On a weekday in early June, around nine in the morning, the parking lot at Grants Farm is still mostly empty. The air smells like cut grass and, faintly, like livestock. A tram pulls away from the loading area with maybe a dozen people on it. This is the right time to come.
Grants Farm sits in south St. Louis County, off Gravois Road, on land that once belonged to Ulysses S. Grant. He cleared timber here in the 1850s, built a log cabin he called Hardscrabble, and farmed the ground while his military career stalled out. The Busch family bought the property in 1903, and the Anheuser-Busch connection ran the place as a public attraction for decades. After a few years of closure and uncertain ownership, it reopened under new management in 2022. Most of the bones are intact: the Clydesdales, the animal enclosures, the old stone gatehouse. The vibe is quieter now, which is not a bad thing.
The visit starts with a tram ride through what the farm calls the deer park — a stretch of open pasture where bison, white-tailed deer, Texas longhorns, and a handful of exotic species roam without fencing between you and them. Guides narrate over a speaker system, though honestly you could ignore the commentary and just watch the animals move across the grass. Kids lose their minds when a bison lumbers past the tram within arm’s reach. Adults do too, a little.
After the tram, you’re on foot through the main yard. There are goats and sheep you can feed for a dollar or two in quarters. There’s a raptor exhibit with owls and hawks perched on posts. The Clydesdales — the famous ones, bred here for generations — are usually visible in their stalls or a paddock. Up close, these animals are enormous in a way that photographs don’t communicate. Hooves the size of dinner plates. Calm, unbothered expressions. Worth the trip on their own.
The Hardscrabble cabin still stands near the back of the property, small and roughhewn, preserved behind a fence. Grant built it himself with timber he cut by hand. Knowing that the man who would later command the Union Army was out here struggling to grow potatoes gives the place a specific kind of historical weight that’s easy to feel and hard to articulate.
Admission is free for children under two. For adults it runs around fifteen dollars, give or take, with kids around twelve. Parking is a few dollars extra. Food and drinks are available on-site — a beer garden still operates, because this is St. Louis and the Busch connection isn’t entirely gone — but prices are theme-park-adjacent, so eat before you come if you’re watching the budget.
The farm is open seasonally, roughly April through October, and gets genuinely crowded on summer weekends and school field trip days. If you can go on a Tuesday morning in May, do that. You’ll have the tram almost to yourself and the animals will still be active before the afternoon heat settles in. That’s the version of Grants Farm that stays with you: quiet, a little weathered, unexpectedly moving. A place that keeps being more interesting than you expect it to be.
