HAZELWOOD — The focal point of the old St. Stanislaus Seminary, which helped form hundreds of Jesuit priests since the 1840s, and numerous Pentecostals after that, looks abandoned and in disrepair.
Some of the windows are busted out of the Rock Building, in the National Register of Historic Places. Dozens more are boarded up throughout the rest of the vacant, 22-acre campus at 700 Howdershell Road.
“We’ve seen people break windows,†said Justin Stark, 31, who lives nearby. “It’s sad to see people take it for granted.â€
The Jesuit Order, which established a foothold in the area in 1823, sold the campus in 1971 to what became Urshan College; but they retained the Rock Building, which housed the Museum of the Western Jesuit Missions, until 2003. In 2019, the college, affiliated with United Pentecostal Church International, relocated to a bigger and much newer campus in Wentzville.
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The Hazelwood campus was then leased to a different Christian school affiliated with Gateway Family Church NFP. That agreement resulted in a breach of contract lawsuit filed Jan. 4 by Urshan Collegiate Support Organization against Gateway and Melissa Morrison. The school was supposed to pay $612,000 in base rent for a three-year period from Sept. 1, 2019, to Aug. 31, 2022, according to the lawsuit, of which only $240,500 was allegedly paid.
Part of the ongoing dispute stems from responsibilities for the payment of utilities and repairs.
Morrison, married to the pastor of Gateway, a nondenominational church based in Glen Carbon, alleged in court records that they were misled about the condition of the historic property in Hazelwood and that the COVID-19 pandemic hit school operations hard, making it “impossible to pay the accumulating rent.â€
In 2022, Gateway moved its school, Gateway Legacy Christian Academy, to 1360 Grandview Drive in Florissant, the former home of ºüÀêÊÓƵ Christian College.
Morrison said Monday in a telephone interview that Gateway invested nearly $1 million into the former St. Stanislaus Seminary property.
“We took over the property with great intentions to try to resurrect it,†she said. “At the end of the day, that was not near enough. We wish nothing but the best for Urshan. We pray great things for them.â€
Urshan officials haven’t responded to requests from the Post-Dispatch for an update on the historic property.
In recent years, the campus was for sale for $5.25 million. That listing expired, said Kevin McKeon, a vice president at commercial property firm NAI Desco, but he assumed Urshan would relist the property with another broker.
Urshan Collegiate Support Organization has also used the Hazelwood campus as collateral for a loan from the United Pentecostal Church Development Fund, records show.
Last week, a big green sticker remained on the doors from Sept. 7, 2022, saying at least one of the buildings wasn’t fit for occupancy. Dead branches were piled up in the front parking lot. There appeared to be fresh boarded-up windows throughout, including the Rock Building.
The Rock Building is the “earliest surviving structure at the first Jesuit novitiate established west of the Mississippi River,†according to the 1972 nomination letter to the National Register of Historic Places.
The white stone building has three floors, a Greek Revival front porch, thick walls and an octagonal cupola projecting from the middle of the roof with a cross on top.
“Bricks for the walls were fired at the seminary and limestone blocks for the foundation and exterior were hauled overland from the bluffs of the Missouri River,†the nomination letter states. “Jesuit brothers, novices, and slaves in residence at St. Stanislaus Seminary provided all of the labor necessary to complete the Rock Building, including blasting, transporting and cutting limestone used in the construction.â€
After it was dedicated in 1849, the Rock Building was described by one Jesuit as the “best building in the whole state of Missouri for solidity, convenience, and elegance.â€
Jacob Barker of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.