The Kleinpeter Connection

Restoring a 200-year-old house, Sid Gray discovers more structures built by the Kleinpeter family in Baton Rouge.

Sid Gray first saw the Willow Grove house back around 1984. It sat in solitary splendor on Perkins Road just past Bluebonnet, the sole structure on an original Spanish land grant of 220 acres. He turned onto a dirt road and drove about a half mile. It was surrounded by trees, with nary another structure in sight. “You couldn’t even see it from Perkins Road,” says Gray.

Gray wanted to check it out because he was just beginning work on another Kleinpeter house. “I looked at the doors and mantels in particular, to use in the restoration of Robert’s house,” says Gray.

“Robert” was Baton Rouge attorney Robert Hodges, who had just bought the Joseph Kleinpeter house on Highland Road near Bluebonnet. It was slated for demolition when Hodges moved it west on Highland Road to its present site near Lee Drive. He hired Gray to oversee the moving and to restore the 1796 house.

In 1989, the Kleinpeter House won the grand prize from the National Trust for Historic Preservation as the first winner of the Great American Home award. Gray had reconstructed the original hip roof, removing gables that had been added later. He rebuilt the bousillage walls (mud and moss covered with plaster), uncovered the original cypress floors, and reconstructed windows and doors to their original configuration.

In 2006, Gray was contacted by members of the Kleinpeter family who were developing the Settlement at Willow Grove. The property, near Perkins Rowe, now has dozens of houses under construction on the original Spanish land grant. The family retained ownership of the house, now known as Willow Grove, and of an acre of land and oaks surrounding it. Gray, whom the family hired to research the house’s construction and submit suggestions for restoration, estimates that the house was built between 1811 and 1820.

Gray was familiar with Kleinpeter history from years of research on the Hodges house. In 1995, he bought a copy of Lynette LeBlanc Kleinpeter’s exhaustively researched genealogy The Kleinpeter Legacy. His well-thumbed copy bristles with sticky notes.

He knew that Johann Georg Kleinpeter, his wife Gertrude, and their ten children had arrived in Louisiana in 1774. Catholics, they probably left Alsace-Lorraine in search of freedom from religious persecution. [i]

They went first to Hagerstown, Maryland, and then to what is now Pittsburgh. From there they took a flat-bottomed boat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, traveling by night and hiding by day to avoid Indian attacks. They eventually settled at Manchac Point in what is now Iberville Parish. They traveled with members of the Sharp and Ory families, with whom they would later intermarry.

Johann and Gertrude settled on the west bank of the Mississippi above Plaquemine Point, while their children settled on the east bank.[ii] By 1784, when Louisiana was under Spanish rule, the Kleinpeter, Sharp, and Ory families had procured land grants from the king of Spain. The area is commonly called the Dutch Highlands, but Gray prefers “Kleinpeter Hills.”

“The terrain is hilly,” he says of the land mass roughly bounded by Perkins on the north, the river on the south, LSU’s south gates on the west, and Bluebonnet on the east. He theorizes that the Kleinpeter family “had money,” which allowed them to pay a surveyor to draw a map of their land; once the map was filed with the proper officials, he believes, the property belonged to the owner. Those who couldn’t afford to pay the surveyor, he thinks, had to become virtual squatters. After ten years of “habitude and cultivation” of a plot of land, they owned it.

The hardworking Kleinpeter family prospered in the new world, cultivating indigo, then cotton, then sugar cane—and eventually taking up ranching and dairy cows. They and allied families procured great swaths of land—the acreage Gray calls the Kleinpeter Hills—and later expanded their holdings all the way to what is now the Country Club of Louisiana.

Gray thinks the Kleinpeters were also involved in building the St. Gabriel Church.[iii] Construction began in 1774, coinciding with their arrival, and was completed two years later. It has been recognized by the National Register of Historic Places as the oldest Catholic church in the Mississippi River Valley. Among those buried in its cemetery are  Gertrude, progenitor of the family now known mainly for Kleinpeter Farms Dairy, which opened in 1913.

As he continued his research, Gray—who estimates he has examined hundreds of south Louisiana houses—tentatively identified seven that he believes were not only built for members of the Kleinpeter family but were possibly constructed by the same builder.

They include Hodges’s house; the Planter’s Cabin on Highland between Staring and Kenilworth (which Gray examined around 1985 before it burned down in the 1990s); the Hughes house on Highland near Kenilworth; Mount Hope Plantation on Highland near Staring; the Bennett house on Highland near Gardere; the Willow Grove house on Perkins; and the Ory house on Highland near Fulwar Skipwith Road.

He points out that Mount Hope, built around 1830 as the Sharp family home, differs from the other six. “It’s an Anglo style house with a floor plan built around a central hall.” The others have “a classic Creole floor plan—two rooms wide and two rooms deep, with no hall.

“It’s obvious these people had money when they got here,” says Gray. “Robert’s house is the best that money could buy for its time.” Among its amenities he lists beaded woodwork, paneled doors and shutters, and elaborate truss work in the attic.

