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Above: The keelboat of the Lewis & Clark Discovery Expedition on the shimmering Missouri River. Since 1996, Discovery Expedition volunteers have promoted St. Charles’ role as the starting point of the Lewis & Clark expedition with 150,000 visitors in dozens of towns along 2,500 miles of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri Rivers.
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With a million folks a year visiting St. Charles, even citizens who aren’t in the retail or hospitality trade recognize that tourism is an economic driver.
By Kevin Kipp
Historic Main Street’s eight-tenths of a mile of 19th century buildings — restored by individuals’ efforts over the last few decades — is Missouri’s largest registered historic district: Shops and restaurants on the south end. Offices and restaurants on the north. Stone-paving and gas-style lamps all up and down. (Readers can catch up even more on Main Street in the May edition of St. Louis Commerce Magazine.)
“The Street’s a tremendous asset. Unique,” says Steve Powell, director of the Greater St. Charles Convention & Visitors Bureau. “No one could have designed it to turn out this way. You might say it’s an accident of history.”
Accidental perhaps, but the town’s role in westward expansion and its river roots give it “real deal” status. Just look:
- A few hundred trappers and traders and a Catholic priest peopled the village before the Spanish governor (with his promises of land grants) lured Daniel Boone and family to the area from Kentucky in 1799. Dan’l died in 1820 in St. Charles County (not Kentucky!) at his son’s house in what’s now Defiance. That house is restored and still there.
- On May 21, 1804, Lewis & Clark and 40-some men set out to explore America’s vast new Louisiana Territory, launching their three boats into the Missouri’s current at a site in what is now Frontier Park, behind roughly the 700 block of South Main.
- Philippine Duchesne, one of four American saints, moved to St. Charles in 1818 to start the first Sacred Heart school. Villa Duchesne is another; so was City House. The Academy of the Sacred Heart still lives at Second and Clark, between the Frenchtown antique district and Main Street.
- Misssouri’s first capitol (1821 to 1826; and still not the oldest building on the Street) sits on Main just north of First Capitol Drive.
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Above: Stone Row, Historic Main Street in St. Charles, c. 1815, with its construction pre-dating Missouri’s First Capitol by some four years.
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Then there were three more quarter-centuries before 1900, during which trails out of St. Charles got names like “Oregon” and “Santa Fe,” and 10,000 wagons a month heading west in the decade after the 1849 Gold Rush, and river boats, and notorious sheriffs, and waves of German farmer immigrants.
The city capitalizes on this rich heritage in its promotional materials, having for almost 10 years used phrases like “Where the past is our present to you,” and “Where history comes alive.” And if history informs the town’s identity, it is also rewarding for the community. Based on data from Missouri’s Division of Tourism, one million visitors translates to estimated expenditures of $160 million.
According to Powell, that estimate has a lot of assumptions buried in it, all conservative in bias.
“The state figured out that overnight visitors spend an average of $160 a day,” Powell says. “That’s meals, lodging, admissions, gas, everything. But there’s no multiplier.”
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Above: Glen Bishop, boatbuilder, founder and guiding spirit of the Lewis & Clark Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, Mo., Inc. Since 1996, Bishop’s corps of volunteers have promoted St. Charles’ role as the starting point of the Lewis & Clark expedition with 150,000 visitors in dozens of towns along 2,500 miles of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri Rivers.
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(Some in the hospitality industry use “7.”) And presumably, your visitor estimate comes from a similarly credible source?
Not exactly, Powell chuckles.
“We counted every person who came into the office at different times of day, a couple of different days. At the same time, we were randomly counting people passing different points on North Main, South Main and Frenchtown,” he explains. “It averaged 10-to-one, and we have in the neighborhood of 100,000 people coming in here looking for information.
“Real scientific, huh?”
It isn’t the Theory of Everything, but it’ll do.
Moreover, the number of visitors includes neither festival-goers nor Station Casino patrons.
The festivals are:
- Lewis & Clark Heritage Days (a past recipient of the American Bus Association’s Top 100 Events award)
- Civil War Encampment (Union and Confederates)
- Festival of the Little Hills (300,000 visitors a year!)
- Bluegrass Festival
- Ragtime Festival (on the Goldenrod Showboat)
- Mosaics Festival for the Arts (juried and high class)
- Oktoberfest (and a Buergermeister Ball to benefit the St. Charles Sister Cities program)
- Daniel Boone bicentennial (Promised Land 1999)
Powell has tighter evidence for at least one conclusion. The CVB collects a 1 percent tax on restaurant sales. “It generates a million dollars, approximately,” he says. “That provides most of our budget.”
The CVB also qualified for $195,000 in the Division of Tourism’s Cooperative Marketing Program. That’s the second highest in the state, Powell says, behind only the St. Louis CVC.
Chris Jennings, director of the Division, explains that the program reimburses on a one-to-one matching basis selected destination marketing. Applicants to the program must be not-for-profit, and funding varies year over year with the growth of revenues in 17 specific SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes.
