Webster Groves House History

The city of Webster Groves has many houses that have stood for a hundred years or more. The Library often gets inquiries from residents looking into the history of their home, so we have compiled the following list of resources available from the Library that such researchers may find useful.

Online resources

City of Webster Groves building permits and property tax records, digitized from the microfilm held by the Library

Hodgdon’s Directory of the City of Webster Groves, 1907 and 1908-1909

A large collection of St. Louis County and City directories, including Gould’s, can be found at Missouri Digital Heritage.

St Louis County Department of Revenue Real Estate Information. This site is important for looking up the legal description and other information about your property.

The Kate Moody Collection consists of over 10,000 historical documents assembled by Katherine Twining Moody, a Webster Groves resident and librarian with St. Louis Public Library from 1895-1945. From the 1880s until her death in 1950, she collected photos, newspaper articles, genealogical records, hand written oral histories, correspondence and other documents dealing with the history of Webster Groves, St. Louis County and St. Louis City. As a joint project of Webster Groves Historical Society, which owns the collection, the Webster Groves Public Library, has digitized the collection and made it publicly accessible in a searchable format as part of the Missouri Digital Heritage program. Search for your address or for names of past owners of your home. You may be surprised at what you find.

The Missouri Historical Society’s House History Resources. Offers a variety of resources to help you research the history of your St. Louis City or St. Louis County home.

HeritageQuest provides U.S. Census data and other genealogical data. This service can be accessed from home with a WGPL card number.

Our Ancestry Library Edition account provides access to over 30,000 collections containing 11 billion individual records.  Some features of Ancestry.com, such as user-created family trees, are not available. This service is only available within the Library, either through our public computers or through your own laptop or mobile device connected to our public Wi-Fi. 

With the Library’s Newspapers.com account, you can access the following Webster Groves newspapers: The Webster Times from 1896-1898; Webster Groves Times from 1909-1914; Webster News-Times from 1912-1961; Webster Advertiser from 1963-1971. This service is only available within the Library, either through our public computers or through your own laptop or mobile device connected to our public Wi-Fi. 

Missouri Digital Heritage has made available online the 1878 Pitzman Atlas of St. Louis City and County and an 1893 Atlas of St. Louis County. Each has an index page to help you locate areas that after 1896 were incorporated into the City of Webster Groves.

Reference books

We also have a variety of local history book in our reference section, including histories of the city, neighborhoods, and churches, along with books about century homes and even some early residential and business directories. Copies of some of these items are also available to check out.

Maps of Webster Groves

There is a collection of historical maps in our Reference Area that can be viewed within the Library showing Webster Groves and surrounding areas. Some of these maps are on loan from the Webster Groves Historical Society. See this index for details.

Century Home Plaques

Do you own an old home in Webster Groves? Is it over 100 years old? That makes you eligible to join nearly 500 of your Webster Groves neighbors who take pride in their historic homes and have had Century Home plaques placed on their homes. Century Home plaques are a project of the Webster Groves Historical Society, which is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, preserve and enhance the historical heritage of Webster Groves, including the management, operation and preservation of the Historic Hawken House and the adjacent Historical Archives and Hearth Room event space.