The Gundelfinger House

Few know the story of the gray apartment building on the southwest corner of Broadway and Elm. It begins with Daniel Gundelfinger, son of Bavarian immigrants and well-known High Street hardware merchant. He built it as his home in 1892, three years before the Herman Tanner residence on the south end of that block was built. The newspaper said the two houses were “very elegant,” noting that they bookended what was becoming “one of the [city’s] most impressive residential blocks.” The spacious, two-story brick Gundelfinger home had a deeply recessed, arched entrance on Broadway; prominent stone lintels; ornate, dentiled cornices; mansard roof with decorative metal parapet and a hexagonal turret; and two huge metal urns flanking the entrance that identified it as a hardware merchant’s home.


Left: Gundelfinger House ca. 1920 (Schroeder family collection); right: Gundelfinger Building, 2018 (courtesy Matthew Holland).

All the other houses in the 600 block postdate the Gundelfinger house and are now on the National Register of Historic Places, but the Gundelfinger house is not. Daniel built the house for his wife, the Bavarian-born Margaretha Hoehler (age 17 when married), and the happy couple moved in. But she became seriously ill, and in a few months, in 1893, she died. Her funeral was held in the parlor of the new house.

Daniel then married Bertha (Bessie) Roesen in 1895, and family life resumed in the big house; they had two sons in short time, Daniel W. and Karl H. But tragedy struck again: in July 1906 a probate jury declared Daniel of “unsound mind and incompetent of conducting his affairs.” He was committed to the State Hospital in Fulton and died there in November 1907. What would become of Daniel’s dream house?

The Roesen family was intermarried with the Moerschels, who had the big Capitol Brewery. Brewery owner Jacob Moerschel lived in the Gundelfinger house while he was building his Villa Panorama mansion on Swifts Highway in 1907–1908. A much smaller home was built on the property, 602 Broadway, for Bertha and sons. (Now it’s a driveway.) In 1916 the “Bertha Gundelfinger property” (two houses at 600 and 602 Broadway) was sold for $2,500 to neighbor Nelson C. Burch. The widow moved to rural Columbia to live with her son Karl, who, incidentally, committed suicide at age 44.

Between 1931 and 1935 the Gundelfinger house was transformed from a spacious single-family residence into four apartments. The Broadway entrance was eliminated, and a new, pointed-arch, canopied entrance was opened facing Elm Street to access the two apartments on each floor. The lintels were removed and all windows made smaller, changing its appearance from Victorian to Craftsman. The mansard roof, dentiled cornice (minus parapet), and turret were retained. Also, a two-story addition was fused to the back of the house, with a matching pointed-arch, canopied entrance for the two new apartments.

Today, the six-apartment Gundelfinger Building looks as if it has been this way all along, but its history is betrayed by the roofline—the addition lacks a mansard roof. The building’s address was changed from 600 Broadway to 301 and 301½ W. Elm. The original brick exterior was faced with tan stucco, mirroring the tan stucco just added to the catty-corner brick German Methodist Church building that had also been converted into apartments. The Gundelfinger’s stucco has since been painted gray.



Since the 1930s the apartments have served as rental residences of Missouri state office professionals, including an assistant attorney general, lawyers at the Supreme Court, state representatives, and professionals with the Tax and Public Service commissions, State Auditor, Education and Revenue departments, Board of Health, and Missouri Highway Patrol.

The 126-year-old building is now owned by Matt Holland and Eric Hemeyer (H&H Property Management), who are renovating it inside and out to make it once again a sought-after residence in Munichburg, Jefferson City’s historic Southside.

©Walter A. Schroeder, 2018

This piece originally ran in the Jefferson City News Tribune as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 23, 2018.

A Meteorite in the Southside?

The German Methodist Church of Jefferson City, built in 1874, stood at the corner of Broadway and West Elm, facing Broadway.




The congregation disbanded in 1918 and sold its property to member and neighbor Albert Thomas. In 1930 Thomas converted the church building into a duplex, which is still standing.

While excavating a basement beneath the church, workmen discovered a large, unusual boulder embedded in the dirt seven feet below the surface. Professor Alfred C. Burrill, curator of the Missouri State Museum in the nearby Capitol, was summoned. He thought it might be a meteorite, according to a newspaper article published the same afternoon of the discovery. He noted that it was rounded, “a feature peculiar to meteorites.”




The boulder turned out to be a huge chunk of red granite, clearly not a rock native to central Missouri. The particular granite can be traced to a source in Minnesota or the Dakotas. But how did it get from that northern location to a hill five hundred miles away in Jefferson City’s Southside?

It is much too large to have been carried in the current of the Missouri River, and besides, the hill it was found on is sixty feet above the present Missouri River. And it could not have been transported south by glaciers, because geologists maintain that the great ice caps of the past never spread south across the Missouri River in central Missouri.

Here is what likely happened. This theory also explains the existence of similar granite boulders found in the Osage River valley as far upstream as Tuscumbia.

When the thick ice caps to the north were wasting away, great quantities of water came down the Missouri River for centuries, causing it to run “bluff to bluff” like the great flood of 1993. Floating in the great mass of raging meltwater were huge chunks of glacial ice with boulders and other debris in them. Some of these ice floes got pushed into tributary valleys like Wear’s Creek and the Osage River, where they lodged in quiet water on the hillsides. The ice melted, and the boulders and debris were left behind and later buried in windblown silt, or loess.

These boulders are therefore called “ice-rafted glacial erratics.”

Originally thought to be a meteorite, that piece of Dakota granite is still there, in the hillside rock garden next to the excavated church basement where it was found. Albert Thomas had a whimsical nature, and he placed his unique boulder in the center of his rock garden, surrounded by peonies.

He cemented a German garden gnome, called a knusperhexe, to its top. For decades, the garden gnome smiled down on passersby on the sidewalk.

The boulder of granite still sits in that rock garden on Broadway but lacks its guardian gnome, and it is much reduced in size, due to chipping chunks away for family members and friends.




By the way, this wasn’t the first “meteorite” found in Jefferson City. Earlier, in October 1912, a supposed “meteor” was found where the new High Street viaduct was going up. The newspaper at the time quipped that meteorites were said to have diamonds in them, but that wasn’t the case with this one.

Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.