Photography by Jennifer Silverberg
It all seems so quaint now: a farm set on the bluffs of the Missouri River, where families travel each winter to escape the city and find that picturesque Christmas tree. It wasn’t always so pleasant, though. “Looking back on it, it should’ve been scary,” says LeRoy Rood, the owner of Pea Ridge Forest (22735 Tree Farm, Hermann, 636-932-4687, pearidgeforest.com), a Christmas-tree farm and wholesale nursery west of St. Louis.
In 1971, he and his wife, Mary, drove from their home in O’Fallon, Mo., to a plot of land near Hermann. They made their way up a narrow road, past winding creeks and rolling hills, to a 140-year-old log house and a small Christmas-tree farm. “We got a rundown of the business, which I knew nothing about, nor did my wife,” recalls LeRoy, who worked as a design engineer for McDonnell Douglas at the time.
Nonetheless, the couple made an offer—and the sellers accepted. “It was dumb as a rock, but we moved into that log house,” LeRoy says. “It had a 10-gallon hot-water heater, and we had four small children. That was interesting, but we survived.”
Those early years weren’t easy. The Roods anticipated that the long rows of Scotch pine would mature at just the right time, but it didn’t happen that way. “Our ignorance led to a lot of pipe dreams,” LeRoy says. “It took a few years to get our feet wet.” Slowly, the couple built the business, talking to other tree farmers along the way. There was no end to the challenges each season: drought, pests, disease, frost, damage from deer… “Like any farm, you think you have it under control, and all of a sudden something else comes back and bites you,” he says. For many Midwestern Christmas-tree farmers, it was too much; LeRoy watched as the industry grew then shrank over time. “The demand is still there, but the people growing them aren’t,” he says. “Not many kids came back and took over the family farm.”
Fortunately for the Roods, their sons did. After graduating from college in the early ’90s, Scott and Michael Rood suggested adding nursery stock: It grew faster and could be sold to nurseries and landscapers. “Scotch pines in this part of the country are a tough row to hoe,” says LeRoy. Today, the business has gone from entirely Christmas trees to 75 percent landscape sales.
Whereas Pea Ridge once sold 10,000 pines each winter, it now sells several thousand choose-and-cut trees per year. From Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, visitors can take a hayride into the fields, cut down a tree with furnished saws, then warm up beside the massive stone fireplace in the gift shop. For many St. Louisans, it’s become an annual tradition to take that same scenic drive the Roods took more than 40 years ago. “It’s a family-type outing,” says LeRoy.
