Gillig Corporation
Gillig Corporation is an American designer and manufacturer of buses. The company headquarters, along with its manufacturing operations, is located in Livermore, California. By volume, Gillig is the second-largest transit bus manufacturer in North America; as of 2013, Gillig had an approximate 31% market share of the combined US and Canadian heavy-duty transit bus manufacturing industry, based on the number of equivalent unit deliveries. While a manufacturer of transit buses, from the 1930s to the 1990s, Gillig was a manufacturer of school buses. Alongside the now-defunct Crown Coach, the company was one of the largest manufacturers of school buses on the West Coast of the United States. Gillig was located in Hayward, for more than 80 years before moving to Livermore in 2017; the oldest surviving bus manufacturer in North America, Gillig was founded in 1890 as Jacob Gillig, trained in carriage building and upholstering, opened his own carriage shop in San Francisco. In 1896, his son Leo Gillig entered the business as a shop foreman, becoming a full partner in the business in 1900.
The shop was destroyed as part of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but the Gilligs rebuilt the shop on a separate property. In 1907, Jacob Gillig died at the age of 54. Following the earthquake, the company reopened as the Leo Gillig Automobile Works, which manufactured custom-built vehicle bodies. In 1914, two major achievements would happen to the company. After building a three-story factory and Chester Gillig re-organized the company as Gillig Brothers, its name for the next half-century. One of the first bodies built inside the new factory was one for a motor bus, though production would not shift to buses for another two decades. During the 1910s, most cars in the United States were open touring cars. To offer improvement over the minimal weather protection, Gillig developed an add-on hardtop, patenting its own version in 1919; the increase of closed car production in the 1920s would render the "Gillig Top" obsolete by 1925. While other hardtop manufacturers went out of business, Gillig survived on its body production, which became its primary source of revenue.
In the late 1920s, the company would produce pleasure boats and produce a prototype of a heavy truck. Following the start of the Great Depression, Gillig Brothers began to look for a steady source of revenue to ensure its survival. Although the company had produced buses sporadically since 1914, in 1932, Gillig designed its first school bus body, a configuration it would produce for most of the next 60 years. In 1935, the company designed its first ambulance body. In 1937, Gillig introduced its first flat-front school bus. By 1938, demand for school buses had surpassed the capacity of the San Francisco facility, leading Gillig Brothers to move to Hayward, California, on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay. In 1940, as a response to the Crown Supercoach, the first Gillig Transit Coach was introduced, as both a coach and school bus; the first mid-engine school bus, the Transit Coach wore an all-steel body and was powered by a Hall-Scott gasoline engine. During World War II, Gillig halted school bus production, instead producing trailer buses to transport workers in defense factories.
Following the end of the war, Gillig resumed production of the Transit Coach, introducing a rear-engine version in 1948. In 1950, the body of the Transit Coach was redesigned. In 1953, Chester Gillig retired, following the death of Leo Gillig; the management structure of the family-run company was changed, with Stanley Marx, assuming control of Gillig. In 1957, a major acquisition was made as Gillig purchased the Pacific bus division of Washington-based truck manufacturer Kenworth. At the time, Gillig controlled a 70% market share of Northern California over Crown Coach, along with a similar share of Washington State and Nevada. In 1959, the company introduced the first rear-engine school bus with a diesel engine: the Cummins C-Series Transit Coach. Although still offered with gasoline engines in various configurations, the C-Series Transit Coach accounted for over three-quarter of all Gillig sales within only five years. In 1967, Gillig would introduce the largest school bus produced: the tandem-axle DT16.
