Saint Michel, Missouri
St. Michel is an abandoned village located in Madison County, Missouri, United States. St. Michel is now incorporated into Fredericktown.
Etymology
Although the origin of the name is not certain, one of the original founders of the village of St. Michel − Nicholas Caillot − had been a "Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michel" in France, and this most likely accounts for the name. It might be pointed out also, however, that there was a Michael Caillot in the group, and a Nicholas Caillot had a son Michel, whose patron saints were Michel.History
Founded in the years between 1790−1800, St. Michel was established as a lead-mining village. The founders of St. Michel were a cohesive group of thirteen families, French Creoles of the Illinois Country with roots in Canada and a few native French who had lived for some time in the valley. Eight of these families were from New Bourbon. Among these first settlers were Antoine, Gabriel, Nicholas, Joseph, Francois, and Michel Caillot det La Chance; Peter Chevalier, Gabriel Nicollet, Pierre Variat; Paul, Andrew, and Baptiste De Guire, and Jerome Matis, who were French-Canadians from Ste. Genevieve and New Bourbon. These men were given concessions of land by the Spanish authorities of Upper Louisiana with each family receiving 400 arpents of land extending from the Little St. Francis River to Saline Creek. The village of St. Michel was forced to move to higher ground by the floods of 1814 when the Saline and Castor Creeks overflowed their banks, and drove the inhabitants out. Some of the families refused to return, and established what was known as the new village, one and one-half miles north of St. Michel. The old site was referred to as "The Village" although there is nothing there to indicate the spot except Calvary Cemetery. The new village numbered about 50 people in 1823. Soon after, on the Saline opposite the village, Germans had settled, as well as other groups from North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, and these settlers evidently outnumbered their French neighbors. In 1819 when a county seat was to be laid out, the commissioners bought land from one of the settlers from North Carolina and laid out a town, which they called Fredericktown. This new town gradually absorbed St. Michel so that today the name is preserved only in the Catholic Church and in the name of the township.Village
The French Creoles of St. Michel built their homes in the American log cabin style, which the French referred to as pièces sur pièces rather than in the French vertical log Poteaux en terre or Poteaux-sur-sol style, with perpendicular log posts set closely together in the ground or on a sill, and with clay chinked in-between filling the interstices. This suggests either that St. Michel housed a lower economic class or that Americans nearby aided the Creoles in house raising and the Creoles accepted the American style of log house construction.The Catholic church of St. Michel was established in 1802 and named after the Archangel Michel, to whom early Christians gave the care of their sick. Whether the church was blessed on St. Michael's day or was dedicated to the patron saint of one of the members, is not known. The original church was a log church.