All Arts and History

Takes Place The Last Saturday in August. When: 4th Saturday in August Call us at 800-373-7007 or 573-883-7097 A family-friendly, living history event! Observe Civil War camp life and demonstrations of marching, and musket fire. Learn about Ste. Geneviève citizens who fought in the war, some on each side. It is actually being held on Saturday, August 27th. The camp will be set up in the yard of the Felix Valle House State Historic Site. From 11:00am to 11:45am on that day, we will do a re-enactment of the Federal troops taking money from our bank during the early days of the Civil War. The re-enactment will be on the corner of Merchant and Main in front of the Show Me Shop. Read more…

October 22, 2022 “Meet” Dr. Lewis Linn, Missouri’s model Senator, Ferdinand Rozier an early merchant, and Jean Baptiste Valle an early leader of the community. Or “meet” folks portraying the well-to-do, or the not-so-well-to-do, residents of Ste. Geneviève’s history before 1880? At the Déjà vu Spirit Reunion, on the 4th Saturday in October from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., visitors will experience these stories and more as the Foundation for Restoration of Ste. Geneviève hosts its annual event in the historic Memorial Cemetery. Tour the cemetery via lantern light and chat “face-to-face” with friendly spirits clad in traditional dress and enjoy a hauntingly good time. Sponsored by the Foundation for Restoration of Ste. Geneviève as a fundraiser for Memorial Cemetery. Read more…

EKlekTix – Jean Rissover Became a Painter at 70 and Now Creates Narrative Art While You Watch At 130 North Main Street in an 1860s building, Jean Rissover paints during the hours her gallery is open—not as demonstration or performance but as working artist fully engaged in creating the figurative paintings that crowd her studio walls. About 75 original oil paintings, most 11×14 inches or smaller, fill the space alongside eclectic giftware sourced from artisans around the world. The paintings tell stories, primarily of women—their activities, experiences, relationships, joys, sorrows, and moods—drawn from Rissover’s imagination populated by characters who “live in her head” and demand to be painted. Some focus on Sainte Geneviève’s French colonial history. Others explore universal experiences of being female across time and culture. All are narrative in nature, inviting viewers to construct stories around the figures Rissover portrays with loose, impressionistic brushwork that suggests rather than defines, leaving space for interpretation. The remarkable part isn’t just the art—it’s the journey. Jean Rissover started painting in 2011 at age 70, after retiring from a career spanning teaching, social work, event organization, antique shop ownership, and managing editor of the Ste. Genevieve Herald. It was her first serious Read more…

Fort de Chartres State Historic Site Stone Testament to French Imperial Ambition Four miles west of Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, where the American Bottom widens toward the Mississippi River, stands a partially reconstructed stone fort that once embodied French imperial authority across the Illinois Country—Fort de Chartres, named for the infant son of the French regent, erected in the 1750s as the seat of French government and chief military installation in Upper Louisiana. The massive stone structure, built after two successive wooden forts proved inadequate to French ambitions, served for barely a decade before the Treaty of Paris (1763) ceded French territories to Britain, before British occupation itself ended in abandonment, before the river whose presence justified the fort’s location began its patient erosion—collapsing the south wall in 1772 and leaving only ruins to mark where colonial power had been concentrated and then forgotten. Today, within the reconstructed fort walls and the grounds of Fort de Chartres State Historic Site, the powder magazine stands—that original 1750s stone structure widely considered the oldest building in Illinois—proof that some things endure even when empires don’t. The Three Forts: Ambition’s Evolution The story of Fort de Chartres encompasses three distinct structures reflecting French Read more…

Fort Kaskaskia State Historic Site Near Ellis Grove, Illinois, where the Kaskaskia River meets the Mississippi in a confluence of currents and history, a 200-acre bluff overlooks a landscape that tells a story of grandeur surrendered to nature’s patient theft. Fort Kaskaskia State Historic Site preserves earthen remains—ramparts in rough square formation with bastions at corners—of a small French fort built around 1759 to defend a town that had become, by then, the principal commercial center of the Illinois Country. Yet the river that once made Kaskaskia valuable through commerce eventually made it expendable through erosion: the original town of Old Kaskaskia, thriving on river-rich bottomland, occupied an island that the Mississippi gradually claimed until, by the 1880s-1890s, it was gone—washed away, leaving only memory and earthen traces on a bluff overlooking what had been taken. The Town: From Jesuit Mission to Colonial Capital Kaskaskia begins not as fort but as faith. Jesuit missionaries established a mission at the mouth of the Kaskaskia River in 1703, choosing location for access to the Illinois Confederation peoples whose lands, hunted and farmed for generations, offered spiritual opportunity. Shortly after, French settlers from Quebec and Louisiana began trickling toward the rich, alluvial farmland Read more…