Along with it corresponding Crown Coach competitor, the DT16 is the only 97-passenger school bus produced in the United States. In 1978, Stanley Marx retired from Gillig, the firm was sold to Herrick-Pacific Steel, a Hayward-based steel manufacturer. Following the sale, the company was reorganized as its present-day name. During the acquisition and reorganization, Gillig began construction on a 117,000 square foot facility in Hayward, the largest bus manufacturing plant in the western United States. To diversify its product line, in the mid-1970s, Gillig began plans to enter the transit bus segment. Following the end of the "New Look" near-monopoly of GMC and Flxible, in mid-1976, Gillig entered a partnership with West German manufacturer Neoplan to build a series of European-styled transit buses; the 30-foot "Gillig-Neoplan" buses featured propane-fueled engines as an option. As a more permanent follow-up to the Gillig-Neoplan, the Gillig Phantom entered production in 1980; the first dedicated transit bus pro
Bus
A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry many passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers; the most common type of bus is the single-deck rigid bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker and articulated buses, smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses. Many types of buses, such as city transit buses and inter-city coaches, charge a fare. Other types, such as elementary or secondary school buses or shuttle buses within a post-secondary education campus do not charge a fare. In many jurisdictions, bus drivers require a special licence above and beyond a regular driver's licence. Buses may be used for scheduled bus transport, scheduled coach transport, school transport, private hire, or tourism. Horse-drawn buses were used from the 1820s, followed by steam buses in the 1830s, electric trolleybuses in 1882; the first internal combustion engine buses, or motor buses, were used in 1895. Interest has been growing in hybrid electric buses, fuel cell buses, electric buses, as well as ones powered by compressed natural gas or biodiesel.
As of the 2010s, bus manufacturing is globalised, with the same designs appearing around the world. Bus is a clipped form of the dative plural of omnis-e; the theoretical full name is in French voiture omnibus. The name originates from a mass-transport service started in 1823 by a French corn-mill owner named Stanislas Baudry in Richebourg, a suburb of Nantes. A by-product of his mill was hot water, thus next to it he established a spa business. In order to encourage customers he started a horse-drawn transport service from the city centre of Nantes to his establishment; the first vehicles stopped in front of the shop of a hatter named Omnés, which displayed a large sign inscribed "Omnes Omnibus", a pun on his Latin-sounding surname, omnes being the male and female nominative and accusative form of the Latin adjective omnis-e, combined with omnibus, the dative plural form meaning "for all", thus giving his shop the name "Omnés for all". His transport scheme was a huge success, although not as he had intended as most of his passengers did not visit his spa.
He turned the transport service into his principal lucrative business venture and closed the mill and spa. Nantes citizens soon gave the nickname "omnibus" to the vehicle. Having invented the successful concept Baudry moved to Paris and launched the first omnibus service there in April 1828. A similar service was introduced in London in 1829. Regular intercity bus services by steam-powered buses were pioneered in England in the 1830s by Walter Hancock and by associates of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, among others, running reliable services over road conditions which were too hazardous for horse-drawn transportation; the first mechanically propelled omnibus appeared on the streets of London on 22 April 1833. Steam carriages were much less to overturn, they travelled faster than horse-drawn carriages, they were much cheaper to run, caused much less damage to the road surface due to their wide tyres. However, the heavy road tolls imposed by the turnpike trusts discouraged steam road vehicles and left the way clear for the horse bus companies, from 1861 onwards, harsh legislation eliminated mechanically propelled vehicles from the roads of Great Britain for 30 years, the Locomotive Act of that year imposing restrictive speed limits on "road locomotives" of 5 mph in towns and cities, 10 mph in the country.
In parallel to the development of the bus was the invention of the electric trolleybus fed through trolley poles by overhead wires. The Siemens brothers, William in England and Ernst Werner in Germany, collaborated on the development of the trolleybus concept. Sir William first proposed the idea in an article to the Journal of the Society of Arts in 1881 as an "...arrangement by which an ordinary omnibus...would have a suspender thrown at intervals from one side of the street to the other, two wires hanging from these suspenders. Although this experimental vehicle fulfilled all the technical criteria of a typical trolleybus, it was dismantled in the same year after the demonstration. Max Schiemann opened a passenger-carrying trolleybus in 1901 in Germany. Although this system operated only until 1904, Schiemann had developed what is now the standard trolleybus current collection system. In the early days, a few other methods of current collection were used. Leeds and Bradford became the first cities to put trolleybuses into service in Great Britain on 20 June 1911.
