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St. Louis was a bustling French trading settlement that became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase, negotiated between President Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803. During the winter of 1803–1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition assembled men and supplies at Camp Dubois a few miles upstream from St. Louis. That spring, Lewis and Clark crossed the Mississippi and began their epic journey up the Missouri to explore the West. As a boy, I played at Camp Dubois Historic Site just a few miles from my home.

As the nation grew west, the need to move goods and people across the Mississippi, and St. Louis's central geographic position, combined to bring the city to prominence. In late 1874, a team of visionaries, including bridge designer James B. Eads, and a young entrepreneur named Andrew Carnegie, opened a combined roadway and railway bridge across the Mississippi. Named the Eads Bridge for its creator, it was the world's first all-steel arch bridge, the first bridge to exclusively use cantilever support, and one of the first to make use of pneumatic caissons. John A. Roebling, designer of the more-famous Brooklyn Bridge, visited the construction site in St. Louis to learn how Eads managed to sink the caissons so deep. St. Louis had long been a city dependent on the Mississippi river for transport north and south. Now railroads connected St. Louis to the east and west, making it a hub of American commerce.

By 1903, St. Louis had grown to become the fourth largest city in the country and hosted a World's Fair to celebrate the centennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the city's role in the settlement of the West. Inventors introduced the ice cream cone at that fair, and a firm called Hellmuth & Hellmuth was practicing architecture in St. Louis at that time.