Tickets are on sale for the 10th annual Get Healthy De Soto Holiday Home Tour, which will be held from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 30.
Advance tickets cost $15 each or two for $25. On the day of the tour, all tickets will cost $18. Proceeds from the tour will benefit Get Healthy De Soto, a nonprofit organization that encourages local residents to exercise, eat well and make other healthy choices.
This year’s tour is titled “Celebrating Our 10-year Anniversary and Still Truckin’” and includes 11 locations – nine houses, an ambulance district headquarters and a church, said Melissa McAlpine, Get Healthy De Soto executive director and tour organizer.
There is a truck theme for the day.
“Although it’s not a requirement that they (tour sites) have a little red truck, we do encourage it,” McAlpine said. “Each home also will have a raffle basket with the Little Red Truck theme. Auto Plaza donated an oil change coupon for each one, and we also have some home goods, yard signs, ornaments – Karen Stringer put those baskets together for us.”
The homes range from a newer home in the Greek revival style to a 184-year-old cabin. There are also some modern homes, and some remodeled homes with interesting features. All are decorated for the holidays, many both indoors and out.
Gersbacher house
Tracy Gersbacher’s fully restored Victorian home is featured on the tour.
Gersbacher, 53, works for Auto Plaza and moved to De Soto eight years ago when the company transferred him from its St. Louis location.
“I rented a house for a while, and then I decided in 2016 to buy,” he said. “I had looked at several houses, but I just kept going by this one. It was too much money, but I finally thought, ‘Well, it’s just me and my three dogs. I’ll just go for it.’
“I always wanted a Victorian house, to have parties.”
The two-story brick home, with its wraparound front porch, features hardwood floors and warm, gleaming wood trim throughout.
Produce merchant George Burgess moved his family into the newly built home – for which he paid the then-astronomical sum of $3,900 – during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
“I’ve written to some of the Burgess family in California, but never gotten an answer,” Gersbacher said. “I would love to have some pictures of the house in its heyday.”
George Burgess died in 1951 and his wife, Mary, in 1971. Their son still owned the house until the mid-1980s, but it sat vacant for several years and eventually fell into
disrepair.
In 1998, the house underwent a total restoration.
“It sat vacant a good 10 years, and apparently it was in just really horrible shape,” Gersbacher said. “Then the Bone family restored it.”
Some additional restoration was done by the Miller family, who owned the home in the early 2000s.
“It’s got a lot of original architecture,” Gersbacher said. “The staircase, pocket doors, a lot of the woodwork and trim – they took it out, refinished and repaired it. What they put in new, they made it match the period. They did a really good job of matching.”
Some of what he knows about the house he actually has learned from visitors who have seen the home on previous tours.
“One woman who lived here came on the tour, and she was talking about which room was hers,” he said. “That was kind of cool.”
Gersbacher has made a few updates himself.
“Paint, new kitchen cabinets, butcher block counters, new flooring, old lighting – it’s a mix of old and modern,” he said. “I put a tintype ceiling up to keep it closer to the period of the house.”
He enjoys decorating for the season with some of the items from his collections.
“I have ceramic Christmas villages that I’ve been collecting for a while,” he said. “I decided to display them, so I built a tree that has 25-30 houses built into it.”
One room showcases his collection of more than 75 nutcrackers, while another features peacocks. His office is decorated in a nautical theme (“I’m a Titanic buff”) and the dining “I’ve gone to a lot of auctions and won things,” he said. “Half my garage is full of Christmas stuff.”
He’s not just a collector of other people’s creations, though; Gersbacher handmade the wooden cutouts – nutcracker, toy soldier, Santa and his reindeer – that adorn the fence The most cherished holiday decoration in his home, though, is the tree-topping angel Gersbacher’s mother bequeathed him.
“My mom bought it, I want to say 45 years ago,” he said. “Its wings flap, the arms move. It’s always been on our tree.”
He said his mother, growing ill, didn’t decorate for the holidays in the few years before her death, so the angel remained in its box.
“But after Mom died in 2002, that came with me,” he said. “She has to go on top of the tree – that makes Mom be there.”
Gersbacher has only one minor regret about his home.
“I would like to have a ghost,” he said wistfully, then laughed. “They dust when they swish around!
“But, you know, this is a nice, peaceful home and I’m very happy to have it.”
New ticket policy
Home base for the tour is Park View Baptist Church, 1531 Hillcrest Drive, De Soto; tour participants can start there or at any of the homes, so long as they have a ticket.