In Siegerland, two passenger bus lines ran but unprofitably, in 1895 using a six-passenger motor carriage developed from the 1893 Benz Viktoria. Another commercial bus line using the same model Benz omnibuses ran for a short time in 1898 in the rural area around Llandudno, Wales. Daimler produced one of the earliest motor-bus models in 1898, selling a double-decker bus to the Motor Traction Company, first used on the streets of London on 23 April 1898; the vehicle had a maximum speed of 18 km/h and accommodated up to 20 passengers, in an enclosed area below and on an open-air pl
Public transport
Public transport is transport of passengers by group travel systems available for use by the general public managed on a schedule, operated on established routes, that charge a posted fee for each trip. Examples of public transport include city buses, trolleybuses and passenger trains, rapid transit and ferries. Public transport between cities is dominated by airlines and intercity rail. High-speed rail networks are being developed in many parts of the world. Most public transport systems run along fixed routes with set embarkation/disembarkation points to a prearranged timetable, with the most frequent services running to a headway. However, most public transport trips include other modes of travel, such as passengers walking or catching bus services to access train stations. Share taxis offer on-demand services in many parts of the world, which may compete with fixed public transport lines, or compliment them, by bringing passengers to interchanges. Paratransit is sometimes used for people who need a door-to-door service.
Urban public transit differs distinctly among Asia, North America, Europe. In Asia, profit-driven, privately-owned and publicly traded mass transit and real estate conglomerates predominantly operate public transit systems In North America, municipal transit authorities most run mass transit operations. In Europe, both state-owned and private companies predominantly operate mass transit systems, Public transport services can be profit-driven by use of pay-by-the-distance fares or funded by government subsidies in which flat rate fares are charged to each passenger. Services can be profitable through high usership numbers and high farebox recovery ratios, or can be regulated and subsidised from local or national tax revenue. Subsidised, free of charge services operate in some towns and cities. For geographical and economic reasons, differences exist internationally regarding use and extent of public transport. While countries in the Old World tend to have extensive and frequent systems serving their old and dense cities, many cities of the New World have more sprawl and much less comprehensive public transport.
The International Association of Public Transport is the international network for public transport authorities and operators, policy decision-makers, scientific institutes and the public transport supply and service industry. It has 3,400 members from 92 countries from all over the globe. Conveyances designed for public hire are as old as the first ferries, the earliest public transport was water transport: on land people walked or rode an animal. Ferries appear in Greek mythology—corpses in ancient Greece were buried with a coin underneath their tongue to pay the ferryman Charon to take them to Hades; some historical forms of public transport include the stagecoach, traveling a fixed route between coaching inns, the horse-drawn boat carrying paying passengers, a feature of European canals from their 17th-century origins. The canal itself as a form of infrastructure dates back to antiquity – ancient Egyptians used a canal for freight transportation to bypass the Aswan cataract – and the Chinese built canals for water transportation as far back as the Warring States period which began in the 5th century BCE.
Whether or not those canals were used for for-hire public transport remains unknown. The omnibus, the first organized public transit system within a city, appears to have originated in Paris, France, in 1662, although the service in question failed a few months after its founder, Blaise Pascal, died in August 1662; the omnibus was introduced to London in July 1829. The first passenger horse-drawn railway opened in 1806: it ran between Swansea and Mumbles in southwest Wales in the United Kingdom. In 1825 George Stephenson built the Locomotion for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in northeast England, the first public steam railway in the world; the first successful electric streetcar was built for 12 miles of track for the Union Passenger Railway in Richmond, Virginia in 1888. Electric streetcars could carry heavier passenger loads than predecessors, which reduced fares and stimulated greater transit use. Two years after the Richmond success, over thirty two thousand electric streetcars were operating in America.
Electric streetcars paved the way for the first subway system in America. Before electric streetcars, steam powered subways were considered. However, most people believed that riders would avoid the smoke filled subway tunnels from the steam engines. In 1894, Boston built the first subway in the United States, an electric streetcar line in a 1.5 mile tunnel under Tremont Street’s retail district. Other cities such as New York followed, constructing hundreds of miles of subway in the following decades. Aerial lift Aerial tramway Funifor Chairlift Detachable chairlift Funitel Gondola lift Maritime transport Ferry Cable ferry Reaction ferry Water taxi Land transport Personal public transport Bicycle-sharing system Carsharing Personal rapid transit Rail transport Inter-city rail High-speed rail Maglev Urban rail transit Airport rail link Atmospheric railway Automated guideway transit Cable car Cable railway Commuter rail Elevated railway Funicular Inclined elevator Light rail Medium-capacity rail system Mono
St. Louis County, Missouri
St. Louis County is located in the far eastern portion of the U. S. state of Missouri. It is bounded by the city of St. Louis and the Mississippi River to the east, the Missouri River to the north, the Meramec River to the south; as of the 2016 Census Bureau population estimate, the population was 998,581, making it the most populous county in Missouri. Its county seat is Clayton. Saint Louis County was settled by French colonists in the late 1700s, before switching to U. S. rule following the Louisiana Purchase. Saint Louis County split from St. Louis City in 1877. In the 1960s, with the growing suburbanization in Greater St. Louis, the County's population overtook the City's population for the first time. St. Louis County borders, but does not include, the city of St. Louis, an independent city; the county is included in MO-IL Metropolitan Statistical Area. In 2019 there was a proposal to merge the county after a Saturday-wide vote. During the 18th century, several European colonial settlements were established in the area that would become St. Louis County.
