The Katy Trail’s Country Store Corridor

Description

This is the story of a special piece of Missouri countryside on the Katy Trail that we call the “Country Store Corridor” – a 3.5-mile stretch embedded in the Trail’s 237 miles. Bookended by historic general stores in Treloar and Peers, the Country Store Corridor bookmarks a prosperous, entrepreneurial, can-do chapter in American history. 

Visitors to this section of the Trail can imagine life in the Missouri countryside before paved roads, automobiles, widespread indoor plumbing or electricity. As the United States grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries, few institutions provided more economic and social value to rural families than the country store. 

With little access to resources that were common in cities, farm families were self-reliant and their home economics consisted of what they could grow, make and sell. When a country store opened, it brought a seismic shift. Sugar! Coffee! Snuff! Fabric! Hand tools! Canned food! Gloves and coveralls! 

With candy and soda pop for kids, no country store was complete without a checkerboard and a welcoming front porch for all. The stores provided the “necessities” of life and served as the glue that held many of these thinly populated places together.