Since beginning work on Willow Grove, Gray has learned that two persons who came to Louisiana with their families in 1774 were John Baptiste Kleinpeter and Catherine Sharp. They married in 1781 and eventually had ten children. Catherine’s brother, Joseph Sharp, built Mount Hope Plantation.

In 1811, Catherine and John’s son John Kleinpeter Jr. married Amelia Sharp, the daughter of Joseph Sharp.[iv] Gray believes that John and Amelia built the Willow Grove house. “Marriage was often the occasion for building a house,” he says. “The fact that they married then is a good reason for placing the construction at that time.”

Willow Grove is a brick and cypress timber-frame raised Creole house that contains rare federal woodwork, bousillage walls, beaded ceiling beams, and an exterior stairway in front.

Later, with indoor plumbing, two baths were added, as well as a two-story rear addition that housed two kitchens—one on the ground floor and one on the second story.

“This is clearly a transitional house between the earlier Creole style and the later Anglo-style house like Mount Hope,” he says. “It is raised up on a masonry base one whole story, and instead of one central chimney, which was common in the eighteenth century, it has two chimneys located opposite each other on outside walls. I think it’s a generation later than Robert’s house, because it’s a full story off the ground, while Robert’s house was raised on piers.

“A two-room-wide house was top of the line. Robert’s is the best built house I’ve seen for its period, and there’s five more that are exactly the same. I would use the word typical. That floor plan was typical all over south Louisiana, even for people who didn’t have a lot of money.”

Besides restoration, Gray has approached old buildings from many other angles. He taught an LSU Union leisure class called “Old Houses of Louisiana,” complete with field trips. He has consulted on public buildings, including the Clinton Courthouse and the Pointe Coupee Parish Museum. He makes and sells paper models of houses he has worked on, including slave cabins, that can be cut out and assembled into three-dimensional structures. Last summer at the Bluebonnet Library, he exhibited a fraction of the research he has done since the 1970s, when he was newly arrived from his native Rhode Island.

Gray relishes the detective work of wading through the detritus and figuring out all he can about the Willow Grove house. “I’m doing the architectural archaeology now,” he says. “I’m creating a construction chronology, removing the layers just like an archaeologist does to discern the different periods of the house. What was done when?” He makes drawings and photos and takes samples for paint and mortar analysis.

“Once you do all that, you determine what the finished product will be,” he says. “I don’t automatically assume I’ll present it as an 1811 house. It might be best to turn it into a nineteenth- or twentieth-century house, somewhere between 1880 and 1920.”

What with the down and dirty physical work, and time spent examining both primary and secondary written resources, Gray, who has an architecture degree from LSU, jokes, “If I was an academic, this would earn me at least a Ph.D.

“I’m not aware of anybody ever connecting seven buildings to the same family, let alone to the same builder,” he says. “And these houses are specific not just to Baton Rouge but to the Kleinpeter Hills.”

Editor's Note: After this article was published in the November 2012 issue of Country Roads, we were contacted by members of the Kleinpeter family, and provided with supplemental details about the family's history by Laurie Kleinpeter Laville. They appear below.

[i] A The Kleinpeters settled first in Frederick County, Maryland, and established themselves. However Maryland, being under British rule, was also a place where Catholics were persecuted, and they found themselves amongst other Germans facing similar difficulties. These German immigrants learned of the religious freedom being offered to exiled Acadians in Spanish-ruled Louisiana. The Germans requested permission from Antonio de Ulloa, the first Spanish governor of the Louisiana Territory, to send an envoy to verify the Acadians' accounts. With a good report, Germans from Maryland began settling in Louisiana. Thus began the adventure that eventually brought the Kleinpeter family to Louisiana in 1774.

[ii] Although Johann Kleinpeter died shortly after the journey to Louisiana, Gertrude and their children were given a land grant in Iberville Parish above Plaquemine Point. However, after years of flooding by the Mississippi River that inundated their crops, the young men of these early families searched for higher ground and relocated to the east bank of the river. By 1784 new land grants had been obtained from the king of Spain, and the Kleinpeter, Sharp, and Ory families settled in the area commonly called the Dutch Highlands.

[iii] The book The Kleinpeter Legacy by Lynette LeBlanc Kleinpeter includes the transcript of a letter dated 1774 that reveals that George Petitpierre (Johann Kleinpeter) had already died and that Gertrude and their seven children had settled on the west bank of the Mississippi, in Iberville above Bayou Plaquemine. The letter further states that the settlers began building a church in November of that year and gives the dimensions of the church. Lynette LeBlanc Kleinpeter established that Gertrude Kleinpeter is buried at St. Gabriel. Images of this letter, in Spanish and French, are preserved on microfilm at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. The Kleinpeter family retains ownership of some of the original land grants, and letters requesting the land grants on Highland Road—evidence that they settled first in Iberville and later sought higher ground.

[iv] Joseph Sharp had a son named Joseph Sharp, who was brother to Amelia. Both father and son died in 1819 of yellow fever. The Willow Grove house could have been built by either Joseph.