French colonists moved from east of the Mississippi River after France ceded those territories to Spain after losing the Seven Years' War. The earliest of these, Saint Louis, was founded by Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau on February 14, 1764, who became major fur traders in the city. Founded in about 1767 was Carondelet, at the southern end of what is now the city of St. Louis. Florissant known as St. Ferdinand, was established in 1785 about twelve miles northwest of St. Louis on a tributary of the Missouri River. During the 1790s small settlements known as Creve Coeur and Point Labadie were built north and west of St. Louis. Upon the sale and transfer of French Louisiana to the United States on October 1, 1804, President Thomas Jefferson suggested that the territory retain the districts drawn by Spanish officials during their decades-long rule of the territory after an arrangement with the French. During this time, the first governing body of St. Louis County was established; this government, called the Court of Quarter Sessions, was composed of Charles Gratiot, Auguste Chouteau, Jacques Clamorgan, David DeLaunay, all ethnic French or French Canadians.
On October 1, 1812, the District of St. Louis was renamed St. Louis County during a federal reorganization of the Louisiana Territory's status. After the transfer of Louisiana to the United States, the authority to grant incorporation to municipalities was delegated to the Territory and was a state power; the first to gain municipal status in St. Louis County was St. Louis, which incorporated on November 9, 1809, under the territorial legislature, gained city status on December 9, 1822. Only a handful of other municipal incorporations took place prior to the separation of the county and city: St. Ferdinand was granted incorporation in 1829, while Bridgeton, a settlement along the Missouri River near Florissant, gained incorporation in 1843. Two towns grew and incorporated in the 1850s, with their growth stimulated by the construction of the Pacific Railroad: Pacific and Kirkwood. Pacific, a community along the Meramec River, known before the railroad line connection as Franklin, straddles St. Louis and Franklin counties.
Kirkwood was settled in 1853 after Hiram Leffingwell and Richard Elliott platted and auctioned land along the railroad line. Leffingwell organized the town as a planned suburb, Kirkwood was granted incorporation by the state in 1865. Other areas of the county did not incorporate as towns. Among these were Chesterfield, Gumbo, both settled in the 1820s in west St. Louis County, Gravois and Affton, which were settled in south St. Louis County in the 1850s and 1860s; the first St. Louis Public Schools were established in the major city in the 1830s, it was a decade and more before some of the settlements of St. Louis County began providing public education. In 1854, the School District of Maplewood was established, it included all of today's Maplewood district, part of what became Webster Groves, along the south and southwest, a large part of St. Louis in the east, to the north up to Clayton Road; the first school called the Washington Institute and renamed as Maplewood High School, opened as a one-room stone building at the crossing of Manchester Road over the Missouri Pacific Railroad tracks.
