Wentzville, Missouri

Wentzville started as a railroad depot deal. In eighteen fifty-five, a local landowner named William Allen donated a strip of ground to the Northern Missouri Railroad in exchange for a stop. The man who surveyed the route and helped Allen lay out the town lots was a New York engineer named Erasmus Livingston Wentz, and Allen named the place after him as a thank-you.

The railroad arrived in eighteen fifty-seven, and within a generation Wentzville had churches, schools, and a post office. It stayed a quiet agricultural town for over a century, then grew explosively when General Motors opened an assembly plant here in nineteen eighty-three. Today that plant, sprawling across five hundred sixty-nine acres just off Interstate Seventy, builds Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon pickups and employs more than four thousand workers.