St. Louis Mercantile Library

When civic leaders in frontier Saint Louis chartered a library in eighteen forty-six, their city was the gateway to an entire continent still being mapped. The Saint Louis Mercantile Library opened that year as a membership institution and has been open continuously ever since, making it the oldest general library west of the Mississippi River. Its collections reflect the city's role as an organizing hub of western expansion: deep holdings on river and rail transportation, Westward expansion narratives, and the growth of the Saint Louis region fill more than two hundred fifty thousand volumes, with millions more items in special collections. The library eventually moved to the campus of the University of Missouri in Saint Louis, where it remains a research anchor for anyone tracing American history along the great corridor west.