Longview Farm Park in Town and Country: Who Keeps It Running?

On a Saturday morning in late summer, you can usually find two different kinds of work happening at Longview Farm Park at the same time. Near the farmhouse, a wedding coordinator is walking the lawn with a clipboard, counting where chairs will go for a five o'clock ceremony. A few yards away, in the perennial beds that frame the porch, a volunteer in sun gloves is deadheading spent blooms and pulling the first creeping weeds of the week. One of these people is being paid. The other has been doing this same work, unpaid, for longer than most residents have lived in the city.

That second person is almost certainly a member of the Mason Ridge Garden Club, and the distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Longview Farm Park gets described, accurately, as the crown jewel of Town and Country. What rarely gets said out loud is that a meaningful share of its polish comes from volunteer hours rather than city budget. Understanding that changes how you look at every park in this city, not just Longview.

A Farmhouse the City Almost Didn't Save

The farmhouse at the center of Longview Farm Park started as a log cabin, believed to date to the 1870s. By the 1920s it had been covered over with a white frame house, and over the following decades it picked up a patchwork of additions that split the interior into small, disconnected rooms. When Town and Country purchased the property in 2000, the building was not ADA accessible and its layout made it impractical for city events or meetings. A subcommittee spent years working through what to do with it.

The answer, finalized in 2007, was surgical rather than wholesale. Crews demolished the pre-1970s additions that October, restored and lightly reconstructed the two-story front portion, and built a new low-profile addition at the rear with a gathering space that opens up with retractable walls. The ribbon cutting for the finished building happened on September 26, 2008. That renovated space is why the Longview Farm House can now host weddings, yoga classes, and corporate gatherings at all. Without it, the property the city describes as its most popular destination would still be a maze of small, unusable rooms behind a pretty facade.

Twenty-Four Years of Volunteer Hours

The building got fixed by a city subcommittee. The grounds around it are a different story entirely. The gardens that ring the farmhouse, the beds that make it look camera-ready for every wedding photographer who shows up on a Saturday, are maintained by the Mason Ridge Garden Club under president Claire Chosid. According to the city's own description of the park, this group of Master Gardeners has put in more than 10,000 labor hours since 2002.

Run that math against a typical municipal parks crew and the scale becomes clear. That is not a one-time beautification grant or a seasonal contractor. It is a volunteer commitment that has now outlasted two decades of city budgets, election cycles, and staff turnover. As the city's own park page puts it, the park is "a place where our community gathers to make personal connections, promote healthy lifestyles and create memories." That sentiment is doing a lot of quiet work. The memories get made because the flowers are there. The flowers are there because a garden club decided, year after year, to keep showing up.

The Deal That Gave Preservation Park Its Tennis Courts

Longview is not the only park in Town and Country that runs on an arrangement most residents never think about. Preservation Park tells a similar story with a different kind of partner.

The city originally acquired roughly 32 acres north of Outer 40 Road, between Mason and Conway Roads, specifically to keep the land from being developed commercially. The park was dedicated on April 11, 1999, and its name came out of a public naming contest, submitted jointly by an adult and a child. That same year the city's future slogan, "Respect the Past, Honor the Present, Protect the Future," was spoken for the first time.

What happened next is the part most people skip over. The city eventually sold 20 of those original 32 acres to Christian Brothers College High School, which built athletic fields and eight tennis courts, four of them lighted, on the site. Those courts are available for public use. The remaining park keeps its pavilion, playground, sand volleyball court, restrooms, and a trail system split between 3,690 feet of paved path and 2,770 feet of wood chip trail. In effect, a private high school's construction budget paid for public tennis courts on land the city no longer owns outright. That is a very different mechanism than a garden club's volunteer hours, but it is the same underlying pattern: the park you use was built partly with someone else's money or someone else's labor.

Here is how the four parks compare at a glance:

Drace Park's Log Cabin Loop

If Longview is the park people visit for events, Drace Park is the one they visit for a quiet lap. The city purchased the nine-acre site in October 2000 from the Drace family, who had used the gently rolling land as horse pastures, and dedicated it as a park in June 2003. The centerpiece is a restored historical log cabin, known as the Kropp Log Cabin, tucked into what the city calls the park's historic area.

The trail here connects to the main path along Clayton Road, which means it is entirely possible to park at Longview, walk the loop through the woods and past the stables, continue on to Drace, circle its perimeter, and walk back without ever getting in a car. Longtime visitors describe doing exactly that, treating the two parks as one connected route rather than two separate stops.

A few practical things are worth knowing before you head out:

• Catch and release fishing is permitted on the Longview lake for anyone holding a valid Missouri Department of Conservation license, unless you qualify for an exemption.
• The city requires photographers to register for a free permit before shooting in any Town and Country park, a detail worth knowing if you are planning family portraits or engagement photos on park grounds.
• Drace Park's playground was updated in 2023 with a more natural design and an artificial turf ground cover, and a nature play area with balance beams and climbing features was added back in 2016.

A Calendar Built on Sponsors, Not Just Tax Dollars

The same pattern that shows up in how these parks were built shows up again in how the city's biggest annual events get paid for. The summer concert series at Town Square, held on select Wednesdays and Fridays from May through September at 13360 Clayton Road, is underwritten by a named group of community partners: Peoples National Bank, T-Mobile, Al-Don Heating and Cooling, and MINI of St. Louis. The 2026 lineup so far has featured Vince Martin on May 15, playing a mix of soul, blues, funk, pop, and rock from 6 to 8 p.m., and Hubb & the Heavy Hearts on June 17, playing St. Louis blues with southern soul from 7 to 9 p.m. Food has come from vendors like Kalifornia Cuisine and Lilly's Café, and the city runs a free continuous shuttle along with park-and-walk options at Hope Church on Mason Road, Longview Farm Park, and Mason Ridge Elementary School, so nobody has to fight for a parking spot on the lawn.

Longview carries its own set of signature events beyond the wedding season: the Turkey Trot, the Holiday Boutique, and the Art, Wine & Music event, alongside newer additions like tennis lessons and summer camps for kids. None of these run purely on tax revenue. They run on sponsor dollars, volunteer coordination, and, in the case of the grounds where they take place, on two decades of unpaid gardening.

None of this is a complaint. It is closer to a compliment, aimed at the right people. A city with a modest parks budget has ended up with a genuinely impressive set of public spaces because residents, a private school, and local businesses have all been willing to put something into the pot. The next time you are walking the loop between Longview and Drace, or setting up a blanket on the Town Square lawn for a Friday concert, it is worth remembering that the flowers, the courts, and the shuttle bus all exist because someone other than the city decided they were worth the effort.

If you are already living here, none of this changes your address. But it might change how you spend a Saturday. And if you know someone weighing a move to this part of West County, drawn by exactly this kind of civic texture, I would be glad to talk through what makes a Town and Country property, and the life around it, worth the investment. You can reach me through Sandra Mesker to schedule a private consultation.