The skies were black in St. Louis in the 1920s.
As the city’s population boomed, residents were using huge amounts of coal to heat their homes and power factories and trains.
St. Louis burned about 7 million tons of coal every year, enough to cover all of Forest Park in a layer almost five feet deep, said Andrew Wanko, public historian at the Missouri Historical Society.
The coal had a devastating effect on air quality.
“It was estimated by the 1920s that the average St. Louisan in the wintertime was ingesting one ounce of coal soot every single day just walking around, being in the smoky air,” Wanko said.
Coal pollution affected every aspect of life in St. Louis, Wanko said, including health, fashion choices and daily routines.
“People talk about putting their laundry out on laundry lines, and you would come back and it was dirtier than when you put it in the laundry in the first place,” he said.
The coal smog was also choking plants, making it especially hard to grow the delicate ones on display at the Missouri Botanical Garden, said Shaw Nature Reserve Director Quinn Long.
As the problem got worse, the garden began to search for a smog-free property to grow plants. If conditions didn’t improve, staff members even thought they may have to move the entire botanical garden to a more rural property, Long said.
The thick smog eventually gave birth to Shaw Nature Reserve, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Right now, garden staff and volunteers are taking stock of a century of changing priorities and the way its land has gone from an oasis from pollution to a unique display of diverse Missouri ecosystems.
In a St. Louis turning point, Shaw is born
In 1925, the Missouri Botanical Garden purchased the first five farms that would eventually become Shaw Nature Reserve in Gray Summit. Right away, the garden built facilities to grow orchids.
“The orchids were among the most important from both a collections value and also an economic value, and they were very susceptible to harm from the poor air quality,” Long said.
The garden was establishing a specialty in growing orchids at the time. “If we go back 100 years ago, the intent was to display exotic plants from around the world,” Long said.
An early project at Shaw Nature Reserve was growing collections of woody plants, like spruce cultivars, to see what might do well in St. Louis’ climate. By 1926, Shaw completed its orchid range, and the garden grew its orchids there until 1958.
But even after the garden purchased the land that would become Shaw Nature Reserve, the air quality in St. Louis kept getting worse.
In 1927, an incredibly smoky Dec. 25 became known as Black Christmas in St. Louis.
“The Botanical Garden lost more than $7,200 worth of plants in one single day,” said Wanko, the historian. “That's equivalent to more than $125,000 worth of plants today.”
Coal pollution skyrocketed in the 1920s and '30s, Wanko said, leading to regular blackout days in winter.
Then, in 1937, St. Louis got its first smoke commissioner, a young Washington University professor named Raymond Tucker. Two years later, smoke again shut the city down, on a day that became known as Black Tuesday.
“They called it the day the sun never rose in St. Louis,” Wanko said.
Tucker acted quickly, seizing on the public outcry over smoke to propose a ban on the type of coal that was especially dirty to burn. In 1940, St. Louis became the first city in the nation to pass an effective smoke abatement ordinance, Wanko said.
“Obviously, St. Louis benefited hugely from this,” Wanko said. “But the really cool thing about it was that this was a transferable lesson.”
Other industrial cities like Pittsburgh followed suit, implementing their own smoke abatement ordinance inspired by St. Louis.
Soon, a different type of environmental transformation would begin at Shaw Nature Reserve.
Ecological restoration
Shaw continued propagating orchids until 1958, when growing the plants moved back to the Missouri Botanical Garden. Also in the ’60s, Shaw began to wind down nonnative woody plant collections, Long said.
“The focus began to shift, first with a greater awareness of environmentalism in the broader American consciousness,” Long said. “Throughout the ’60s, then, environmental education became a focus at the nature reserve, and by 1972 it was recognized as a national environmental education landmark.”
In the ’80s and ’90s, prairie plantings and woodland glade restorations began at Shaw. In the early ’90s, the reserve established the Whitmire Wildflower Garden, which showcases examples of landscapes and gardens featuring native plants.
The reserve now focuses on environmental education, ecological restoration and native plant horticulture. This devotion to native ecosystems led the nature reserve to develop a collection of Missouri’s natural communities.
“We have woodlands, flood plain forest, tall grass prairie, these natural glades, wetlands, the Meramec River gravel bars,” Long said. “All of these habitats are represented through exemplary conservation areas and state parks throughout Missouri, but to find all of those different habitats in one place, where someone can enjoy an afternoon hike and experience them all is truly exceptional.”
And almost all of those habitats were established seed by seed, over years of work by both reserve staff and volunteers.
In one small corner of the 2,400-acre reserve, a group of volunteers are spread out near a creek on a fall afternoon, sliding handfuls of wheat-like seeds off plants and throwing them into plastic buckets.
“This is river oats,” explained Mike Smith, a retired teacher turned Shaw volunteer. “Some of the seeds are just really therapeutic to collect. This is definitely one.”
The seed collection is part of a broader effort to remove invasive plants and plant what should be here.
Volunteers collect over a thousand pounds of seeds from about 275 species of native plants at Shaw each year. Once they gather the seeds, volunteers transfer them to a room in the Linnemeyer-Russell Restoration Center, named for Susie Russell, a 40-year volunteer.
There, whirring fans blow air through a web of ducts and into 50-gallon cardboard barrels filled with flowers and pods. The seeds give off a spicy, earthy smell as they dry. Nearby, equipment for controlled prairie burns and invasive plant removal sits ready to incinerate and rip apart aggressive plants that are damaging the habitat.
This building is a symbol of how the goals of Shaw Nature Reserve have changed in the past 100 years, said Long. It is built on top of the former orchid cultivation building.
“That represents a shift from a focus on predominantly nonnative biodiversity from around the world to a focus on the native biodiversity of our region,” Long said.
