October 9, 2025: Tracing the Tracks of Glendale’s History

Come Help Re-launch the Glendale Historical Society! Tuesday, October 21, 7 p.m. at City Hall

After a ten-year absence, the Glendale Historical Society is getting a new life! 

After a ten-year absence, the Glendale Historical Society is getting a new life!  The group was active from 1986 to 2015 but folded due to the retirement of its long-time president.  The hodgepodge of archives was put in the attic of City Hall — and basically have collected dust since.  At the invitation of City Hall, a small group of citizens has formed a GHS.2 steering committee.  We would like to update Glendale residents on what we have been doing and how we hope the new Glendale Historical Society will grow and develop to help protect, celebrate, and preserve Glendale’s history, stories, and traditions. 

Please attend our launch event at Glendale City Hall on Tuesday, October 21 at 7 p.m.  We will showcase what we have found in the archives and what we are working on at present.  We will also discuss our proposed activities and welcome the community’s suggestions on what you would like to see from the newly organized organization.  Refreshments will be served.  A limited number of Glendale Christmas ornaments will be for sale to benefit the new group.  Finally, there will be plenty of opportunities for interested people to get involved.  

In the meantime, direct any questions or comments to GlendaleHSMO@gmail.com.

Tracing the Tracks of Glendale’s History

By Robert Koenig

A popular song in the World’s Fair film “Meet Me in St. Louis” features the clang-clang-clang of the bells on trollies that once rumbled across the city. Back then, those same bells were also ringing in Glendale, where two streetcar lines had stops.

Old timers recalled paying a nickel to ride the “Old Number One” – the Kirkwood-Ferguson 01 line – boarding at a stop on Sappington Road, near where Glendale’s City Hall now stands. When the line opened in 1896, Sappington was still a dirt road and most of the transport in Glendale and Kirkwood was by horse-drawn carriages.

“One of the favorite things to do in those days was to ride the trolley car, and the fare was only a nickel,” recalled Dottie Maselter LeRoi in the Glendale Historical Society’s Bulletin (September 1995).  “Yes, the trollies did clang . . . especially in downtown traffic, or on summer nights when a conductor was sweet on a pretty girl and would clang as he passed her house.” 

In the early years, long before it was incorporated in 1912, Glendale was a picturesque country settlement, with open fields, dirt roads, ponds, shallow streams, and dense thickets. There were few telephones and few shops. An ice company in Rock Hill delivered blocks of ice every week to cool food in ice boxes. In the winter, furnaces were stoked with coal. Oil lamps provided lighting in most homes. Many workers and shoppers took streetcars downtown, and older kids rode the trolley to schools in Kirkwood.

“When I was young, after school we used to walk the tracks instead of riding the streetcar,” recalled Beatrice Holscher Walther in the Bulletin (September 1989). Noting that the trolley cost five cents, she said the walkers’ motto was: Save our nickel and buy a pickle.

Walther said her family moved to Glendale in 1905, and “in our first years here we went everywhere by streetcar. We did our shopping in downtown St. Louis.” Emma Jane Dunn, who moved to Glendale in 1913, also told the Bulletin (June 1998) that, in those days, “Glendale’s lifeline was the streetcar.”  

The trolley car is part of the Glendale Historical Society’s logo because the city’s identity was originally linked to rail and trolley lines. After all, Glendale got its name from a station on the Missouri Pacific Line, and for years the town was known for its streetcar stops.

Trains and streetcars were rumbling through Glendale long before the town was incorporated. By 1880, the Missouri Pacific commuter trains between Kirkwood and St. Louis city were doing well. Cable-drawn streetcars were running then, but electric-powered trams were operating by 1888.

By about 1900, the Kirkwood-Ferguson 01 line carried hundreds of passengers, running every ten minutes during rush hours, and every 20 minutes at other times. Two men were required to operate those streetcars up until 1930, when improvements such as automatic exit doors made it possible for one person to operate the trams.

Most businessmen in Glendale worked in St. Louis and rode the streetcars downtown. The fastest route was the Brentwood 57 line, which ran along Manchester Road, with a stop in Glendale, all the way to downtown St. Louis. Hilbert Keisker wrote in the Bulletin (September 1987) that, back in 1908, the men who worked in St. Louis “either used the Manchester trolley on Lockwood or the commuter trains that were operated by the Missouri Pacific and the Frisco railroads. Both had stations on Berry and on Sappington roads. The Manchester trolley ran from the Meramec Highlands, west of Kirkwood, to Fourth and Market streets in St. Louis.” 

The “01” line ran from Kirkwood across Dickson Street and through Glendale, crossing Hill Drive, Venneman Avenue, Sappington Road, and Berry Road, across the Algonquin golf course to Kirkham Road, then north on Kirkham and into Brentwood and Clayton.

Glendale tram stops were also places to meet interesting people. Florence Delling wrote in the Bulletin (March 1989) that she recalled meeting Dr. Hillel Unterberg while he waited at an “01” tram stop in the 1920s. Unterberg, a neurologist who had studied under Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in Europe before World War One, commuted by tram every day to his office in the Frisco Building in St. Louis. 

“It was enjoyable sitting with him [on the tram] and listening to his stories about his travels and his experiences during World War One,” she wrote. Unterberg built a house for his mother in Glendale in 1908, and he lived in the town for many years.

Delling also wrote that, on her way to a tram stop, she once explored “the only big barn around these parts” in a field to the north of Edwin Avenue. “As I often crossed through this field on my way to the streetcar, I walked beside it, peering nervously inside… I ventured inside one time. There were scatterings of hay and pieces of machinery, but to my surprise a large flock of huge birds flew out from the rafters, scaring the wits out of me.” 

She added: “They were only black crows, and they were probably more frightened than I was.”

In the 1930s, kids used to take the tram from Glendale to see Saturday Matinees at the old Kirkwood Theater on North Clay Avenue. “Since [the theater] was located near the streetcar tracks, it was easy to reach and streetcars were cheap,” recalled Peggy Kickey Ratz in the Bulletin (September 2003). 

Sometimes, Glendale trams were targets for pranksters. One prank was to “soap the tracks” so that streetcar wheels would skid, making it tough for the cars to make it uphill. Another, more dangerous, Halloween prank recalled by an old-timer involved hanging a cloth dummy in front of a tram as it went over a downhill grade near Sappington.

At its peak in the 1920s, the St. Louis region’s extensive tram system included about 1,650 streetcars, operating on an estimated 485 miles of tracks that crisscrossed much of the city and many of its suburbs.

But as a growing number of people bought autos, and roads like Sappington and Manchester were paved and widened, the demand for public transport waned. By the 1930s, buses were more popular than trams in St. Louis region. The last run of the Kirkwood-Ferguson 01 line was on August 2, 1950. Here is a photo taken that day when the final streetcar stopped at Sappington Road.

Today, there are no signs of the old tracks in Glendale, and the number of residents who remember them has dwindled. But the tram symbol still lives in the logo of the newly revitalized Glendale Historical Society.