Finance History | Ashley Street Power Plant — Union Electric's River Plant Entered a Holding Company Called Ameren

People treat Ameren as a St. Louis utility tower and a ticker born on New Year's Eve.

The operating company that still runs Missouri's largest electric book built this coal plant first.

Union Electric put the Ashley Street Power Plant to work in 1904 to send steam heat and current into downtown St. Louis.

The firm had been organized two years earlier as the Union Company. By 1906 Union Electric stock was public and paying a cash dividend it kept paying until the 1997 merger.

On 31 December 1997 articles of merger were filed in Missouri and Illinois.

Union Electric and CIPSCO Incorporated, parent of Central Illinois Public Service Company, became subsidiaries of a new Missouri holding company named Ameren.

Each Union Electric common share became one Ameren share. Each CIPSCO share became 1.03 Ameren shares. The new ticker was AEE. The old tickers UEP and CIP left the tape.

Ameren's first annual report said the name was chosen to mark American energy and the two states the wires already crossed.

Headquarters of the holding company sat at 1901 Chouteau Avenue. The plant on Ashley Street remained a Union Electric, later AmerenUE, industrial fact on the near north riverfront.

The mechanism was a pooling-of-interests merger under the Public Utility Holding Company Act. Two regulated books, and their long-term debt, were stacked under one listed parent without a cash takeout.

The pin is the public ground around the surviving plant. The interiors and the Chouteau offices are working utility property.

Photo: Paul Sableman, 11 September 2016, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Ashley Street Power Plant, St. Louis.