St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

The St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway Company—usually called the Iron Mountain—was formed on May 6, 1874, through consolidation of the St. Louis and Iron Mountain and Cairo and Fulton railroad interests. From its St. Louis, Missouri base, it connected the city’s industrial riverfront with the mineral country around Iron Mountain and routes reaching deep into Arkansas and Texas.

Its rail empire did more than move ore. The Iron Mountain carried freight, passengers, timber, cotton, machinery, mail, and the general bustle of a region being welded together one timetable at a time. By 1874, trains could run between St. Louis and Texarkana; the company became one of Arkansas’s dominant rail systems.

Jay Gould acquired the railroad in 1881, placing it within the expanding Missouri Pacific orbit. The two systems remained formally separate for years—because nineteenth-century railroad finance apparently enjoyed a complicated relationship status—but Missouri Pacific ultimately absorbed the Iron Mountain on May 12, 1917.

Our St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway collection celebrates the hard-working Iron Mountain identity: iron ore, river terminals, long southern rails, and the unapologetically industrial swagger of a railroad whose name already sounded like a destination poster.