How Imperial and Kimmswick Shape a Local Weekend

Take Exit 186 off I-55 and the green sign reads "Imperial / Kimmswick," stacked on top of each other like they're the same place. They are not. One has a fossil bed named for Kimmswick, though it sits inside Imperial. The other has a bakery that ships pie nationwide because of a flood that happened over thirty years ago. If you live in Imperial, both towns offer nearby options for a weekend.

This isn't a knock on Imperial. It's a pattern worth naming, because once you see it, it explains a lot about how a week here actually unfolds.

The Exit That Splits the Town in Two

Imperial's population sits at roughly 5,800 people as of this year, and the commercial stretch along the highway corridor includes Subway, Papa John's, Hardee's, and a Krispy Krunchy Chicken counter inside the Express Mart.

Kimmswick, one exit closer to the river, has a little over a hundred residents. It also has a two-block historic district of 19th-century storefronts that draws day-trippers from across the region, and it's home to sit-down dining, wine tasting, and Saturday festivals. The towns offer different settings: Imperial has a commercial stretch along the highway, while Kimmswick has a walkable historic district. Kimmswick was founded in 1859 by German dry goods merchant Theodore Kimm and has kept its original footprint. Together, they give residents access to both settings within a short drive.

Dining Options in Imperial and Kimmswick

Imperial has a sit-down restaurant of its own: Frankie Gianino's Grill & Bar, on Main Street. It has been family-owned for 16 years, is known for scratch-made portions, and has a patio built around an outdoor fireplace.

Kimmswick, by contrast, has a cluster. The Blue Owl Restaurant & Bakery has been a fixture on 2nd Street since 1984, when Mary Hostetter turned a home baking business into a full restaurant. Her daughter Kim Byerly and Kim's husband Dan now run it, carrying forward a recipe that has less to do with flour and more to do with disaster response.

Here's the part that doesn't show up on the menu description. In 1993, the Mississippi River rose high enough to threaten Kimmswick with evacuation, and volunteers built a makeshift levee out of sandbags to hold it back. The town survived. Mary Hostetter marked the moment by inventing a pie stacked with eighteen apples and finished in caramel and pecans, meant to look like the rocks and mud that shored up that levee. She called it the Levee High Apple Pie. It has since shown up on the Food Network, the Today Show, and in Oprah's list of favorite things, and the restaurant now serves more than 300 people a day. Nobody orders it because of the marketing. They order it because a flood is baked into the recipe.

A few doors down, NoWhere Food & Drink is the newest entry, drawing crowds within days of opening and building a following around its wing flavors first introduced at a local Wing Ding event. LaChance Winery rounds out the block, hosting the merchant association's after-hours wine walks on its patio. These Kimmswick destinations are a five-minute drive from Imperial.

Fall Events in Kimmswick Near Imperial

On August 15, Kimmswick closed its shops for a Poker Run Shopping Edition, sending visitors store to store for a shot at cash prizes. That's not an isolated event. It's the first entry in a fall run that continues through late October, with each event aimed at a slightly different crowd.

Ticket sales for Witches Night Out opened August 1, which means if you live in Imperial and haven't grabbed one yet, that window is already narrowing. The Apple Butter Festival closes out the run in late October, timed as it always is to the last full weekend of the month, with traditional apple butter making and local craft vendors filling the same streets that hosted the Poker Run ten weeks earlier.

These events take place in Kimmswick, not Imperial proper, and add seasonal dates to the calendar for households in the area.

If you want something less ticketed, the standing weekly stuff is still in Imperial itself. American Legion Post 283, on Montebello Road, runs a Friday fish dinner most weeks. The Meramec Arnold Elks Lodge, at 1515 Miller Road, holds regular bingo nights. Neither shows up on a tourism site, and neither needs to. They're for people who already live here, not people passing through on their way to the pie.

The Kimmswick Bone Bed in Imperial

Here's the detail that ties the whole thing together. Mastodon State Historic Site sits on Charles J. Becker Drive, well within Imperial's city limits. The fossil deposit at its center, one of the most significant Pleistocene ice age finds in the country, is called the Kimmswick Bone Bed. Not the Imperial Bone Bed. Kimmswick.

The naming isn't an error. It reflects the same gravitational pull that shows up in where you eat dinner. Even a 425-acre state historic site, physically located in Imperial, carries its neighbor's name because Kimmswick was the recognizable place when the bones were catalogued.

The site itself is worth the visit on its own terms. Three trails run through it. Spring Branch Trail is an easy three-quarter-mile walk along Rock Creek bottomland, passing the remains of an old springhouse fed by a spring that keeps the stream temperature constant year-round. Limestone Hill Trail is the opposite experience: a steep, rugged 2.25-mile route that climbs along a limestone bluff, cuts through oak and hickory forest, and passes an old quarry near the top. The half-mile Wildflower Trail splits the difference. The first two trailheads sit in the same picnic area, and reaching any of them means driving off the same Exit 186 that takes you into Kimmswick for dinner afterward.

What This Actually Means Week to Week

Imperial and Kimmswick offer a mix of everyday stops, dining, trails, and seasonal events within a short drive. The two towns can be part of the same week, whether you think of them that way or not.

If you're new to the area and still building your own version of this rhythm, that's the map worth having. Not just "things to do near Imperial," but how the nearby places fit into a week here.

If you're weighing what it's like to settle into this particular stretch of Jefferson County, our Imperial neighborhood guide breaks down more of what daily life looks like here. And if a move toward this exit is somewhere on your mind, the Becky O'Neill Power Home Selling Team has spent decades getting to know exactly what each side of Exit 186 has to offer. Reach out when you're ready to talk through it.