Fenton, Route 66 Missouri

About Fenton Missouri

Facts, Trivia and useful information

Elevation: 433 ft (132 m). Population 4,022 (2010). Time zone: Central (CST): UTC minus 6 hours. Summer (DST) CDT (UTC-5).

Fenton is a city whose northernmost fringes touch old Route 66. It is located in St. Louis County, on the western side of the Meramec River in the central-eastern Missouri. Here is the first of three bridges that carry Route 66 across the Meramec river, the other two are further west, in Times Beach and Villa Ridge.

History of Fenton

Eastern Missouri has been inhabited for the last thousand years and Native Americans built two conical earth mounds here, the "Fenton Mounds" ca. AD 1050 - 1400, now gone (leveled for a Wal-Mart Supercenter in 2001) which are associated with those found in nearby Cahokia Mounds State Historic Park in Illinois. They were related to the historical Indians who were members of an Algonquin nation known who called themselves "Illiniwek" which meant "men" in their language; a group of hunter-gatherers who grew crops of corn and squash.

French explorers from Canada arrived in 1683 and named it after their king Louis XIV: "Louisiana", they also deformed the Indian's name to "Illinois". France lost the territory to Spain in the mid 1700s. The city of St. Louis was settled in 1764 by Laclede and Chouteau; and the first settlers in what would become Fenton arrived in the 1770s. Napoleon recovered Louisiana from Spain in 1800 but sold it to the U.S. in 1803 as he needed the cash to wage war against England.

St.Louis incorporated as a municipality in 1809 and the Territory of Missouri was established in 1812 and William Lindsay Long, who had migrated from England to the U.S. founded Fenton in 1818; he chose a spot on the western side of the Meramec River southwest of St. Louis. The State of Missouri joined the Union in 1821.

The Name: Fenton

Long is said to have named the town after his mother's supposed noble ancestor, the Earl of Fenton or, according to another version after his Welsh grandmother, Elizabeth Fenton Bennett. The surname "Fenton" comes from the Old English words "Fenne" = "marsh" and "Tun" = "fenced enclosure".

During the 1830s, the Illinois people and the other natives in Missouri were forcibly relocated to reservations in what is now Oklahoma. This opened the way to more white settlers in the region. Fenton's post office opened in 1833 as did the ferry across the Meramec River and replaced in 1854 by a covered toll bridge. It incorporated in 1874 and again in 1948.

It was a small farming community until the mid-1950s. Linked by MO-141 to Route 66 in the north and I-55 in the southeast. Missouri Hwy 30 linked it with Affton and downtown St. Louis in the east and with St. Clair on Route 66 in the west. It hardly had any association with Classic Route 66.

Chrysler chose the town for a large plant, that opened in 1959. This led to a growth in population as laborers flocked to the area. A second plant was built in the 1960s to manufacture light and medium sized trucks. The crisis of 2008 led to the closure of both plants in 2008 and 2009 respectively.