Lemp Mansion

Tragedy struck the family repeatedly: William Lemp Sr. shot himself in the house in 1904, his daughter Elsa died of a gunshot wound in 1920, and William Lemp Jr. took his own life in the same building in 1922, followed by his brother Charles Lemp's suicide there in 1949 — a pattern so severe the mansion is sometimes called one of the most tragic addresses in American brewing history. After decades of decline the house reopened in the 1970s as a restaurant and inn, and staff and overnight guests have long reported a little girl's laughter on the stairs, piano music from empty rooms, and a shadowy figure at the third-floor window.

Johann Adam Lemp arrived in St. Louis from Eschwege, in Germany, in 1838. Both the mansion's own history and Legends of America say he first kept a grocery, where he sold lager brewed to his father's recipe, and that in 1840 he gave it up to build a small brewery. He died a millionaire in 1862. His son William J. Lemp opened a new plant at Cherokee Street and Carondelet Avenue in 1864, and by 1870, in the mansion's words, Lemp was "by far the largest brewery in St. Louis"; Legends of America adds that the Falstaff beer of the 1890s gave it national distribution. The two sources date the house differently. The mansion's history says it was built in the early 1860s and later bought by William J. Lemp as a residence and auxiliary brewery office, which he turned into a Victorian showplace of thirty-three rooms. Legends of America says Jacob Feickert, Lemp's father-in-law, built it in 1868 and that Lemp bought it in 1876. Frederick Lemp, William's favourite son and heir apparent, died in 1901 at the age of 28; Legends of America gives the cause as heart failure. On 13 February 1904 William J. Lemp shot himself in the head, in a bedroom of the mansion according to its own history, with a .38 Smith & Wesson according to Legends of America. His son William J. Lemp Jr. became president of the company that November. Prohibition came in 1919 and the plant was closed. On 20 March 1920 his daughter Elsa Lemp Wright, called the wealthiest heiress in St. Louis, shot herself. In 1922 William Jr. sold the Falstaff name to the brewer Joseph Griesedieck for $25,000 and the brewery to the International Shoe Co.; Legends of America gives the price as $588,000, the mansion as $588,500 at auction on 28 June 1922, and both set it against an earlier valuation of $7 million. On 29 December 1922 he shot himself in the heart with a .38 revolver, in his office just inside the entrance, in the building where his father had died eighteen years before. His brother Charles lived on in the house and was found dead there of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on 10 May 1949, the fourth suicide in the family. Edwin Lemp, the last of the brothers, died of natural causes in 1970 at the age of ninety. After Charles's death the house was sold and became a boarding house. Dick Pointer and his family bought it in 1975 and turned it into a restaurant and inn.

The Lemp Mansion stands at 3322 DeMenil Place, St Louis, Missouri 63118, in the Benton Park neighbourhood, beside the remains of the Lemp brewing complex; the older street address, the one that turns up in nineteenth-century sources, is 3322 South 13th Street. The family history the house publishes calls it "the thirty-three room house". It works today as a restaurant, an inn and an events venue; the telephones are +1 314 664 8024 and +1 314 664 8027. Since 3 September 2026 it has also been for sale. St. Louis Public Radio reported that day that the Pointer family, which has owned the house for decades, had listed the mansion at 3.9 million dollars and the neighbouring Lemp Stables at 2.8 million through Fusion Business Brokers as its caretakers near retirement. The antiques stay with the building, and the venue will go on hosting events through December 2027. Every opening time below hangs on that. The restaurant hours published on the house's own site and read on 22 September 2026 are Thursday and Friday 11:00 to 14:30 and 17:30 to 22:00, Saturday 17:30 to 22:00, and Sunday 11:30 to 20:00. The Sunday chicken dinner, which is the local institution, is 29.95 dollars a head, half price for children under ten and free under two; card payments carry a surcharge of 2.99 per cent. The same page ends with the line "All Prices/Items/Times subject to change". The inn is four suites: Lavender and William on the second floor, Elsa and the two-room Louis and Frederick suite on the third, with no nightly rate printed. The guided house tours and the evening programmes — murder-mystery dinners, the Spirits Tour, the Lemp Experience paranormal hunt and an escape room — are booked separately and come and go with the season. What the house keeps of the Lemp fortune is indoors: panelling, imported mantels, the hand-painted parlour ceiling, the art vaults at the rear and the period bathrooms that were an extraordinary luxury when they went in. Within a few minutes' walk there are two more pieces of the same economy. The Lemp Brewery complex, largely still standing, is one of the most impressive nineteenth-century industrial groups in the city. And the Chatillon-DeMenil House, an 1848 house museum at 3352 DeMenil Place, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 9 June 1978 under reference number 78001673.