2648 Russell

Single Family Gut Rehab

Fox Park Neighborhood

2002 Homer Award Winner for Outstanding Total Renovation

HISTORY: The Anton Demuth House
The building permit for this house was issued in 1883 to Anton Demuth and was built at a cost of $9,000. Mr. Demuth owned a dry goods store and also had houses built at 2644 and 2646 Russell. The Demuth family lived in the 2644 Russell house. By 1896 Anton Demuth was no longer in the dry goods business but was listed as an iron manufacturer and president of the Lafayette Foundry Company. According to census records in 1900 and 1910 the family of Benjamin Luppan was living here as tenants.

This project is funded in part by a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Community Development Agency under the Provisions of Title 1 of the Housing and Community Development Act 1974 (P.L. 93-838).The house continued to stay in the Demuth family until 1922 when Harry and Nellie Eppes bought it. At this time the property was still a single family dwelling, but in the 1930s it became a two-family unit and would remain so until the 1980s.

By the late 1980s the house was standing vacant and in 1995 it was acquired by the St. Louis Land Reutilization Authority [LRA]. In the more than ten years that the house was unoccupied, there were three separate fires that caused sufficient damage to the interior. Millennium, who purchased the property in 1999, gutted and rebuilt the entire interior of the house and it was sold in 2002.