a magazine called The Potters’ Wheel. There were 15 issues of the magazine, according to the Handwritten Newspaper Project.
“A single copy of the magazine was hand-lettered and hand-illustrated by the Potters. It contained a variety of artistic output, including poetry and prose, photographs, calligraphy artwork, and needlework. The collection contains poems, short stories, watercolor prints, photographs – mostly portraits, various hand-painted designs, plays, fabric-covered designs, and photographs of sculptures.”
After 1907, the group of young women went their separate ways. Teasdale married Ernst Filsinger in 1914. She published a poetry collection, Rivers to the Sea, in 1915, which was “a bestseller” and has been reprinted several times. She and Ernst moved to New York City in 1916. She continued to write and finished the prize-winning collection in 1917. Other collections of poetry followed. She and her husband divorced in 1929. Frail and in poor health, she committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills in 1933. She is buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.
The Saxton Farm was a special place for Teasdale during her life, said Bob Archibald, former president of the Missouri Historical Society.
In her poem, “Places,” from her collection, Flame and Shadow, she writes:
“Places I love come back to me like music,
Hush me and heal me when I am very tired;
I see the oak woods at Saxton’s flaming
In a flare of crimson by the frost newly fired;
And I am thirsty for the spring in the valley
As for a kiss ungiven and long desired.”
“Her ‘places’ did not include any in St. Louis,” Archibald said. “‘The oak woods at Saxton's’ was a farm near Sulphur Springs, Missouri.”
The Saxton farm remained a place in Sulphur Springs until the late 1940s. The old Saxton farmhouse was demolished in the 1970s, according to the study. The property is now part of a quarry and belongs to Simpson Construction Materials Inc.
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