St. James: Iron Furnaces and Route Sixty-Six Wine

St. James sits in the Meramec River valley in Phelps County, where Route Sixty-Six crossed through the Missouri Ozarks on its way from St. Louis toward Springfield.

The town was platted in eighteen sixty as a shipping point for the Maramec Iron Works, one of the larger nineteenth-century iron furnaces in Missouri, which processed local ore from the Ozark uplift from eighteen twenty-six until eighteen seventy-six. Route Sixty-Six brought new commerce through the twenties and beyond, and the surrounding area developed a wine industry that persists today, with several wineries along the old highway alignment. St.

James lies in the Meramec River country, where the river and its springs carved cavern systems through the limestone bedrock. Travelers on Route Sixty-Six passed through here heading into or out of the deeper Ozark plateau, a landscape distinct from both the flat farmland east of St. Louis and the hotter lowlands to the south.