Wildwood Historic Resource Survey

Location: Wildwood, Missouri
Type of Project: Architectural Survey
Commencement: 2014
Completed: 2015

In 2013, the City of Wildwood began to undertake a Historic Inventory project to identify significant properties within the city limits of the municipality, located in western St. Louis County, Missouri. The city elected to hire Preservation Research Office to complete this work in 2014. The goal of the project is to evaluate all structures 75 years or older for local architectural or cultural significance to guide preservation planning at the local level.

PRO completed a reconaissance-level survey of over 300 properties and a final survey report identifying significant resources. Survey work included collection of extant building histories and photographs of each resource. Since much of the area has always been unincorporated and outside of the jurisdiction of building permitting, assessing exact building dates was challenging and entailed collation of information found in multiple archival sources.

Parts of Wildwood once incorporated as the villages of Pond and Glencoe were the subject of surveys conducted by the St. Louis County Departments of Parks and Recreation in 1988, but most of the area of Wildwood — incorporated only in 1995 — has not been inventoried. With a preservation ordinance charging a Historic Preservation Commission to direct the identification and protection of significant sites, Wildwood long has taken the lead on mapping its future heritage.