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Site 15 on the St. Louis Sundial Trail:
Perryville, MO

Perryville, Missouri, is located about 80 miles south of St. Louis city. Two sundials are located there; one is new, and one is old. The new sundial is at the southwest corner of the Perry County Courthouse at 15 W. Sainte Marie St. (37°43'30.61"N, 89°51'47.72"W). The Courthouse was in the path of totality during the Great American Solar Eclipse that occurred across the United States on Aug. 21, 2017. The design and construction commenced in Nov. 2016 of a new sundial to be installed at the Courthouse in time for the eclipse, and to commemorate the eclipse. The horizontal sundial pictured at the right was unveiled in a public ceremony on Aug. 19, 2017, just two days before the eclipse.


The sundial has two special features. One is that the gnomon is pierced such that a letter "P" appears in the gnomon's shadow, as seen in the pictures below. This represents Perry County. The second special feature is the red-colored date line for August 21. The tip of the gnomon serves as a nodus whose shadow traverses this date line on that date. As it traverses from morning hours to evening hours, the tip's shadow encounters markers at the time of onset of the eclipse, the time of totality, and the time of completion of the eclipse.

Three plaques are mounted on the pedestal, one to explain how the sundial commemorates the total solar eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017, a second to explain the relationship between solar time and civil time, and the third to cite the people involved in creating the sundial. A picture of the third plaque is below.

To learn more about this sundial, click on An Eclipse Sundial for Perry County.

A second sundial in Perryville, the "old" one, is painted on a south-facing wall of the St. Mary's of the Barrens church at 1811 W. St. Joseph St. (37°43'38"N, 89°53'24"W). This sundial is attributed to Vincentian Brother Angelo Oliva, being painted sometime in the 14 year period between 1823, when he arrived in Perryville to lead the reconstruction of the original, wooden church into the present one made of stone, and 1837 when he died.

(Third image by Trish Erzfeld, Perry County Dir. of Tourism.) To learn more about this sundial, click on The sundial on the Barrens Church in Perryville, MO. To go to other sites on the trail, return to the trail map.