Tour of National Building Arts
May 2, 2026

National Building Arts Center Tour May 2, 2026

St. Louis Chapter NRHS

Eleven members of the St. Louis Chapter NRHS visited the National Building Arts Center on Saturday, May 2. The center, located in Sauget, Illinois, promotes public awareness of the crucial roles of architecture, manufacturing, construction, and urban design in our built environment. Our tour’s emphasis was their collection of street car related items plus any railroad items. Of course we learned about other artifacts as well. We spent additional time in their library after the tour. The engineers and architects in the group were amazed by the artifacts. Our tour was led by docent and historian Amanda Clark. She volunteers at NBAC, while professionally she is employed at the Missouri History Museum.

In terms of both artifacts and archives, the majority of what is directly railroad-related comes from United Railways, the St. Louis streetcar system. This includes machinery from streetcar shops, fare boxes, and technical drawings of tracks/stations/streetcars/etc. They have fragments of streetcar track, presumed to also be from St. Louis. The reference library contains some books about railroads, both streetcar and otherwise. Additionally, the foundry (Sterling Steel) that used to operate on their campus, and for which they have extensive papers, made wheels for mine carts and possibly other rail vehicles.

Most of the tour was outdoors or in buildings that lacked roofs and/or walls: facility-wise, it was somewhere in between "construction site" and "museum". About 15-20 minutes were spent fully indoors in the climate-controlled library stacks, but there is one step up into that room.

This was an opportunity to visit a place relatively few St. Louisans know about on a docent guided tour.

National Building Arts
2300 Falling Springs Road
Sauget, IL 62206
314 922-5500

For additional information, please see NationalBuildingArts.com