Where there is now a Walgreen’s, a McDonald’s, a gas station and an entrance ramp onto Interstate 64/Highway 40, there was once a small town named Gumbo, which lay in the larger area known as Gumbo Flats, rechristened Chesterfield Valley nowadays. Settlement occurred out here early with the Long Family being prominent; Chesterfield Airport Road was originally Olive Street Road or Plank Road and ended at the Missouri River where there was a ferry to St. Charles County.
The cemetery we looked at recently, which seems strangely isolated now makes more sense when we realize there was a church and town just to the north. What I find most interesting is that there was a small lake or isolated slough which once sat north of the town. It no longer exists and was certainly destroyed by the time of the construction of the Daniel Boone Expressway, the forerunner of today’s interstate.
For the most part, all of the houses have been annihilated, the latest just in the last year, but there are two houses that may be from the original town, which you see below. I’m not completely sure, as the foundations don’t look right.
There was also the small motel-turned-countertop store that was demolished in the last decade, which surely dated to the early Twentieth Century.