Pacific: Gateway to the Meramec and the First Railroad West

Pacific, Missouri sits where the Meramec River cuts through the Ozark foothills west of Saint Louis, and its history is bound up with one of the most ambitious railroad projects of the nineteenth century. The Pacific Railroad, chartered in eighteen forty-nine, was among the first railroads built west of the Mississippi River, and the town, platted as Franklin, took the name Pacific from that line in eighteen fifty-nine.

Route Sixty-Six followed the same westward corridor through the river valley, and Pacific sat on that road for travelers leaving Saint Louis. Meramec Caverns, far to the southwest near Stanton, became one of the most aggressively advertised attractions on the entire highway, plastering barn roofs across fourteen states with ads that leaned on the Jesse James legend. Whether Jesse James ever actually hid there is disputed by historians, but the signs sold tickets for decades.