Another antebellum school district was Rock Hill, which provided a one-room school across from the Rock Hill Presbyterian Church until about 1870. The first school in Florissant opened in 1819 under the direction of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, a Roman Catholic religious congregation; the instructor, Rose Philippine Duchesne, was a French immigrant, described as "one of the foremost educators in the state of Missouri." A second school an Indian school known as the St. Regis Academy, was operated for young boys from 1823 to 1829; the complex included a Jesuit seminary known as St. Stanislaus Seminary, which continued to operate until 1971; the earliest public school in Florissant was the St. Ferdinand School, authorized by the General Assembly in 1845 and operated until 1871, when the Florissant School District was formed. From 1813 to 1830, the county initiated several c
St. Louis
St. Louis is an independent city and major inland port in the U. S. state of Missouri. It is situated along the western bank of the Mississippi River, which marks Missouri's border with Illinois; the Missouri River merges with the Mississippi River just north of the city. These two rivers combined form the fourth longest river system in the world; the city had an estimated 2017 population of 308,626 and is the cultural and economic center of the St. Louis metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in Missouri, the second-largest in Illinois, the 22nd-largest in the United States. Before European settlement, the area was a regional center of Native American Mississippian culture; the city of St. Louis was founded in 1764 by French fur traders Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, named after Louis IX of France. In 1764, following France's defeat in the Seven Years' War, the area was ceded to Spain and retroceded back to France in 1800. In 1803, the United States acquired the territory as part of the Louisiana Purchase.
During the 19th century, St. Louis became a major port on the Mississippi River, it separated from St. Louis County in 1877, becoming an independent city and limiting its own political boundaries. In 1904, it hosted the Summer Olympics; the economy of metropolitan St. Louis relies on service, trade, transportation of goods, tourism, its metro area is home to major corporations, including Anheuser-Busch, Express Scripts, Boeing Defense, Energizer, Enterprise, Peabody Energy, Post Holdings, Edward Jones, Go Jet and Sigma-Aldrich. Nine of the ten Fortune 500 companies based in Missouri are located within the St. Louis metropolitan area; this city has become known for its growing medical and research presence due to institutions such as Washington University in St. Louis and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. St. Louis has two professional sports teams: the St. Louis Cardinals of Major League Baseball and the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League. One of the city's iconic sights is the 630-foot tall Gateway Arch in the downtown area.
The area that would become St. Louis was a center of the Native American Mississippian culture, which built numerous temple and residential earthwork mounds on both sides of the Mississippi River, their major regional center was at Cahokia Mounds, active from 900 to 1500. Due to numerous major earthworks within St. Louis boundaries, the city was nicknamed as the "Mound City"; these mounds were demolished during the city's development. Historic Native American tribes in the area included the Siouan-speaking Osage people, whose territory extended west, the Illiniwek. European exploration of the area was first recorded in 1673, when French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette traveled through the Mississippi River valley. Five years La Salle claimed the region for France as part of La Louisiane; the earliest European settlements in the area were built in Illinois Country on the east side of the Mississippi River during the 1690s and early 1700s at Cahokia and Fort de Chartres. Migrants from the French villages on the opposite side of the Mississippi River founded Ste.
Genevieve in the 1730s. In early 1764, after France lost the 7 Years' War, Pierre Laclède and his stepson Auguste Chouteau founded what was to become the city of St. Louis; the early French families built the city's economy on the fur trade with the Osage, as well as with more distant tribes along the Missouri River. The Chouteau brothers gained a monopoly from Spain on the fur trade with Santa Fe. French colonists used African slaves as domestic workers in the city. France, alarmed that Britain would demand French possessions west of the Mississippi and the Missouri River basin after the losing New France to them in 1759–60, transferred these to Spain as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain; these areas remained in Spanish possession until 1803. In 1780 during the American Revolutionary War, St. Louis was attacked by British forces Native American allies, in the Battle of St. Louis; the founding of St. Louis began in 1763. Pierre Laclede led an expedition to set up a fur-trading post farther up the Mississippi River.
Before Laclede had been a successful merchant. For this reason, he and his trading partner Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent were offered monopolies for six years of the fur trading in that area. Although they were only granted rights to set-up a trading post and other members of his expedition set up a settlement; some historians believe that Laclede's determination to create this settlement was the result of his affair with a married woman Marie-Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau in New Orleans. Laclede on his initial expedition was accompanied by Auguste Chouteau; some historians still debate. The reason for this lingering question is that all the documentation of the founding was loaned and subsequently destroyed in a fire. For the first few years of St. Louis's existence, the city was not recognized by any of the governments. Although thought to be under the control of the Spanish government, no one asserted any authority over the settlement, thus St. Louis had no local government; this led Laclede to assume a position of civil control, all problems were disposed i
St. Clair County, Illinois
St. Clair County is the oldest county in the U. S. state of Illinois. According to the 2010 United States Census, it had a population of 270,056, making it the eighth-most populous county in Illinois and the most populous in the southern portion of the state, its county seat is Belleville. The county was founded in 1790 by the government of the Northwest Territory, before the establishment of Illinois as a state. Cahokia Village in the county was founded in 1697 and was a French settlement and former Jesuit mission. St. Clair County is part of the American Bottom or Metro-East area of the St. Louis, MO-IL Metropolitan Statistical Area. In 1970, the United States Census Bureau placed the mean center of U. S. population in St. Clair County; this area was occupied for thousands of years by cultures of indigenous peoples. The first modern explorers and colonists of the area were French and French Canadians, founding a mission settlement in 1697 now known as Cahokia Village. After Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years' War in 1763 and absorbed its territory in North America east of the Mississippi River, British-American colonists began to move into the area.
