With the recent guilty pleas of former County Executive Steve Stenger and St. Louis Economic Development Partnership CEO Sheila Sweeney, Wellston has been in the news a lot lately. The political scandal raised questions about the sale of two industrial parks in this inner-ring suburb to a political donor.
The Plymouth and Wellston Industrial Parks are located just west outside of St. Louis along Page Avenue and Dr. Martin Luther King Dr./St. Charles Rock Road (which switches names at Ogden Avenue within the Wellston city limits). Local news media has mentioned their names and counted up the considerable amount of money St. Louis County spent to clean up environmental contamination there, but nobody’s explored the long and rich history behind these sites.
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The story of Wellston is inextricably linked to that of its industrial past—and to the failed promises by county, state, and federal officials to restore the economic fortunes of this former dynamo. St. Louisans might be familiar with the “company towns” in the Metro East, such as National City, home of the stockyards and packing plants; Monsanto, now Sauget, and its chemical plants; and Alorton, with the Alcoa aluminum smelter. But Wellston functioned much in the same way on the other side of the Gateway City, located conveniently at the end of the Hodiamont Streetcar Line. Its east-west street names are the same as many of the corresponding streets across the city border, yet the former industrial suburb seems cut off and isolated at times, even with busy Page and MLK passing through it.
Wagner Electric, founded in St. Louis City but relocated to Wellston in 1906 along Plymouth Avenue, remains one of the most fascinating industries to call the suburb home. Founded by Herbert Wagner and Ferdinand Schwedtman in 1891, the company expanded rapidly, due to the success of the small alternating current motors it manufactured for home appliances. Like many industrialists in the first half of the 20th century, Wagner was able to quickly retool its plants to aid the war effort in both world wars. Photographs in the Missouri History Museum’s collection show mountains of shell casings piled up outside the Wagner factory; at one point, 25 percent of its work force were women. Wagner’s shell casings are so iconic that the newly opened Soldiers’ Memorial Museum has two of them on exhibit. The company also pioneered the use of non-union labor from outside St. Louis and took advantage of “business friendly” leaders in Wellston. Newspaper clippings show that corruption had a long history in Wellston city government. Workers soon found their voice, going on strike in 1918.
Wagner Electric was not the only major employer in Wellston in the early 20th century; a book on the history of St. Louis County published in 1911 lists no fewer than 11 companies open at the time, including two planing mills and at least one foundry, the Fulton Iron Works, whose front office building along Stephen Jones Avenue still stands.
Fulton Iron Works dates to 1852 and originally constructed engines for steamboats along the Mississippi River. As the railroad rendered the steamboat obsolete, Fulton moved into other industries; now located in South City, it fabricates gear for drawbridges and presses for sugar cane.
North of Wagner Electric and MLK was the Abex Foundry, which unlike Fulton and Wagner, has been completely obliterated. But there’s still a hulking electrical substation just north of MLK, a testament to the massive energy needs of Wellston industry. It’s hard to imagine now, but at one point, upwards of 6,000 workers were once employed at Wagner Electric, and many other companies also operated in the expansive industrial zone that takes up a substantial percentage of Wellston’s 0.93-square-mile footprint. At its greatest census, 1950 (also the apex of St. Louis’s population), Wellston reached 9,396 inhabitants. It must have truly been a sight to see the thousands of workers pouring out of the factories at the end of their shift, crowding the streetcars or hustling down to the shopping district of the Wellston Loop to pick up a last-minute purchase before going home. In its heyday, the town must have been bursting at the seams.
That’s all gone now. Wagner Electric closed in 1983, after laying off thousands of employees year after year, and donated its land to St. Louis County. The Abex Foundry closed in 1982. Interstate 70 rerouted customers around MLK/ St. Charles Rock Road, and factory closures further decimated the Wellston Loop business district. The General Electric plant down on Etzel Avenue, once a busy maker of lightbulbs, held out until 2007 before laying off its last employees.
My previous statement that everything is gone now should come have come with a qualifier, though. The tax dollars left, but the PCBs, cadmium, chromium and other pollutants stayed behind. The “donation” of the old Wagner Electric land was starting to look a lot less generous in 1985, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on the discovery of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl, an organic chlorine coolant used in electrical transformers) throughout the old factory. The Abex Foundry, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, was severely polluted with cadmium and chromium, a result of its history of working with steel.
As so often happens, government inherited the contaminated mess. Rob Powers captured the demolition of the factories and some of the workers’ neighborhoods close to the pollution. The images are harsh, grim. But from the clean-up of the abandoned factories came two new industrial parks with wide open spaces and wonderful possibilities. The old Wagner Electric site became the Plymouth Industrial Park, its core building a job training center. The old Abex Foundry site became the Wellston Industrial Park. A lot of public money was spent clearing up the mess that private industry had made.
Perhaps that is what makes disgraced former County Executive Steve Stenger’s betrayal all the more egregious: The history of Wellston is one of grave social injustice, and he has added a new chapter. Wellston is one of the poorest towns in Missouri, and just in the last couple of weeks, it received another punch to the gut with the announcement that the Housing and Urban Development Agency may demolish hundreds of its public housing units in the town instead of renovating them. It was bad enough for a county exec to sell land to a crony for a couple dozen jobs and minimal economic promise, but selling off property to a political donor for a car lot that will only produce a few dozen jobs is, if you ask me, a moral crime. And the HUD announcement is just one more piece of bad news Wellston didn’t need right now.
True, the thousands of jobs that once drove Wellston’s economy aren’t all coming back. But the people of Wellston do not deserve continued failure on the part of those who govern them.
