A two-mile walk is not much of a hike. That is rather the point. When the Missouri Department of Conservation's "A Walk in the Park" series comes to Benton Park on Monday, Oct. 19, participants will gather at 5:30 p.m. outside Bluewood Brewing at 1821 Cherokee Street and set off at a relaxed pace, finishing back where they started by 7 p.m. It is free, open to all ages and abilities, and leashed, well-behaved dogs are welcome.
The series is MDC's bid to reframe what a city park is. "We are lucky here in St. Louis City to have more than 100 city parks," conservation educator Mary Fuller said in announcing the program. "Through A Walk in the Park series, we hope to help people see these spaces not just as places to visit, but as vibrant habitats and cultural landmarks worth exploring and protecting." Each installment takes a different park and pairs the natural with the historical: what is blooming or going to seed this week, which birds and turtles and insects have taken up residence, and what happened on that ground before it was a park at all. Walks run one to two miles, led by MDC education staff, with time built in for questions and for simply standing still and looking.
The Benton Park route is an unusually dense piece of that story, because the neighborhood packs an extraordinary amount of history into less than half a square mile. The park itself is one of the city's oldest, and the neighborhood around it grew up as a working-class, largely German south-side community tied to the breweries that once made St. Louis one of the great beer cities of the world.
It ends, appropriately, at a brewery. Bluewood Brewing occupies the historic Lemp stables, a surviving fragment of the Lemp empire that once dominated the city's brewing industry. The taproom opened in September 2019, the culmination of a partnership that began when Cameron Lund and Grant Lodholz met in college and started homebrewing together. They took the name Bluewood in 2015 as a nod to their college houses, one nicknamed "Ol' Blue" and the other "Plywood," and by the end of 2016 had joined with Michael and Joseph Jones, the group the brewery calls its "original four," to find a permanent home. They found it in the stables. Lund, the brewmaster, graduated from Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla in December 2014 and worked as a hydraulics engineer while his homebrews built a local following.
That a conservation agency's nature walk should begin and end at a brewery in a nineteenth-century stable is less incongruous than it sounds. The Lemp works were a landmark of the Cherokee Street corridor, and the district that bears the family name is now recognized for its stock of historic commercial and industrial buildings. The same blocks that once housed lager cellars and cooperages now hold taquerias, antique shops, art spaces and a brewery making artisan ales. The walk is designed to make those layers legible: the seasonal plants and wildlife that have moved into old industrial ground, and the cultural history that shaped the streets the plants grow along.
MDC's framing is deliberately modest. These are short walks, not expeditions, and the pace is set for conversation. But the series as a whole amounts to an argument that St. Louisans do not need to drive to a conservation area to encounter conservation. A city park is a habitat, a watershed, a piece of infrastructure and a historical document at once, and the Benton Park installment happens to sit at a corner of the city where all of those readings are visible within a couple of miles.
Check-in is at Bluewood Brewing, 1821 Cherokee Street, at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 19, 2026; the walk runs until 7 p.m. Participation is free, and while registration is encouraged to ensure space, the program is built for people who simply show up. More information is available from MDC's St. Louis office at 314-301-1504 or [email protected], and the full series schedule is posted at mdc.mo.gov/events.