Bauvais-Amoureux House in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri
The Bauvais-Amoureux House is the kind of architectural oddball Atlas Obscura readers secretly (loudly) root for: a 1792 French colonial home built poteaux-en-terre—“posts in the earth”—meaning its vertical log walls are literally structural and planted like stubborn teeth in the soil. It’s a survivor from a town that had to move and rebuild after the Flood of 1785, and it sits near le Grand Champ—among the nation’s oldest continuously worked farmland—like it’s keeping watch over the old field still. Even in a country stuffed with “historic homes,” this one hits different: only five poteaux-en-terre houses are known to remain in the United States, and three of them are right here in Sainte Geneviève.
Then the story swerves from “rare building technique” into “human lightning in a bottle.” In the 1800s it became home to Pélagie Amoureux, who was born enslaved and remained enslaved for 27 years—until love and stubborn courage helped pry open a door history tried to keep locked. She married a white man while still enslaved in 1830, was manumitted along with their son two years later, was forced to live separately from her husband until 1852 when they bought the house, and she fought desperately (and successfully) after his death to keep the home in their name. Pélagie’s struggles left a vortex of latent energy that only recently became kinetic.
It’s a story that strikes right at America’s guilty conscience, and one that struck a match under Pélagie descendant, Don Strand, where—with Academy Award–winning director Ben Proudfoot—they turned the house into the the “set” of Pélagie X, a short biopic that doubles as a revolt against historical erasure. The Pélagie X site that the film accompanies is built like a toolkit as much as a tribute: it points people to church registers, census records, court and county documents, and other research breadcrumbs, and it even expands outward into community memory work like compiling African American burial data from local cemeteries—turning a historic house visit into a gateway drug for genealogy.
