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“I look at this,� she said, pointing to the elder Essen’s grave, “and I see that we’ve only been here less than 200 years. And I think about how you can’t turn the TV on these days without seeing people, and politicians, who want to stop immigrants from coming to this country. What if that was my family?�

That was nine years ago, and it still resonates today. Time flies, but history repeats itself.

Jenkins and her brother, Mark Essen, and their cousin, Carl Essen, had invited me to the family plot to tell me a story about a log cabin.

Gerhard Rudolph Essen built the cabin, which used to be adjacent to the cemetery, in 1870. He and his wife, an Irish immigrant named Ellen O’Kennedy, came St. Louis from Philadelphia. He was a cobbler and eventually settled in a German enclave , in what is now Wildwood.

He built a cabin, where he and his wife raised six children. The cabin stood, in remarkably good shape, until November 2015, when a thief drove a truck up to it, took it apart and stole it. He planned to sell the wood. At the time, two sisters who owned the land where the cabin sat — Patty Schoenbeck and Ruth Martin Karst — had been in talks with Wildwood about donating the structure so it could be preserved.

About a month later, the thief was found in St. Charles County and the cabin, and its pieces and parts, were recovered. Now the heavy lifting would begin. Working with Wildwood officials, the Essens, who are proud of their family heritage, started figuring out if the cabin could be preserved and where it could go.

In 2016, the city accepted the donation of the cabin from the sisters who owned the land where it sat. But it was difficult to find contractors with the expertise to put it together. The city hired an architect, Carol Quigley, who is an expert in historic rehabilitation. Quigley works for Patterhn Ives, a St. Louis-based architecture practice that also has offices in suburban Philadelphia. In 2019, on the top of the parking garage across from Wildwood City Hall, labeling each piece to help guide reconstruction.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and that slowed things down.

The city thought the cabin might be located in its new Wildwood Community Park. And then a plan started coming together for a Village Green park, just west of City Hall, with the Essen Cabin as a centerpiece.

But there was another problem: To make the cabin historically accurate, and able to be preserved and used by the public, the city was going to need additional logs from that period.

Enter The House That Bob Built. That’s what Bob Schoknecht calls the reconstructed cabin on his property in Cuba, Missouri.

Several years back, Schoknecht purchased the logs that made up the Schlotthauer House, a historic cabin in Manchester that was taken down during an expansion of the Manchester Athletic Association complex. That house was built around the same time as the Essen Cabin. Schoknecht was storing logs on his property, and he donated them to Wildwood to help with the reconstruction of its historic cabin.

Last week, nearly nine years after the Essen Cabin was first stolen and recovered, members of the Essen family gathered in Wildwood City Hall to address the Historic Preservation Commission, which must approve the plan to reconstruct the cabin on the future Village Green.

It would be open to the public, at least during special events, with two entrances so people can walk through this piece of St. Louis County history.

“This is just a great opportunity to teach the next generations about what happened in the 1800s,� Joan Essen told the commission.

The Essen Cabin, like the — built in the 1850s in the same Melrose community — offers a look into the region’s rugged past, when immigrants came to find their way, to start families and to launch careers.

The story of Melrose is the story of lots of places. Eventually, when the railroad moved away, new highways were built and modes of transportation determined which old places in Missouri thrived and which withered away.

Saving the remnants of those days — remnants of the immigrants who created the communities where we now live — is one generation’s gift to the one that comes next.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this column misstated the location of the architect's office.Ìý