Old State Road follows a ridge line through the foot hills, providing a link from Manchester Road near Ellisville down to Eureka. I imagine it is a very old road. It appears in Julius Pitzmann’s famous map of St. Louis… Continue Reading
Opened on August 7, 2015, Bluff View Park off Old State Road is a wonderful new addition to St. Louis County Parks. There seems to be a previous history to the acreage, as there are the remnants of an old… Continue Reading
I finally had the chance to go looking for the open pit clay mine I had seen in a historic photo at the Rockwoods Reservation visitors’ center. I found the piers for the narrow gauge railroad that had accessed the… Continue Reading
It was a beautiful unseasonably warm day yesterday, so I headed out to Rockwoods Reservation. I had heard some reports of devastating flash floods washing out trails and bridges, so I was not able to access the mines that I… Continue Reading
There’s this genteel old house sitting out on St. Albans Road on Manchester Road, way out in Wildwood. It was built in 1913 by J.P. Connell, the president of the Glencoe Clay Company for $1,800. It was a nice house,… Continue Reading
Bethel United Methodist Church is a congregation whose roots go deep into the history of West County, all the way back to 1858. In fact, I did not realize it, but I had photographed its original stone church (last photo)… Continue Reading
Due to an eagle-eyed reader, I learned recently that the historic freedmen’s settlement of Westland Acres recently sold for a substantial amount of money. Inhabited by the descendants of freed slaves for generations, I suspect that property tax pressures finally… Continue Reading
Remember last year when I posted about all the great historic, if abandoned buildings out in Pond, a small hamlet along Manchester Road in Wildwood? Well, the historic Pond Hotel was demolished, and so was the Italianate farmhouse I documented.
Update: The Wildwood City Council voted to keep the name in 2013; there has been no other effort to change the name since then. My family and I took a drive out to Old Slave Road and looked to see if… Continue Reading
My parents and I headed out to our favorite zombie subdivision in far western St. Louis County, off of Wild Horse Creek Road. What was intended to be a high-end subdivision sits largely empty, with the empty lots not even… Continue Reading