Artwork takes on a whole new hue when you get to talk to the people who are creating it.

Today I visited St. Charles, a town in eastern Missouri known for it historic 1800s downtown and its association with Lewis and Clark's expedition. There's plenty of charm on the brick-lined streets, and many historic sites to visit. But the one that interested me the most was the Foundry Arts Centre.

Created as a railroad car manufacturing facility in the 1940s, the foundry later closed and sat dormant for years. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a community effort helped to turn the facility into an arts center with gallery space for artwork exhibition and studio space where local artists can work.

Today the Foundry Arts Centre is the cultural headquarters of St. Charles, hosting concerts, art shows, lectures luncheons and other events. The permanent galleries on the bottom floor host a series of changing exhibitions of work by local and regional artists. In the upstairs section, some 25 working artists have studios, where they can be found creating paintings, sculptures, fabric art, pottery and other art forms.

My favorite part of the visit was walking through the studios and meeting the artists who work there.  Two of them are retired art teachers who are pursuing their life passions now after decades in education. They explained the inspiration behind their work, and shared some of the processes and techniques they use to create painting and pottery that they love and that appeal to art buyers.

Meeting these guys helped me to put a human face on the artwork, and allowed to see the items in front of me through the perspective of their experience, creativity and passions. If you're only a casual art liker, a visit to the foundry just might turn you in to a bona fide art lover.

The story of Jesse James, which I knew little of before this trip through Missouri, just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

Today I visited the Jesse James Wax Museum in Stanton, a small Missouri town not far from St. Louis. Official history indicates that Jesse James was killed in 1882 in a rented house in St. Joseph, Missouri (the home is now a St. Joseph museum). But the owners of Jesse James Wax Museum hold that James faked his own death and left Missouri, and resurfaced in 1948 as a 100-year-old man under the name J. Frank Dalton. According to this version of the story, the real James returned to Missouri and lived for three years before dying in 1951.

The wax museum is dedicated to making the case that J. Frank Dalton was Jesse James. Displays use grainy black-and-white photos of the two men, along with the testimonies of several of James' contemporaries, to try to convince visitors of this alternate version of history. During a tour of the museum, guests see a number of wax figures depicting scenes from James' life, as well as a figure of the elderly Dalton after making his debut in public. Also on display are a number of antique firearms, as well as a computer-generated aging photos used to demonstrate how Jesse James would have aged into a old man resembling Dalton.

"The evidence they found was amazing," said Tammy Franklin, my guide to the museum who was a true believer in the story. "It really does make sense."

The story is certainly compelling -- if Jesse James succeeded in faking his own death in 1882 to ultimately escape pursuit, it would be the greatest criminal exploit in American history. I've been so taken in by the tale that I've spent much of tonight reading historical accounts online, looking at the evidence presented by both sides. Most academics and scientists who comment on the issue point to a 1996 DNA test that confirms that the man buried on the farm in Kearney shares DNA with James' sister. But to the true believers, the DNA test had several underlying innacuracies and, thus, proves nothing.

For me, the deciding factor is this: J. Frank Dalton was introduced to the public by Rudy Tirelli, one of the proprietors of Meramec Caverns in Stanton. The owners have long marketed the caverns as a hideout of the James gang in the 1800s, and drew no small ammount of media attention with their claims to have found the real, un-dead outlaw.

Sounds to me like Tirelli and company had a financial motivation to promote the tale of J. Frank Dalton. And if you make a trip to the Jesse James Wax Museum, they'll make few bucks off of you, too. But for those who are fascinated with the legend and lore of Jesse James, or who can't pass up a good conspiracy theory, this museum makes an interesting half-hour visit.

To many students of history, Jesse James is one of the most notorious villains ever to live in the United States, robbing banks and killing enemies all over the country for decades during the mid-1800s. But for a fair number of his contemporaries in western Missouri, James was a freedom fighter and folk hero.

I learned a fascinating story about James life and motivation for his violent actions at the James Farm, a historic site in the small town of Kearney, Missouri, where James was born and lived much of his early life. During a tour of the museum, I learned about the violent Civil War-era events that motivated Jesse and his brother Frank James to begin their life of violent crimes. The James boys and their family, who supported the South in the Civil War, saw significant abuse at the hands of Union sympathizers. After the war, when a new Missouri constintution disenfranchised and marginalized those who had supported the rebel cause, the James brothers began robbing pro-Union banks as a form of vigilante justice.

After seeing an introductory video and touring the small museum, I took a guided tour of the James house, which was built in the early 1800s. During the tour, I heard stories of the family's life there, including some of the attacks that the boys' mother and siblings endured by federal marshals pursuing the outlaws. The boys' mother lived there until the day she died; after that, Frank James came back and lived in the home as well, giving tours of the farm to curious passers by who came to see the birthplace of the already-infamous Jesse James.

After he was killed in St. Joseph, Jesse James was brought back to the farm and buried there, where a gravestone and memorial still stands. Reading the inscription on the headstone, you would think that Jesse James was a first-rate hero. It's a good reminder that history is never quite as simple as it seems. And after visiting the home and hearing its stories, I have a new appreciation for the difficult time in our history that this family's struggle represents.