The program has seeded some good results. Jennings says, “We’ve had six fiscal years where we’ve seen growth in the supplemental revenue fund, which pays for a good portion of the co-op marketing program. For example, through June of 2000, we’ve allocated $2 million. We know it will go to $3.25 million in the following fiscal year.”
Among the enterprises funded by city-state teamwork is a taking the mountain to Mohammed.
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Above: Bob Plummer lives and talks history with visitors onboard a replica of the Lewis & Clark expedition’s keelboat. Since 1996, reenactors like Plummer have promoted St. Charles’ role as the starting point of the Lewis & Clark expedition with 150,000 visitors in dozens of towns along 2500 miles of the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri Rivers.
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The Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, Mo., Inc., a non-profit organization, was founded in 1994 by Glen Bishop, native son and retired general contractor. The organization owns replicas of Lewis & Clark’s three wooden boats.
Bishop (who with his white beard, Bill McClellan once wrote, must have looked like Noah building boats in 1993 as the rivers rose) has assembled a disturbingly large number of oddball boatwrights and river-rat historians, bent on commemorating the Lewis & Clark bicentennial by wearing old-fashioned clothes, and retracing the entire water route of the original expedition in 2003 to 2006.
They’ve already traveled some 2,500 river miles, spreading the gospel of St. Charles heritage to any town where they’re allowed to land. They’ve met almost 150,000 people along the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and from Louisville, Ky., to Yankton, S.D., since their first practice voyage, up to St. Joseph, in 1996.
If Bishop’s boats build the heritage niche, Station Casinos stretches it. According to Pam Droog, Public Relations manager for the latter, approximately five million patrons boarded during 1998. Of them, 30 percent were from out-of-town.
“We get about half a dozen buses every day,” she adds.
Presumably not the yellow kind, with swinging stop signs.
Sports and fitness also build a crowd in St. Charles and neighboring communities. Powell and Rick Weaver, Aquatics special events coordinator at the Rec Plex, headed to the National Aquatic Sport Conference in San Francisco in October 1997. They set their sights on landing a couple of swimming meets for the St. Peters facility. They scored a couple of diving competitions as a bonus. The four events attracted 1,650 top young athletes, plus some 450 coaches, 900 parents and 175 officials. They stayed for two-to-five nights, and generated an estimated $2,086,200 in local expenditures between March and July of this year.
Powell explains that, again, the estimate is conservative. “We used an average expenditure of $120 a day for these events. When you have a squad of 15-year-olds, they’re doubling up in rooms, and they’re probably eating at lower priced restaurants.”
Powell adds that athletic events are worth hosting, for reasons beyond economic impact. “You generate media attention back home,” He says, “and a lot of times, families use the athletic event as the start of their annual vacation.”
Besides heritage, families can also get after a little eco-tourism. They can ride the Katy Trail. They can bird watch on the Mississippi River. They can tour Missouri’s wine country. Or they can follow an autumn leaves tour.
Peter Geery of The Geery’s Bed & Breakfast says, “Seventy percent of our business is people coming to visit Main Street, or check out the architecture in town. Another 30 percent are here for the trail and the natural environment around St. Charles.”
Whatever the ratio is of hometowners-to-imports at the often-more-than-monthly festivals, those events boost business in St. Charles. So knows Rose Thro, whose family’s haberdashery at 229 North Main is celebrating its 101st anniversary.
Thro, also a member of the St. Charles Tourism Commission, has chaired the St. Charles Oktoberfest three or four times. She’s headed this-committee-or-that another five or six times.
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Above: Missouri’s first state capitol, home to the governor’s office, state legislature and occasionally the Missouri Supreme Court from 1821-1826.
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Thro says festivals draw locals, neighboring countians and out-of-towners. Golf carting around nine Oktoberfests, and working at Thro’s and Michelle’s or a booth at events in other months has led her to this conclusion.
But Thro has data that hints at festival crowds’ composition. Of 2,532 people who entered a win-a-car drawing at the 1997 Oktoberfest, St. Charles Countians accounted for 47 percent of the entries; St. Louisians, 20 percent; and “Elsewhere”-ites, 32 percent. Plenty of Missouri zip codes, Thro says, some central Illinois towns, and a dash of Kansas City, Memphis and Louisville.
Thro says festival-goers “add to [customer] traffic and familiarity with the area. Sometimes we get new customers; sometimes they’re from out of town, sometimes they’re local. It’s a plus either way. People say, we didn’t know all this was down here. We’ll be back.”
And if they go back this month, they’ll find one of the American Bus Association’s “Top 100 Events” on Historic Main Street: It’s the very Victorian, very Dickens Christmas Traditions. Six St. Nicks from different eras and countries (they don’t even all wear red!), three choral groups, a town crier, garlands, candles, luminaries, and St. Charles native Wayne Boschert roasting chestnuts on an open fire.
Kevin Kipp runs Bubble Communications, a creative services and community relations firm in St. Charles.
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