Many ethnic and Catholic French moved to settlements west of the river rather than live under British Protestant rule. After the United States achieved independence in the late 18th century, St. Clair County was the first county established in present-day Illinois; the county was established in 1790 by a proclamation of Arthur St. Clair, first governor of the Northwest Territory, who named it after himself; the original boundary of St. Clair county covered a large area between the Ohio rivers. In 1801, Governor William Henry Harrison re-established St. Clair County as part of the Indiana Territory, extending its northern border to Lake Superior and the international border with Rupert's Land; when the Illinois Territory was created in 1809, Territorial Secretary Nathaniel Pope, in his capacity as acting governor, issued a proclamation establishing St. Clair and Randolph County as the two original counties of Illinois. Developed for agriculture, this area became industrialized and urbanized in the area of East St. Louis, Illinois, a city that developed on the east side of the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri.
It was always influenced by actions of businessmen from St. Louis, who were French Creole fur traders with western trading networks. In the 19th century, industrialists from St. Louis put coal plants and other heavy industry on the east side of the river, developing East St. Louis. Coal from southern mines was transported on the river to East St. Louis fed by barge to St. Louis furnaces as needed. After bridges spanned the river, industry expanded. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the cities attracted immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and from the South. In 1910 there were 6,000 African Americans in the city. With the Great Migration underway from the rural South, to leave behind Jim Crow and disenfranchisement, by 1917, the African-American population in East St. Louis had doubled. Whites were hired first and given higher–paying jobs, but there were still opportunities for American blacks. If hired as strikebreakers, they were resented by white workers, both groups competed for jobs and limited housing in East St. Louis.
The city had not been able to keep up with the rapid growth of population. The United States was developing war industries to support its eventual entry into the Great War, now known as World War I. In February 1917 tensions in the city arose. Employers fiercely resisted union organizing, sometimes with violence. In this case they hired hundreds of blacks as strikebreakers. White workers complained to the city council about this practice in late May. Rumors circulated about an armed African American man robbing a white man, whites began to attack blacks on the street; the governor ordered in the National Guard and peace seemed restored by early June. "On July 1, a white man in a Ford shot into black homes. Armed African-Americans gathered in the area and shot into another oncoming Ford, killing two men who turned out to be police officers investigating the shooting." Word spread and whites gathered at the Labor Temple. From July 1 through July 3, 1917, the East St. Louis riots engulfed the city, with whites attacking blacks throughout the city, pulling them from streetcars and hanging them, burning their houses.
During this period, some African Americans tried to use boats to get to safety. The official death toll was 39 blacks and nine whites, but some historians believe more blacks were killed; because the riots were racial terrorism, the Equal Justice Initiative has included these deaths among the lynchings of African Americans in the state of Illinois in its 2017 3rd edition of its report, Lynching in America. The riots had disrupted East St. Louis, which had seemed to be on the rise as a flourishing industrial city. In addition to the human toll, they cost $400,000 in property damage, they have been described as among the worst labor and race-related riots in United States history, they devastated the African-American community. Rebuilding was difficult as workers were being drafted to fight in World War I; when the veterans returned, they struggled to find jobs and re-enter the economy, which had to shift down to peacetime. In the late 20th c
St. Charles County, Missouri
St. Charles County is in the central eastern part of the U. S. state of Missouri. As of the 2010 census, the population was 360,485, its county seat is St. Charles; the county was named for Saint Charles Borromeo, an Italian cardinal. The county executive is Steve Ehlmann, since January 2007. St. Charles County is part of the St. Louis, MO-IL Metropolitan Statistical Area and contains many of the city's northwestern suburbs; the wealthiest county in Missouri, St. Charles County is one of the nation's fastest-growing counties; the county is recognized as conservative, ranking in the top 100 nationally. St. Charles County includes an area of vineyards and wineries whose distinction has been nationally recognized. On its rural outer edge along the south-facing bluffs above the Missouri River is an area of numerous wineries, so that Missouri Route 94 is sometimes called the Missouri Weinstrasse; the area includes the Augusta AVA, designated in 1980 as the first American Viticultural Area by the federal government.
