Zebediah F. and Mary H. Wetzell House

St. Louis, United States

Exterior only

Visible from the street; the inside is private.

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Heritage registerNational Register of Historic Places↗

Built in 1880 for Zebediah F. Wetzell, a wealthy St. Louis drug and medical supply merchant, and his wife Mary, this three-story brick Second Empire residence stands in what was once a fashionable Midtown neighborhood. The house exemplifies the high-style Second Empire architecture that characterized the area during the late nineteenth century and remains one of only two such refined examples surviving in Midtown and among the rarest brick examples of the style remaining in the city. As wealthy residents migrated to the Central West End by the early twentieth century, the neighborhood transformed into a commercial district; after Mary Wetzell's death in 1897, the house became a rental property. The building subsequently served various commercial tenants before the Redemptorists, a Catholic religious order, acquired it in 1986 for their pre-novitiate students. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.