Streetcars Changed the Course of St. Charles Rock Road

By Wayne Brasler

Thanks to the M-G-M film musical “Meet Me in St. Louis” the city will forever be associated with its trolley system.

  In fact it was one of the most comprehensive in the nation, and notable because so much of the streetcar lines traveled not on streets but through woodlands and rural areas to far distant spots.  Including the city of St. Charles across the Missouri River!

  The streetcar line in the film really did exist; it was the Hodiamont line and it passed the west of the Wellston Loop at Easton (now Martin Luther King Boulevard) Avenue at Hodiamont.

  That was where the St. Charles and Western streetcar line commenced its journey.  The history of the Rock Road, from its beginning as a westward overland passage from the Mississippi to the Missouri, is well-known.  But few people know the Rock Road had for many decades as a component a heavy-duty electric railroad line from Wellston to St. Charles.

  Few histories accurately record the route of the line and few record the fact that the present location of the Rock Road isn’t the original location for much of its route. That’s because bit by bit the road was rerouted to conform to the rail line.

  The line was built by the enterprising James Houseman beginning in 1897 in stages westward, originally terminating on the east side of the Missouri River, where passengers rode ferry boats across to St. Charles.  Then in 1904 a bridge was built over the river and the trolley line terminal still stands just off where its exit landed in St. Charles.

  The line was double-tracked in the middle of the road west from Wellston.  Just east of Lucas and Hunt Road it traveled over a humped wooden bridge with the rails laid in the wood.  At Lucas and Hunt the line met the St. Peters line, a single-tracked operation which went north up Lucas and Hunt to Natural Bridge.

  West of Lucas and Hunt each track spread to the south and north sides of the Rock Road.  Later, when the Road was widened to four lanes from two, the streetcars rode in the middle of the road until reaching St. Vincent’s Lane in Pagedale, where they spread to the outside lanes.

  In the early days the line met the Cross Country line which came north up Ferguson Avenue from Vernon to serve visitors to St. Vincent’s Sanitarium.  At Lucas Lane, which is now Normandy Drive, there was a siding to serve the Normandie Country Club and Golf Course.  At North and South Road both rails moved to the north side of the Rock Road on an impressive rail highway.

  At Brown Road (which was Birdie Avenue), where the car barn was located (the bus barn north of it still stands, hidden behind Walgreen’s Drugs), the line narrowed to one rail, and at what is now Cypress Road, the Bridgeton Line branched off to head north for what is now Lambert Field.

  Most histories have the line following the Rock Road right out to St. Charles, but not so.  At what is now Lindbergh, the rails turned northwestward to reach the town of Bridgeton, eventually curving to where the Rock Road now runs just west of I-270.  The line crossed Natural Bridge just east of its junction with the Rock Road and a siding there served Westlake Amusement park at that junction.  Many histories have the streetcar running in front of Westlake Park, but it actually ran in back.

  The streetcar line west of Westlake Park was built on an embankment because a flood plain commenced at that location, and therein lies another tale.  With rail traffic declining because of the automobile, the streetcar line was cut back to Dammerman Stop, one third mile west of Woodson Road at what is now Airline Avenue, in 1932 and assumed the name of the Woodson Road streetcar.  That’s because Woodson Road was not located where it is now, but west of that location and today it survives as Edmundson Road.

  When the streetcar stopped running west of Woodson, the state was able to recreate St. Charles Rock Road west of the junction with Natural Bridge Road to highway standards.  St. Charles Rock Road originally west of I-270 meandered along the Fee Fee Creek, which was prone to flooding.  When the Road was relocated to the route of the streetcar line to St. Charles, the road was renamed Old St. Charles and later Boenker Road, which today is unfit to drive on.

  In fact, before that, several portions of the Rock Road in the St. John and St. Ann areas were called many other names before commencing at Adie Road and continuing west as Old St. Charles Road.

  Amazingly, parts of the streetcar right-of-way remain, most notably at Fee Fee, where “Electric Avenue” at one time stood just north of the Rock Road and a short patch of right-of-way and electrical sustation still stands on the west side of the road.  The right-of-way is also visible north on McKelvey Road, where it follows a creek and winds through a townhouse development, poles still in place and, most amazingly, a short stretch of the embankment is visible on the south side of the Rock Road just east of Earth City Expressway.

  James Houseman was very proud of his electric line, nicknamed the “All Saints” because it served so many cemeteries.  His luxurious cars included toilet facilities and phones, kept to schedules, stopped wherever passengers awaited (at night lighting newspapers to signal the motorman to halt) and were equipped with loud air horns and gigantic headlights to pierce the dark countryside.

  What a saga!  And now almost all forgotten or, if remembered, gotten wrong.  Not now.