Ladue: Osage Hunting Ground to St. Louis's Wealthiest Address

The rolling land west of St. Louis was Osage territory for centuries. The Osage hunted along the Meramec River corridor and made seasonal trips through what is now St. Louis County. By treaties in eighteen eight, eighteen eighteen, and eighteen twenty-five the Osage gave up their Missouri lands, and later moved to Oklahoma, and European farming families moved in.

For most of the nineteenth century this was corn and wheat country, farmed by Irish, German, and French families whose names still mark local roads: McKnight, Warson, Litzsinger. The land was organized as Township Forty-Five, unremarkable agriculture at the western edge of St. Louis County.

The shift came when automobiles replaced horses in the early nineteen hundreds. Wealthy St. Louis families began buying up farm tracts to build country estates. Three small villages consolidated in nineteen thirty-six to form the city of Ladue, named for Peter LaDue, a nineteenth century St. Louis attorney, banker, and land owner whose property sat at what is now Warson and Ladue Roads. Ladue zoned itself as almost entirely single-family residential with minimum lot sizes, and it became the address for St. Louis business dynasties. Today it ranks among the highest-income municipalities in Missouri, a city of nearly nine thousand residents on land that was grass and grain just a century ago.