All Family Fun

River Rapids Waterpark at the Y Located at 1301 Progress Parkway in Ste. Genevieve, River Rapids Waterpark delivers family-friendly summer fun in Missouri’s oldest town—a welcome escape from history tourism and a reminder that water play, laughter, and splashing are just as much part of a complete vacation as exploring colonial homes and French heritage sites. This amazing facility includes several tubular tall water slides delivering genuine adrenaline, a lazy river offering relaxing floats around the park, a 6-lane lap pool featuring a zip line, climbing ropes, and diving board, and an exciting kids’ play area with 30 different activities. Operating daily from 11 AM to 6 PM from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend, River Rapids Waterpark transforms summer afternoons into wet, wild celebrations perfect for families, friends, or anyone needing cooling-off relief from Missouri heat. Multiple Ways to Play: Every Thrill Level River Rapids Waterpark understands that water fun means different things to different people. The tubular tall water slides deliver genuine speed and excitement for thrill-seekers—you climb the tower, feel the anticipation as you position yourself at the slide entrance, then plunge through enclosed tubes toward the splash pool below. That closed-tube design creates additional thrills Read more…

Sainte Genevieve Art Center & Museum – Historic Legacy Meets Living Creativity Nestled comfortably in the shadow of the historic Sainte Geneviève Catholic Church at 310 Merchant Street, the Sainte Genevieve Art Center & Museum occupies a place of quiet significance in both the physical and cultural landscape of Missouri’s oldest town. This isn’t just another small-town art gallery—it’s a vital institution that illuminates Ste. Genevieve’s surprisingly important role in American art heritage while serving as an active, thriving hub for contemporary creativity. A Building with Its Own Story The Art Center is housed in a stately Norman-Revival stone building that itself tells a story of community pride and celebration. Built in 1934 in preparation for the city’s bicentennial celebration, the structure reflects the civic confidence and architectural ambition of Depression-era America. The choice of Norman-Revival style—with its solid stone construction, arched openings, and medieval European echoes—was particularly fitting for a town celebrating its French colonial heritage. That this beautiful building now serves as home to the Art Center creates a perfect synergy: historic architecture preserving and presenting both historic and contemporary art. The stone walls that once marked a bicentennial milestone now safeguard the legacy of artists who found Read more…

Sainte Genevieve Memorial Cemetery At 5th and Merchant Streets, where a hillside slopes toward what was once open prairie, Memorial Cemetery holds more than 3,500 known burials and perhaps 1,500 additional unmarked graves—a total approaching 5,000 souls whose wooden crosses rotted away over 235+ years, leaving most graves anonymous. This is not the orderly, manicured cemetery of contemporary imagination but rather something more honest: crowded ground where 235 years of deaths compressed themselves into earth, where French colonists buried in 1787 rest beneath Confederate soldiers buried in 1881, where the absence of markers tells its own profound story about mortality, memory, and what happens when time erases deliberate effort to remember. A Cemetery That Remembers Through Absence Established in 1787, Memorial Cemetery was formally blessed in 1791 according to Church records and functions as physical archive of Sainte Genevieve’s entire post-contact history. The oldest existing tombstone belongs to Marie Theres St. Gemme, who died in 1807—though earlier burials certainly occurred between 1787 and 1807, marked then by wooden crosses now long consumed by earth and time. This cemetery contains physical remains of people who lived under French rule, Spanish administration, and American governance—people who witnessed the Louisiana Purchase transform their Read more…

Ste. Genevieve – Modoc Ferry For well over two centuries, a ferry crossing has connected the Missouri and Illinois shores of the Mississippi River near Ste. Genevieve, making it one of the oldest continuously operating transportation routes in the American Midwest. Today’s Ste. Genevieve – Modoc Ferry carries on a tradition stretching back to the very earliest days of European settlement in the region—a living link to the frontier era when the Mississippi was both highway and boundary. Now operating Wednesday through Sunday, the ferry provides reliable access to historic sites on both sides of the river, carrying vehicles and passengers across approximately 10-15 minutes of pure Mississippi River experience. The crossing represents more than transportation; it’s a step back in time and a connection to the river’s enduring power and presence that hasn’t fundamentally changed in over 200 years. A French-Language Petition: 1798 The story of this ferry crossing begins in 1798, when residents of Ste. Genevieve formally petitioned for ferry service across the Mississippi. The petition itself was written in French—the language of commerce, government, and daily life in this thriving French colonial river town. At that time, Ste. Genevieve was already a well-established community, one of the Read more…

Ste. Genevieve Antique Mall At 500 Market Street, a massive 1920s factory building that once hummed with industrial production now houses something entirely different: Missouri’s most consistently open antique mall in a town famous for shops that keep their own hours. The Ste. Genevieve Antique Mall came about because of a disaster that became an opportunity—when a tornado destroyed the county’s only antique mall in nearby St. Mary, Patrick Fahey and Dr. Susan O’Donnell recognized both the need and the chance. They were already invested in Sainte Geneviève through the Main Street Inn Bed & Breakfast, and they knew downtown could support a substantial antique destination. So they transformed this aging factory into a seven-day-a-week destination with over 80 booths housing everything from Depression glass to mid-century furniture, vintage advertising signs to antique tools, jewelry to collectibles—creating the kind of reliable, climate-controlled shopping experience that brings people back and anchors downtown retail. Inside the mall, PJ’s bar and coffee shop extends the experience: grab coffee while browsing Saturday and Sunday mornings, return for evening drinks and live music on Friday nights (5 PM-8 PM), or stop by Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings for beer, wine, and conversation. Why Reliability Matters Read more…