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Mystery of Civil War bullet hole ends
By Valerie Schremp Hahn
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
06/11/2007
ST. CHARLES —
Every day, thousands of cars buzz by the Sandfort family home fronting the north side of Interstate 70. Behind a stand of trees, it's an easy place to miss.
But 145 years ago, a half-dozen Missouri militiamen — some drunk — rode a similar route in front of the house on horseback and truly made their mark on the place.
The mark is a bullet hole, left in the home's front door frame the night of June 10, 1862. The hole was long ago patched and painted over, but an indentation on both sides is still visible. For decades, the Sandforts never knew how the hole got there: One story was that a Union soldier fired at the door during the Civil War, another said a soldier shot and killed a slave who was working in a flower bed next to the front porch.
"We just thought that somebody got angry and there was a shot taken at the owner," said David Sandfort, who grew up in the stately brick home just east of Truman Road and now lives there with his wife, Helen.
David's brother Robert, the family historian, recently uncovered the true story. He and his wife, Janine, live in a more modern house farther back on the 170-acre property. Robert Sandfort got the story behind the bullet hole by digging through war records kept by the Missouri State Archives in Jefferson City. He wrote a report of his research, which appeared in a recent issue of St. Charles County Heritage, a magazine produced by the St. Charles County Historical Society.
The house was built by slaves for the Daniel Griffith family in the late 1830s. In 1862, Daniel Griffith's son, Daniel A. Griffith, lived at the brick home with his wife, Fanny, and their three young children. He was a judge, dabbled in real estate and also operated a cider mill and orchard on the property. He had Southern leanings, and after the Civil War started, the territory around him grew increasingly hostile.
In the spring of 1862, two companies from the Missouri State Militia Cavalry wound up in Troy, Mo., to organize an effort against some Southern sympathizers. That June 10, two soldiers had completed their tour and wanted to go back home to St. Charles. The soldiers had turned in their rifles, so they were afraid to travel alone through the hostile territory. Four soldiers were selected to go with them.
The group left on horseback about 11 a.m. and traveled along the Salt River Road. They stopped to eat dinner in St. Peters, and afterward drank at a bar for about two hours. By this time, they had ridden through the most dangerous territory, Robert Sandfort pointed out.
"Nonetheless, they may have felt the need to reinforce their courage," he wrote.
The men rode on along the Salt River Road. As they approached the Griffith home, riding on the spot near where the north service road exists today, two of the Griffiths' dogs ran towards the soldiers, barking. Several shots rang out — it's still not certain who fired — but at least one bullet went through the right side of the front door frame, whizzed through the hallway, tore through the back door, hit a back porch post, glanced off a brick wall and fell to the ground.
The shots woke the Griffith family, angering Daniel Griffith. The next day, he took the bullet into St. Charles to the headquarters of Lt. Col. Arnold Krekel, the commander of the battalion. Krekel had the soldiers arrested that day and took their statements.
The stories varied: Some denied firing their guns, one said he thought he heard two guns firing, another said he had fired his gun but so did the others.
"I was not drunk," Pvt. Hermann Koehne wrote. "I was drunk," Pvt. Franz Steinmann wrote. "I never was drunk when a soldier and this was the first time."
Two men camping on a nearby creek (now called Sandfort Creek) told Krekel that they definitely had heard gunshots, dogs barking after the firing, and men talking loudly and swearing.
Krekel held the soldiers in a military prison for 13 days while he wrote his report. He concluded that he thought Steinmann, who admitted he was drunk and fired his gun into the air, had fired the shot that hit the house. Records don't show if he or the others got any more punishment.
A few years passed, and the approaching end of the Civil War meant tougher financial times for the Griffiths. Daniel Griffith eventually suffered a stroke or some sort of breakdown, and the family had to sell the farm. Hermann Dietrich Sandfort — David and Robert Sandfort's great-grandfather — bought the house on the courthouse steps in 1878. The house and its outbuildings have remained in the Sandfort family ever since.
The bullet hole marks just one of several unique aspects of growing up on the property: The Sandforts still eat pears from two trees left from the original orchard, and tombstones removed from the Griffith family cemetery long ago somehow wound up as caps on the old brick home's chimneys. The tombstones sit up high near a limestone cornice, which has an indentation that looks like it could have been left by a cannon ball.
But, the Sandforts say with a grin, that's another family mystery.
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