Eureka: Six Flags, the Meramec Caves, and the Edge of St. Louis

Eureka sits at the western edge of St. Louis County where Route Sixty-Six began climbing into the Ozark foothills, leaving the flat bottomlands of the Missouri River behind. The town grew as a suburban extension of St.

Louis in the postwar era, but its Route Sixty-Six identity came earlier, when the highway was still the primary road southwest of the city. Meramec Caverns, far to the southwest near Stanton, was one of the most aggressively marketed roadside attractions on the entire highway, with barn roof advertisements painted in fourteen states claiming the caves had sheltered Jesse James. The claim is disputed by historians.

Six Flags St. Louis, which opened in nineteen seventy-one on Interstate Forty-Four near Eureka, is a direct descendant of the Route Sixty-Six entertainment economy, a large-scale amusement destination positioned to capture the traffic between the city and the highway corridor heading southwest.