How Much of Wildwood's Essen Log Cabin Is Actually From the 1870s?

In late November 2015, members of Wildwood's Historic Preservation Commission drove out to 822 Highway 109 to settle plans for a log cabin the city had just been given. When they got there, the cabin was gone. Sometime between Nov. 24 and 29, someone had taken the two-story building apart and driven off with it.

That same cabin opened to the public on Sept. 19, 2026, on the Village Green west of City Hall. The building on the lawn is only partly 1870s. Wildwood's planning and parks director has said 30% to 40% of the original material remains. Everything else came from a decade of salvage, storage, donated replacement logs and one close City Council vote. The cabin is a record of those years too, and you can see that history in the walls.

A Family That Shows Up All Over the Map

The cabin was built by Gerhard Rudolph Essen, a German immigrant shoemaker who settled in Melrose, a community inside today's Wildwood. His family arrived in Missouri in 1869. His wife, Ellen O'Kennedy, was an Irish immigrant. Their children included sons John and Rudolph and daughters Ellen and Katherine. The Post-Dispatch describes Melrose as a mostly German settlement south of what is now Old Eatherton Road.

The family name runs through the area's geography. According to the Post-Dispatch, Gerhard's son John Essen later built the Ball-Essen House, now part of Wildwood's Ball-Essen Farmstead Historic District. John's son Francis moved a little east and helped found Ballwin.

The cabin stayed on the original farm for generations, beside the Essen Family Cemetery, where the paper reports 30 family members are buried. Joe Vujnich, Wildwood's director of planning and parks, said the cabin was still in remarkably good shape a century and a half after it was built. He also pointed to its height. "It's unique, too, that it's a two-story cabin," he said. "There's not a lot of those anymore."

In 2015, two Essen descendants, Ruth Martin Karst and Patricia Martin Schoenbeck, donated it to the city. The plan was to take it apart carefully and rebuild it somewhere new.

Fifty Logs, One Truck, No Diagram

The thief got there first. Police found the cabin had been taken apart overnight and loaded onto a truck. The Post-Dispatch counted 50 heavy logs, worth about $50,000 in total. A few weeks later, an anonymous tip led police to Wentzville, where the logs were sitting outside an apartment. A man was charged.

Getting the logs back turned out to be the easy part. The cabin had been taken apart without any documentation, so nobody had recorded which log went where. The theft also cost the city a large share of the building.

That table explains how the cabin looks today. Under the new roof, behind the new windows and front door, the walls mix surviving Essen logs with replacements that a donor supplied years after the theft.

A Puzzle Laid Out on a Parking Garage

What came next was a long stretch of not knowing what to do. The rough sequence:

1. 2015 to 2018: For three years, the city struggled to find a contractor willing to take the job.
2. 2019: Staff spread every log across the top of a parking garage in Town Center and started working out how the pieces fit.
3. 2020: The pandemic halted the work.
4. 2023: The city chose the new Village Green park, next to the police station and City Hall, as the permanent site. After the theft, officials wanted a location that was easy to watch. By the end of the year they had found a donor for replacement logs.
5. December 2024: Charrette Creek Excavating, based in Marthasville, agreed to take the project for close to $300,000. Its bid was the lowest by more than $40,000.

The whole time, the logs sat in storage, mostly exposed to the weather, for close to a decade. Mayor Joe Garritano described the reassembly this way to West Newsmagazine:

"It took a lot of work, like putting a puzzle together, to get all the pieces aligned and determine what pieces went where and what was missing."

The Vote That Nearly Sent It Back to the Family

The low bid, $279,565 out of three, came before the Wildwood City Council at its Sept. 8, 2025 meeting. Council member Cliff Albers of Ward 8 asked what fundraising had brought in. Vujnich said donation drives at city events had raised less than $1,000.

Joe Farmer of Ward 4 said he could not approve the spending in good conscience. "That's a lot of money for something I'm not even sure what we would do with," he said. Bob Mabry of Ward 2 said his view changed completely after serving as the council's liaison to the Historic Preservation Commission.

Vujnich presented the choice plainly. "We're at a juncture here," he recalled telling the council. "We either need to move forward, or we need to advise the Essen family that this is not a project we can take." More than half the council voted against the first motion. Debate continued, two members changed their votes, and the project passed 9-6 on a motion to reconsider.

Vujnich did not oversell what the city was paying for. "Is this a life safety issue? Certainly not," he told the Post-Dispatch. "But in a community that values historic preservation. It's important to a large, large group of people."

What Stands Beside City Hall Now

On July 30, 2026, a Post-Dispatch photographer caught Eli McDonald of the contractor installing roof tiles. At that point the remaining work was windows, the brick chimney, a front door and staining the logs. Asked how the finish felt, Vujnich said, "It's more of a relief than an exultation."

The cabin opened during Celebrate Wildwood on Saturday, Sept. 19. Carl D. Essen and his family cut the ribbon. Carl, Gerhard's great-great-grandson, explained why the family wanted the cabin in a public park:

"If you make history available to the youth, and the youth reaches in and grabs that history and studies that history, then all of a sudden they realize that their parents, if not their grandparents, were part of that history."

For anyone who hasn't been inside yet, here's what's confirmed:

• Where: On the six-acre Village Green at 16860 Main St., on the west side of City Hall. The lawn also hosts the Music on Main concert series.
• Access: You can walk inside. ArchBridge, which worked on the unveiling, describes the cabin as freely accessible to residents and visitors. We could not find posted hours or a regular tour schedule.
• Programming: ArchBridge hopes to build tours, exhibits and educational programs with the city. No dates have been announced.
• Photos: ArchBridge is collecting photos of the ribbon cutting, the restoration and older family gatherings for an archive at [email protected].

The Village Green around the cabin is still being built. Phase 1 opened in May 2026. For Phase 2, volunteers are raising money for an all-inclusive playground with Unlimited Play. Vujnich has suggested local school groups could visit to see what life in a cabin was like. When they do, they'll see a building that combines surviving 1870s Essen logs, replacement timber and a roof put on in the summer of 2026.

Plenty of West County homes have histories their owners only know in part, from original timber to later rebuilds and families who shaped the street. If yours is one of them and you'd like to know what that history adds up to in today's market, The Benes Group would be glad to help. Request a Complimentary Home Valuation.