Until recently, the limestone building at 445 Smith Avenue North, St. Paul, Minnesota, United States, was known in surveys and local architectural history books as the Anthony Waldman House.

Evidence of this commercial design include a side porch/loading dock facing the alley to the north (since removed); obvious stone in-filling of the first-floor shop-front windows; a large structural beam above the one-time shop front that supported the second-story stonework; photographic evidence from the 1940s of remnants of the original first-floor commercial cornice (see enlarged image below); physical evidence of a central entrance step into the shop; and wooden sleepers that served as nailers for decorative wooden pilasters or perhaps signs at either side of the shop windows below the cornice.

[1] The Waldman House lies in the southwest block of Leech’s Addition to the City of St. Paul (legally described as the NE1/4 of SE1/4 Section 1, Township 28, Range 23).

Leech’s Addition was platted by developer Samuel Leach in 1849 as a perfectly symmetric nine-block square of streets and alleys extending southwest from the earliest-settled core of St. Paul.

The lot spanned the area between block nine’s alley to the north and Goodrich to the south, and faced Forbes Street (renamed Smith Avenue in 1887) to the east.

Prior to 1853 this lot was bought and sold as an undifferentiated part of the quarter-section, and later block, by such early and avid land speculators as Henry Sibley, Samuel Leech, James McClellan Boal ("McBoal"), William Forbes and Justus Ramsey.

The $420 price paid by Fuchs for the stone house lot only one month later (December 1854) suggests there may already have been a small wood frame structure there.

Both Shingles (aka Shindell and Shendle) and the building's owner after 1860, Anthony Waldman, paid the City of St. Paul for liquor licenses in March 1858.

Waldman, who purchased the stone house in October 1860, is listed as the owner of a lager beer saloon in the 1860 federal census.

Amos and his sometime business partner Christian Rhinehardt constructed numerous other limestone structures in Uppertown, including 202 McBoal Street (Martin Webber House, 1867).

The first record of Amos in St. Paul is his listing in the 1856/7 City Directory as a “mason” living on Bluff Street, two blocks south of the stone building.

So, given the implausibility that Amos chose the worst economic crisis of the period to experiment in retail trade, one is compelled to conclude that the "store" description in the Directory may not be accurate.

Moreover, given the chaotic economic times, it may have been difficult for the Directory's compilers to decipher the building's current use (especially if its owner declined to pay for a fuller listing).

While it is only a guess, it is possible that Amos was the stonemason for the stone addition to the wood frame structure originally on the lot, and then occupied the building with his family after it fell vacant following the Panic—perhaps in lieu of Fuchs' payment for his work.

He was promoted to the ranks of Sergeant (April 2, 1862), 1st Lieutenant (August 2, 1863) and Full Captain (February 9, 1865), before mustering out at Fort Snelling on September 6, 1865.

However, by 1864 the City Directories begin consistently listing his occupation as the owner of a “feed and flour” store, a trade Waldman continued for the next fifteen years.

As mentioned above, the historic thoroughfare from St. Paul to the ferry at Fort Snelling ran along the Mississippi River bluff line, mostly through unplatted land west of the City.

If that is correct, Fuchs knew what he was doing when he built his commercial building facing a street that he and other observant property owners expected to become a major business thoroughfare.

As the St. Paul Financial Real Estate and Railroad Advisor opined on September 5, 1857: A. Vance Brown, who had sold the stone house lot to Fuchs in 1854, may have been among those suspected by the paper as exerting their influence.

While no other street in Leech's Addition would be graded for another twenty years, in 1858 Fuchs and a handful of other owners along Forbes Street repeatedly petitioned the Common Council to grade Forbes and build a sidewalk on its west side, purportedly out of a concern that it was "impossible for school children to get to the School House from the upper part of the Town."

Obviously unconvinced of their motives, Mayor Norman Kittson vetoed these improvements, stating that "the streets designated have as yet few buildings erected on them, and being situated on the outskirts of the populated parts of the City, must be for the convenience only of a few of the property owners."

One can imagine Fuchs' reaction, long after selling his property, when the construction of the High Bridge in 1889 once again turned (now) Smith Avenue into a major thoroughfare.

In 1885 Waldman sold his home and two rental properties on Forbes Street (now Smith Avenue), and returned to Germany, where he died in Edenkoben, Pfalz, Rheinbauein in 1887.