Missouri Life

Our goal is to uncover and honor the individuals, locations, history, and attractions that give our state its distinct character. We aim to amaze and engage our audience with captivating narratives, striking visuals, and innovative design.

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This is Why We Fight

1 month ago | missourilife.com | Evan Wood

What might have happened if, in the early days of the Civil War, a militia with Southern sympathies had been allowed to seize the federal arsenal in St. Louis? Could this have cleared the way for the secession of Missouri from the Union? Lincoln viewed holding onto the border states (states in which slavery was legal, but which hadn’t seceded) as a crucial aspect of his strategy for victory.
Something Awful - Missouri Life

2 months ago | missourilife.com | Evan Wood |Sydney Jones

As a child I used to sneak out onto the roof of our house at night and look up at the night sky. Living on a secluded plot of land in a rural part of the state, I can remember hearing all kinds of sounds emanating from the darkness around me as I sat there: the howl of coyotes, the hooting of owls, and the occasional screech of a bobcat.
A Fresh Air Love Affair

2 months ago | missourilife.com | Matt Crossman

How the St. Louis Great Rivers Greenway cultivates connections. I pedaled through the dark gray of a summer morning. A breeze tickled my arms. The dull roar of traffic followed me as I crossed a bridge and followed a cloverleaf under it to join the greenway as it entered a wooded park. After I rode under the bridge but before I entered the woods, I enjoyed 100 yards of silence. Then the screech of bugs turned overpowering. I was smack dab in the middle of suburban St. Louis, but it felt remote.
New Heights - Missouri Life

Mar 26, 2025 | missourilife.com | Mary Andino |Sydney Jones |Andrea Kaneko

To fully appreciate a familiar, well-trodden place, sometimes we need to look at it from a fresh perspective and see it from a new point of view. If you’ve visited and hiked Missouri’s beautiful state parks and conservation areas multiple times, discover them all over again from above. Climbing is your passport to a revived admiration of our region’s most inspiring landscapes.
Navigating History

Mar 26, 2025 | missourilife.com | Evan Wood |Sydney Jones

A book of maps illustrates the past and present of Ferguson. How well do you know the area you live in? Are you pretty much navigating exclusively with the help of your phone’s GPS, or could you direct a wayward stranger who asks you for directions to the grocery store, the highway, or wherever they are trying to go? When we build familiarity with a specific town, neighborhood, or region, our minds build a map of that place, which can have more to do with functionality than objective reality.
Home Roads - Missouri Life

Feb 13, 2025 | missourilife.com | Evan Wood |Andrea Kaneko |Sydney Jones

Last fall I got the chance to travel the full course of Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica with an old friend as he researched a piece he published in Rolling Stone. When he invited me along, he’d already been researching the route for months and had created a spreadsheet with every overnight stop and the distance between each. In general, the goal was to avoid chains as much as possible for dining while taking in some of the Mother Road’s most conspicuous attractions.
Yours and Mine - Missouri Life

Feb 13, 2025 | missourilife.com | Evan Wood |Sydney Jones

For most of the 1800s and part of the 1900s there was a little town just north of St. Louis founded by former slaves, not marked on any map, and impossible for outsiders to find. That’s the premise of Phillip B. Williams’s new novel, Ours, out this year from Viking. The book takes its name from the fictional town where it is set, long since subsumed by the expansion of Lambert Field.
How to Taste Wine

Dec 2, 2024 | missourilife.com | Doug Frost |Lisa Waterman Gray

Please don’t imagine for a moment that I’m going to tell you what wines you should like, or what glass shape is the one that will impress your snooty co-workers, or whether you should stick your pinky out when you hold a glass of wine. That’s not the point of this column. Instead, I want to remind you that wine is fruit juice that’s been converted by nature into an alcoholic beverage. Yes, some wines cost a few dollars, and some of them cost thousands, but they’re all just fermented grape juice.
Rock Bridge Memorial State Park

Nov 7, 2024 | missourilife.com | Ron Soodalter

Because of its oddity, the area south of Columbia was probably destined to become a state park, if not preserved in some other way, although this is hindsight, of course. There are so many natural phenomena here to excite human curiosity. Flowing creeks disappear underground. Natural shallow ponds called sinkholes act like funnels, holding water for only a short time after heavy rains. Deep holes in the earth open into extensive caverns. Bats boil out of these caves at dusk.
Why Does Missouri Have 2 out of 12 Federal Reserve Banks?

Nov 5, 2024 | missourilife.com | Ron Soodalter |Diana West

There was a time in America’s history when our currency was an imprecise, ill-defined medium of exchange. Harking back to prerevolutionary years, colonists freely used French, Spanish, and English coins to conduct commerce. Individual colonies often issued their own money, leading to endless confusion. It was a time when a “buck” was valued as the trade equivalent of a deerskin or buckskin and five bucks bought a cask of whisky. Conducting a war, however, has always been an expensive proposition.