The city of Festus recently completed a $434,000 renovation project on the historic red barn in Larry G. Crites Memorial Park on the west edge of town. Now called The Barn at Crites Park, the new event venue will help area residents make special memories for years to come.
Members of the extended Peterein family, however, already have a rich catalog of memories about the park. It was formerly their family dairy farm, and the barn housed cows that provided milk and cream to the entire community.
Peterein brothers Glen, 85, and Wendell, 73, both of the Festus area, enjoy recounting the history of the farm and showing off some of its artifacts.
“It’s nice to see people out here having fun,” Wendell said. “Let me tell you, working here was not always fun.”
The farm’s original map is laid over an aerial view of Crites Park, which shows the red barn, at the top center, still standing.
Glen recalls the sweaty work of setting up booths and tables for the annual Knights of Columbus picnic, held in a big field on the farm for many years.
“We’d load the lumber and tools and everything on the tractor and trailer, take it over and help them set it all up,” he said. “Then on Monday, we’d take it all apart and load it up and Dad would store it in the barn until the next year.”
A working farm is a busy place indeed
Giovanni Petereini came to the U.S. from southern Switzerland in 1855.
“Our great-grandfather worked as a chef at a hotel in St. Louis,” Glen said. “He bought this property, a farm in Hematite called Hanover and another at Wappapello Lake which is underwater now. This (property) was gifted to our grandfather, David Anthony ‘DA’ Peterein, in the early 1900s.”
For the next 75 or so years, D.A. and his wife, their nine children and many grandchildren worked their land and used the site’s resources to produce as much as they could of the things they needed.
“We raised wheat and oats in rotation,” Glen said. “There was a big alfalfa field, corn, soybeans. Where the splash pad is going in was a milo patch. Where the gazebo is we had corn.”
The pigs were kept in the low-lying area that is now Al Brown Lake, and hog-farrowing houses were where the playground parking area is now, along with a corn crib.
“The hammer mill (a grinding device) was in the corn crib,” Wendell said. “We’d use a tractor and hook up a flat belt drive to run the hammer mill; then the grain was blown into the feed room in a big old pipe. It had a scale you could use to weigh cattle, loads of grain, whatever.”
A lumber mill, just south of the current building shed, processed trees that were cut on farms all over the area.
“The altar in the tabernacle at the old Our Lady (Catholic) Church came from here,” Wendell said. “Pete Govro planed it, and said it was the hardest wood he’d ever seen.”
The brothers recalled the two-story chicken house, made of cypress wood.
“The chickens were on the bottom, and the top was storage and where they did leather work,” Glen said. “The smokehouse was where we put all the beef and pork, and on the side was my grandma’s laundry. There was a tool shed, but vandals burned it down.”
Those who drive or walk around the park’s western perimeter in spring can see the jonquils that mark the spot where the Petereins’ grandparents built their house.
“Those flowers, that’s the remnants of Granny’s garden,” Glen said.
The farm’s original barn was called the “horse barn” and stood just to the west of the current one, and a red clay tile building served as a well house. The red barn now on the site was built in 1933 but didn’t house cows until 1939. Up until that time, dances were held there, drawing revelers from all around the area.
All about the cows
A lot of work went on all over the property, but the main business of the farm was dairy.
Through the first few decades of the 20th century, D.A. Peterein and his sons cared for and milked the cows, separated and bottled the milk and delivered it to customers throughout Festus and Crystal City.
“They milked about 30 cows,” Wendell said. “Cows would leave the barn and walk to the south, along what is now the road in front of the barn, to get to the pasture. There’s a ditch you can still see where the cows walked the same path every time.”
Custom-made glass bottles embossed with the Peterein Brothers Dairy logo were ordered, and a machine sealed the tops with pasteboard circles. All advertisements carried the proud Peterein Brothers Dairy logo that included the dairy phone number: 1.
“Our grandfather wanted a phone out here really bad,” Wendell said. “He talked the Festus Phone Co. into providing him with a service if he would have his boys set poles from Cromwell all the way out here.
“Somewhere in our possessions is a set of lineman spikes from roughly 1920. Dad and Uncle Davey, about 10 and 12 years old, along with Grandpa, set the poles, and Dad used those spikes to go up the pole and tie each wire to the connector. That’s how we got that very first phone number.”
World War II put an end to this period of the farm’s history. Four of the six brothers were drafted into the military, and Glen and Wendell’s father, Tony, and his oldest brother, David, were left to run the place
The Peterein property was a source of road materials for the city of Festus. D.A. Peterein, at right, supervises a crew hauling rock in the 1921 dump truck he purchased. “Our dad, Tony Peterein, hauled rock from the creek and sold it to the city for some of the roads in town,” Wendell Peterein said.
“They had to close down the milk route,” Wendell said. “From then on, we shipped cream only, and the hogs were fattened on ‘blue john,’ the skim from the milk, along with grain and alfalfa.”
In the 1960s, the family put in a pool near the western edge of the property. Known as Peterein’s Hilltop Pool, it was a popular gathering place for more than a decade.
Transformation
By the late 1970s, the grind of farming had taken its toll on the remaining brothers and their families.
“Our dad and my Uncle John were in their 70s, and none of my generation could scrape together a few nickels, much less the $356,000 for the property,” Wendell said. “The city administrator was Rick Turley, and his dad and our dad were friends.”
With help from a federal grant, the city of Festus purchased the property in 1981.
“The National Guard came and cut out the dam, cleaned it out, made the lake the way it is today,” Glen said. “They started tearing down one building and then another.”
The blacksmith shop was adjacent to the barn, and the brothers hoped it could be kept and run as a sort of tourist attraction.
“But it was let go and eventually they tore it down,” Wendell said. “That was the last building other than the barn left on the place.”
Before it was torn down, however, Glen did a bit of salvaging.
“Just before Larry Crites died, I asked him if I could go in and get some old wooden boxes full of bolts and stuff,” he said. “I’ve got it all at my house.”
Wendell maintains a Facebook page with photos, videos and information about the Peterein Brothers Dairy.
“When I first started, I’d go into great detail about how we did things back in the day,” he said. “I’ve had people from all over the world talk to me about it.”
He also has a YouTube channel where he posts as Tractorman44 and a TikTok account under the same name.
The brothers say they are a bit wistful about the passing of their family farm, but have no real regrets about it becoming a park.
“We would like to have been able to keep it, but for various reasons, we couldn’t,” Glen said.
His brother said he likes to visit the park.
“There’s nothing better than walking around here with my grandkids, showing them where I met their grandmother. We’re very proud.”