Christopher Hawken’s great grandfather, Niclaus Hachen, came to America from Switzerland about 1750, settling in York County, Pennsylvania. His father, Jacob, came to St. Louis in 1807, where he began crafting the famous Hawken Rifle in a shop on the Mississippi Riverfront.
Historians call the coveted Hawken Rifle the “gun that settled the west,” since it was prized by so many famous westward explorers and trappers, including Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, John Fremont, Jim Bridger, and Robert Campbell, the famous St. Louis fur trader. To find out more about the Hawken Rifle, visit The Hawken Shop.
Mary Ann Kinkead Eads was the eldest of three daughters of Granville O. Eads and Lucinda Sappington. Lucinda was the only child of Thomas Sappington (of Sappington House) and his first wife Mary Ann Kinkead.
The Hawken family burial plot is located at Oak Hill Cemetery in Kirkwood, along Big Bend Road to the west, just beyond I-44. Oak Hill is also the burial site of several members of the Sappington and Eads families, in addition to many other early Webster Groves residents.
For more information about Christopher and Mary Ann, and the life of a Gentleman Farmer in Saint Louis County in a post-war Missouri… come visit us and take a tour of the Historic Hawken House Museum!
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