“In the past, we let people purchase tickets at the homes, but that’s different this year,” McAlpine said. “When we’d get close to selling out, it was all this confusion and calls – who has tickets left and how many? It just got too crazy, trying to keep up with it.”
Advance tickets may be purchased in person at the De Soto Public Library, LaChance Vineyard, Leader Publications in Festus, both Drummond and Cherished Memories florists in De Soto, Pogolino’s in De Soto and both First State Community Bank locations in De Soto. Online ticket purchasers get to choose whether to pick up tickets in advance or get them on the day of the tour at the church. Deadline for all advance ticket purchases is Nov. 27.
McAlpine said many tour participants choose to break up the touring.
“They can go to a few houses, then go have lunch,” she said. “They can come back and do the rest, make a day of it.”
Each year, the tour features a Country Market, and this year it will be at Valle Ambulance House 2.
“They will move the equipment out of the bay, and set up indoors,” McAlpine said. “There will be Get Healthy De Soto volunteers there to help, and there will be at least two volunteers at each of the homes – one to handle the tour tickets and one to sell raffle tickets.”
In case of inclement weather, the tour will be held the following day, Sunday, Dec. 1, from 1-5 p.m. Updates will be posted online at www.gethealthydesoto.org or the group’s Facebook page and broadcast over radio station KJFF.
For more information about the home tour, visit www.gethealthydesoto.org or the group’s Facebook page, or call McAlpine at 314-471-3681.
Additional homes on the tour:
■ First stop on the tour is Park View Baptist Church, 1531 Hillcrest Drive, De Soto. The church was built in 1964 on a 12-acre property that was formerly part of the Walther family farm. Badly damaged in a May 2003 storm that ravaged the town, it was rebuilt and rededicated on Mother’s Day 2004.
■ Valle Ambulance House 2, 1540 Hillcrest Drive, is the second stop. The ambulance district was formed in 1977 and expanded in 1990 with the addition of this second station, which now covers most of the city. A 2009 remodel/expansion of the facility added additional living quarters for the two crews that staff the station around the clock.
■ Pope Home: At this modern brick ranch home, built in 1964, the owner puts a tree in the living room, then decorates the family room with Santa Claus memorabilia. The sunroom is full of snowmen. (Addresses for the tour homes are listed on tickets.)
■ Paddock Home: Built in 1895 by a beer distributor, this three-story home is reported to be the first house in De Soto built with indoor plumbing. Its brickwork was done by masons brought in from Germany, and it was wired for electricity that De Soto wouldn’t have for years to come. The history-fanatic owners have kept the original floor plan basically intact, and have used period-appropriate wallpapers, colors, furnishings, and decor. They have furnished it with antiques, the oldest a bed dating to 1779.
■ Doyen Home: This 1960s-vintage brick ranch saw a major remodel in 2018, after the family patriarch moved to an assisted living facility. The owner’s son said he and his wife had to lose “a lot of carpet and floral accents!” but kept their fond memories through the use of many then-and-now photos in the home’s decorating.
■ LaChance Home: This two-story home was built in 1947 by a railroad superintendent. The current owners bought it in 2017 after falling in love with the original fireplace. The home is the perfect setting for their Christmas village, the pieces of which have been collected over the years.
■ House Home: This bungalow, built just after World War II, sat empty for more than a decade before undergoing an extensive remodeling in 2018. The current owners collaborated with the renovators to bring “Baby Girl” back to its former glory, and are excited to celebrate their first Christmas in the home.
■ Eades Home: This house was the longtime residence of a local doctor, but fell into disrepair. Renovated by a local couple, it came back to life just in time to provide the perfect cozy home for a former De Soto resident returning to the area.
■ Milfeld Home: In the entryway to this 184-year-old log cabin hangs the original land grant for the property, dated 1835 and signed by President Andrew Jackson. The home was extensively renovated in the 1980s, and showcases the original oak ceiling beams and rock fireplace, as well as oak floors salvaged from an Ohio home constructed the same year as the original cabin. The home’s hand-hewn logs, which average 14 inches in diameter, are set off at Christmastime by the family’s 9-foot tree, decorated with more than 5,000 lights.
■ Williams Home: This Greek revival-style home, built two years ago, sits on property that was part of a land grant predating the Civil War. Inside it has a more modern character, with an open floor plan and sweeping views of the Big River bluffs from the screened porch.
