34 North Commercial Street

Blanche Kelso Bruce (1841-98), who later became a senator from Mississippi, was born a slave in Virginia. He moved to rural Missouri in the early 1850s with the family of his master, William Perkinson. By the mid-1850s he had come to St. Louis, where he worked along the levee. He later attended Oberlin College, in Ohio, then returned to St. Louis after the Civil War as an employee on the steamboat Columbia, which sailed between St. Louis and Council Bluffs, Iowa.

In 1868, he bought a plantation in Bolivar, Mississippi, and amassed a fortune. Entering politics in 1870, he became sergeant-at-arms for the Mississippi state senate; in 1874, he was elected United States senator and served until 1881. After his term ended, he served as register of the treasury until 1889, recorder of deeds in the District of Columbia until 1895, and finally register of the treasury until his death. One newspaper recalled that Bruce "scorned the use of the phrase 'colored men""; he often declared, "I am a Negro and proud of it."