If you’ve ever pedaled out of Rocheport onto the Katy Trail, you’ve started your ride on the same stretch of gravel where the whole 240-mile trail began. It’s easy to miss walking or biking through, but this town was ground zero for what became the longest continuous rail-trail in the country — and it almost didn’t happen at all.
The trail follows the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad corridor — the “Katy” — which ran freight and passengers from St. Charles County to Sedalia until the line shut down in 1986. Missouri State Parks was able to claim the abandoned right-of-way under a federal rails-to-trails law, but claiming a corridor and actually building a trail on it are two different things. According to Missouri State Parks, the project ran into funding shortfalls and landowner lawsuits that nearly stalled it before a shovel hit the ground.
That’s where Ted and Pat Jones came in. Ted was the son of the man who founded the Edward Jones investment firm, and according to the State Historical Society of Missouri, he caught the rails-to-trails bug after a bike trip on a converted railroad trail in Wisconsin. He came home and started lobbying Jefferson City to do the same thing with the dead Katy line. When the money and the lawsuits threatened to sink the project anyway, Ted and Pat wrote a check for more than $2 million to cover the gap — a donation both sources agree was decisive in getting the trail built at all.
Construction started in 1987. The very first section of finished trail opened right here at Rocheport, and the whole park had its official opening on April 28, 1990. Ted didn’t get to enjoy it for long — he died that October 3, less than six months after the ribbon-cutting he’d fought years to make happen. Pat kept going without him: the Historical Society’s biography credits her with staying actively involved in the couple’s conservation projects for almost three more decades, work that eventually earned her the nickname “Prairie Godmother” from a national magazine.
The Joneses’ giving didn’t stop at the trail. The same biography lists the Young Conservation Area in Jefferson County (built from Pat’s own family farm) and the 911-acre Prairie Fork Conservation Area in Callaway County among their other donations to the state. Missouri State Parks notes that in 1991, Union Pacific chipped in another 33 miles of corridor toward Clinton, and the trail as we know it today — Machens to Clinton, all 240 miles of it — grew out from the Rocheport section outward in both directions.
Next time you’re standing at the trailhead here, it’s worth remembering: a couple who fell in love biking through the Ozarks as teenagers ended up deciding, with their own money, that this town would be where Missouri’s rail-trail experiment either worked or didn’t. It worked.
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