Illustration by Britt Spencer
Many longtime St. Louisans shorten the proper noun to “the Rock Road.” Though the road contains parts of the original thoroughfare, it’s been planked, asphalted, paved, and straightened over the course of four centuries. In the process, it’s lost its meanderings and curves. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
St. Charles Rock Road’s precursor was a trail worn by the Niúachi, or Missouria tribe. When French and Spanish colonists settled the lower Missouri River Valley in the 1760s and began using the trail, too, they dubbed it King’s Highway, a then-common term for oft-traveled roads. By 1772, it’d become the main connector between the villages of St. Louis and St. Charles, and in 1796, it was depicted on a map for the first time by French explorer Georges Henri Victor Collot. In 1804, Meriwether Lewis traversed it to meet up with William Clark; by that time, the southeastern stretch was known as St. Charles Street.
In 1819, when it became a postal and stagecoach route, the route received the grander name of St. Charles Road. Westbound pioneers used it as a primary means of accessing the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. Laws—and cemeteries—shaped the Rock Road just as profoundly as the traffic that passed over it. In 1823, it became illegal to dig a grave within the St. Louis city limits, and cemeteries sprang up along roads leading out of the city. The Rock Road was no exception. In 1834, when a petition was filed with the St. Louis County courts to make it a permanent highway, the Rock Road was legally defined, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted in 1921, as running “from the Catholic grave yard to a point on the east bank of the Missouri River opposite St. Charles.”
Things only got more official from there. In 1851, the Missouri Plank Road Law dictated that it be covered in 2.5-inch oak planks, and in 1865, it officially became the St. Charles Rock Road. And no, the name doesn’t come from some magnificent bluff formation known as the St. Charles Rock. In that year, a petition filed in the courts asked that it be “macadamized” from end to end—meaning that it’s named for gravel, layers and layers of it that were tamped down after being laid.
Tollbooths were put in place to pay for upkeep, but by 1919, the Post reported, it was one of the worst roads in St. Louis County, “full of bad holes and ruts, making driving either in automobiles or horse-drawn vehicles unpleasant at day time and actually dangerous at night.” In 1921, the former King’s Highway became the first concrete highway in St. Louis County. So why keep the name? Maybe they thought “St. Charles Concrete Road” just didn’t have the same ring to it.