The County of St. Charles was called the District of St. Charles and had no definite limits until 1816 to 1818 when neighboring counties were formed; the borders of St. Charles are the same today as they were in 1818. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 593 square miles, of which 560 square miles is land and 32 square miles is water; the highest elevation is 901 feet northwest of Augusta near Femme Osage Creek headwaters. Lincoln County Calhoun County, Illinois Jersey County, Illinois Madison County, Illinois St. Louis County Franklin County Warren County I-64 – Major freeway in the western portion of the county. U. S. Route 40, the highway was upgraded to Interstate standards in the late 2000s; the highway was re-signed as Interstate 64 from the Daniel Boone Bridge to Interstate 70 in Wentzville in 2009. I-70 – The major east-west thoroughfare in the county, it is a six-lane freeway in the county, but there are sections in St. Charles and St. Peters where the Interstate widens to 11 lanes of traffic.
US-40 US-61 US-67 Rte-79 Rte-94 Rte-364 – A freeway in the southern and central portions of the county that begins at Interstate 270 in western St. Louis County and ends at Interstate 64 in Lake St. Louis. Rte-370 – A six-lane freeway that connects Interstate 70 in St. Charles County and Interstate 270 in St. Louis County. Two Rivers National Wildlife Refuge As of 2010, there were 360,485 people, 132,906 households, 77,060 families residing in the county; the population density was 643 people per square mile. There were 142,766 housing units at an average density of 73 persons/km²; the racial makeup of the county was 91.3% White, 4.4% African American, 0.3% Native American, 2.3% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 1.6% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino made up 2.5% of the population. There were 101,663 households out of which 40.50% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 63.20% were married couples living together, 9.20% have a woman whose husband does not live with her, 24.20% were non-families.
19.40% of all households were made up of individuals and 5.90% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.76 and the average family size was 3.18. In the county, the population was spread out with 29.00% under the age of 18, 8.20% from 18 to 24, 32.60% from 25 to 44, 21.60% from 45 to 64, 8.80% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 34 years. For every 100 females there were 97.10 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 94.10 males. The median income for a household in the county was $71,458, the median income for a family was $64,415. Males had a median income of $44,528 versus $29,405 for females; the per capita income for the county was $23,592. 4.00% of the population and 2.80% of families were below the poverty line. Out of the total people living in poverty, 4.90% are under the age of 18 and 5.10% are 65 or older. St. Charles County, with an estimated population of 373,495, has been one of the fastest-growing counties in the country for decades, with 55% growth in the 1970s, 48% in the 1980s, 33% in the 1990s, another 27% in the 2000s.
The county features a cross-section of industry, as well as some agriculture. With the Missouri River on the south and east and the Mississippi River on the north, the county is bisected east to west by Interstate 70. St. Charles County has one small airport St. Charles County Smartt Airport and two ferries that cross the Mississippi River. Fort Zumwalt R-II School District – O'Fallon Francis Howell R-III School District – St. Peters Orchard Farm R-V School District – St. Charles St. Charles R-VI School District – St. Charles Wentzville R-IV School District – Wentzville Boonslick State School – St. Peters – Special Education Fort Zumwalt Hope High School – O'Fallon – Other/Alternative School – Francis Howell Union High School – St. Charles – Other/Alternative School – Heritage Landing – St. Peters – Other/Alternative School – Lewis & Clark Career Center – St. Charles – Vocational/Technical School – Quest Day Treatment Center – St. Charles – Other/Alternative School – Lindenwood University – St. Charles St. Charles Community College – Cottleville St. Charles City-County Library District St. Charles County is governed by a county executive and a county council.
The county council
