What is the Henry Shaw Gardenway? / Or, Here is Another Pacific Lions Tale

By Pauline Masson –

In the early 1930s, a group of far thinking St. Louis civic leaders, who called themselves the Henry Shaw Gardenway Association, got a lot of credit for beautifying our stretch of Route 66, including the building of Jensen’s Point Lookout, which placed Pacific at the center. And they should have. After all, it was their project. 

But a review of history shows that they may not have been able to pull it off without the energetic work of Pacific Mayor Clarence Mayle and the new Pacific Lions Club.

Those Pacific leaders persuaded property owners to give easements on their property for planting – and brought a CCC Camp to Pacific to do the planting.

In all, it took four highway commissions –  Federal, Missouri, St. Louis County, and Franklin County – the St. Louis County Planning Association, Shaws (Missouri Botanical) Garden, the Henry Shaw Gardenway Association, the Missouri Agricultural Commission, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), an international horticulturist, a before-income-tax beer baron – and Mayor Mayle and the Pacific Lions – to create the much celebrated stretch of roadway.

The story of the Henry Shaw Gardenway – the stretch of Route 66 between the St. Louis city limits and Shaw Nature Reserve in Gray Summit – begins with beer baron Adolphus Busch, who built his father-in-law Eberhard Anheuser’s small brewery into one of the biggest breweries in the world in the Soulard district of South St. Louis.

This was before income tax and Busch became one of the richest men in America, if not the world. He collected grand mansions the way some rich men collected fancy cars. He bought the Boss Tweed mansion on the Hudson River north of New York City and a dozen other mansions and grand estates in the U.S. and his native Germany.

When his son August bought the farm of former president Ulysses S. Grant, Adolphus refused to move out of the mansion he had built at #1 Busch Place, adjacent to the brewery. On one occasion he went along with August to visit the old farm. When a startled stag attacked August, Adolphus took a tree branch and beat the beast off his son. Clearly, the place needed to be tamed.

Adolphus remembered the gardens that he visited on his trips to Europe. He recruited an up and coming horticulturist, 22-year-old Lars Peter Jensen of Denmark to come to America and landscape the wild gounds around the mansion August was building.

Jensen transformed Grant’s Farm into a grand park, and landscaped a dozen other Busch family estates. As his fame grew, he was asked to join local horticultural groups and was offered another great park to improve. In 1922, he was hired by Shaws Garden (now Missouri Botanical Garden) the home of the late Henry Shaw, another rich man who surrounded himself with beautiful spaces.

From that assignment would come one of the largest landscaping projects anyone had ever seen.

The U. S. had built a new interstate highway from Chicago to Santa Monica, California – Highway 66. One section of the new 2,500 mile highway extended between Shaw’s Garden in St.Louis and its Arboretum in Gray Summit. Wouldn’t it be grand to create a beautiful garden along the 35 mile stretch between the two properties. 

The chief horticulturists at Shaws Garden formed the Henry Shaw Gardentway Association with the mission to beautify the new Route 66. On May 11, 1933, the St. Louis County Planning Association held a meeting at the Kirkwood City Hall and named Lars Peter Jensen chairman of the project to beautify the Gardenway and Route 66. The following month Jensen was named president of the Henry Shaw Garden Way Association.

After several petitions, judges in St. Louis and Franklin County, and the Missouri Highway Commission approved the association’s request to designate a section of Hwy. 66 the Henry Shaw Gardenway.

The association mapped out a plan to plant 10,000 trees, 60,000 shrubs and beds of flowering plants on each side of the new highway in a two hundred foot right of way.

The Missouri Highway Commission agreed to provide the trees but the Gardenway Association would have to provide the labor to plant them. Highway officials suggested the Association turn to President Roosevelt’s two-year-old New Deal program called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). They had already planted large stands of trees in several states. Problem was, there was no CCC camp nearby. Maybe they could get a CCC camp here to plant the trees. 

CCC officials agreed to construct a camp in Pacific if city officials could find a suitable site and obtain the needed permits and approvals.

If anyone knew how to find a site and get the appropriate easements and approval for a CCC camp, it was Clarence Mayle, Pacific’s outgoing mayor, who never shied away from a challenge worth taking. 

Mayle was a people pleaser of the first water. He was so admired by the community, that the local newspaper editor once reported that the birds that occupied the wire in front of his home on Osage Street did not start to chirp each morning until Clarence opened the garage door, signaling that he was up.

Mayle was also president of the new Pacific Lions Club at the time. A  group of prominent citizens formed the organization with the audacious purpose of paying local out-of-work men $1 day ($5 a week) to work on city streets. With grocery prices at the time, it was enough to feed a family.

Charles Olmstead, Ralph Langenbacher, Herbert Gross, L. E. Leaver, Bruce Prater, Raymond Maguire, James McCaughey, L. P. Brennan, C. W. Christy, Wm. Wolf, Jr, amd Edward Zitzman all joined.

Mayle and his fellow Lions had already convinced the Federal Highway Department to abandon an alternative route for one Missouri stretch of the new road and build it through Pacific.

They eagerly took on the challenge of establishing a CCC Camp at Pacific. The CCC agreed to establish a camp at Pacific if the city would provide a site and the necessary permit.

Mayle and the Lions located a 21-acre site adjacent to the Buscher property south of Pacific and obtained the necessary approvals to construct a large camp.

In May, 1935 F. W. Sayers, Missouri State Highway Department landscape engineer approved the CCC camp for the purpose of installing Highway 66 roadside beautification – if the Gardenway Association could obtain 50 feet of easements on each side of the road for the beautification. Again Mayle and his fellow Lions stepped in and began contacting property owners to persuade them to allow the easements.

In a matter of weeks, the CCC constructed 18 portable wood buildings, including eight 66 by 20 barracks buildings, a 110 by 20 mess hall, a headquarters building, recreation hall, officers headquarters hospital, quarters for a forestry agent, bath and latrine house. The camp would house 200 Veterans of WWI.

As a bonus for Pacific, Jensen designed a European style steep-roofed stone pavilion and wide paved patio on a bluff overlooking Route 66 at Pacific. Jensen called the site the Overlook, which locals converted to the Lookout. But grateful Gardenway Association members named it for Jensen and installed a bronze plaque in the stone pavilion dedicating the site to Lars Peter Jensen.

To commemorate the opening of the Gardenway and the Overlook, the Gardenway Association installed nine bronze markers along the route to signify good stopping points, including a much discussed Civil War Marker at Pacific.

One Webster Groves couple, Jasper and Margaret Blackburn, who were members of the Henry Shaw Gardenway Association, took a fancy to Pacific and gave the city a second high spot to view Route 66. The couple bought the tract of land atop Sand Mountain and donated it to the City as Blackburn Park. In 1940 the Blackburns brought their grandson James Weaver to Pacific to dedicate the bronze marker on the face of bluff, where it still exists. It is one of the few original markers that are still on display.

In 1936, the Route 66 beautification was considered complete. The hard working CCC WWI veterans were transferred to other camps to provide labor for larger construction projects. Only the officers would remain to train a troop of Junior CCC enrollees, who would make the Pacific camp home. The camp remained in Pacific until December 1941.

The Buscher family purchased the abandoned camp buildings, and created Buscher Bottoms, a camp and recreation complex on the bank the Meramec River.

On completion of the Gardenway, Lars Peter Jensen was named president of the Arboretum in Gray Summit. He moved there and spent the rest of life there.

When Jensen died in July 1941, The Henry Shaw Gardenway Association elected Clarence Mayle president of the association.