Rosati was once known as Knobview and was originally named for the three high hills that overlook the area from the southwest. The name probably dates back to the mid 1850s or earlier when westbound travelers passing through the area reached King's Hill on Springfield Road. This spot provided a perfect view of three high hills to the southwest. Thus, the name Knobview was born. Its beginnings go back more than 300 years when it started as Indian trails, and later became known as the Osage Trail, which was little more than a wilderness path of separate but connected trails. Traders and early settlers going west used this route. The road is still intact and in use in the Rosati area, and is located about two-thirds of a mile north of Rosati. Its path is roughly parallel to the railroad, Historic Route 66 and I-44.

The first store and post office at Knobview were located along Springfield Road at the intersection with the Phelps-Crawford county line road (Johnson Rd. today). It was known as Kinsey's Station and was owned by Thomas Kinsey, Jr., a merchant who moved there from Maries County, Missouri. He was appointed postmaster on May 26, 1856 and was likely the first or one of the first residents of the area, arriving there sometime after 1845. In 1857, Phelps County was formed from portions of Maries, Pulaski, and Crawford counties. The creation of a new county placed the store and post office on the western border of Crawford County with newly formed Phelps County just across the road. The area had been surveyed by Lt. James Abert who was a part of the third expedition of John Charles Frémont and was surveying for a possible future railroad through the area. In the 1850s after the surveying was completed, the government offered large sections of land to any company which could build a railroad through central Missouri, and by early summer 1860, the Southwest Branch of the Pacific Railroad had arrived at Knobview from the east, roughly following the path of Springfield Road. Because the mail would now be arriving by train rather than road, Kinsey's Station moved about 1/4 mile south and reopened alongside the new railroad. A portion of an 1872 map shows that Knobview and Kinsey's Station were situated in the Knobview Township of Crawford County.

Mr. Kinsey died suddenly in 1860, nearly the same time the railroad reached his store. Business was booming after the railroad arrived, so the store was taken over by a son, also named Thomas. Trains brought goods that people in the surrounding area needed and the agricultural products they raised could now be shipped easier and faster. Thomas died in 1865 and the store was bought from his widow by a store employee named Charles Cartall who owned the store until 1880 when it burned. Cartall then opened a new store in St. James.

The 1870 census of Knobview shows only five residents with four of those being Mr. Cartall, his wife and two children. By 1881 the population had risen to 35, and there was a new store owner from Gasconade County named Lorenzo Viemann. It is not known at this time if he rebuilt in the same location of the previous store or if the location changed, but it appears that he owned the store for only 18 months. The post office closed in the autumn of 1882. From 1893-1898, Anvil A. Beezley owned the store and post office. After the 1898 closing, local residents picked up their mail from the post office at Fanning, four miles to the east between Knobview and Cuba. A January 1894 article in the St. James Journal states that A.A. Beezley's store in Knobview was robbed of $100 worth of merchandise.

The railroad was eager to sell the excess land it owned along each side of the tracks because private ownership of the land meant that new towns and businesses could develop along the tracks and increase its revenue. Profits from shipping iron were down in the years following the Civil War, and wood from the Knobview area became one of the major items shipped by train to St. Louis. With the railroad's sale of land, the population in the Knobview area increased slightly during the 1860s-1890s. The population in 1895 was 43.

A school was located at Knobview in the 1880s but little is known about it. It is known that the school was also used as a church. The railroad maintained a section crew at Knobview with a man named Frank Roberts in charge of the workers. Charles Hampton, who was one of the local residents, shipped wood to St. Louis by railroad. A newspaper article from March 1889 states that "Mr. Hampton's iron bank is booming", which refers to a deposit of iron ore. Another local landowner, D.H. Hughes, who owned a large amount of property in the area, donated land in 1889 to erect a building for a chapter of the National Agricultural Wheel Society. Dances and prayer meetings were held at the homes of area residents. Articles mentioning residents of Knobview in various 1889 issues of the Rolla New Era refer to family surnames such as Stulce, Hammett, White, Sallard, Manning, Wheeler, Sozier, Reick, Pancoast, Spading, Ellis, Carter, Smith, Sweeton, Goodwin, Cranmer, Fox, Leeper, Weathers, Wagner, and Reissaus. These families were widely spread out around the Knobview area, and there was no concentration of homes and businesses located along the railroad in Knobview.

Meanwhile, in November 1895 in the southeastern corner of Arkansas at the Sunnyside Plantation, the first group of Italian immigrants arrived. There had been a labor shortage at the cotton plantation in recent years, and the owner, Austin Corbin, came up with a scheme to find hard working sharecroppers at little expense. Corbin negotiated an agreement with Don Emanuele Ruspoli, the Mayor of Rome, to recruit Italians in northern Italy to come to America for a better life. Corbin's sole interest was profit, and he managed to sell the Italians land at his Arkansas plantation at a very inflated price. He provided them with everything they needed including a store, owned by himself, where the immigrants had to purchase needed items. He had things arranged in a way that many of the immigrants worked for him in a virtual cycle of indebtedness. Within the first year of living and working around swampy, mosquito infested land and drinking unfiltered water, many of the settlers died from Malaria and other fevers. They were not accustomed to raising cotton, and they realized that their agreement with Corbin was never going to allow them to experience the better life they had come to America for. It became imperative that they find better living and working conditions, so a committee was formed to find land which was more like their native regions in Italy. Two other areas were found but the group could not agree on one, so they split, with most going to either Tontitown in northwestern Arkansas or Knobview, Missouri. A small number either returned to Italy or moved to other places.

In early October, 1897, Giovanni Taldo, Antonio Asnicar, and Pietro Marchi travelled from Sunnyside to St. Louis where they met representatives of the railroad who took them to Knobview to see what the area was like. The railroad had heard about the group and wanted more business along their tracks. In December, a second group visited in the same way. The group included Fr. Bandini, a founder of Tontitown and the first priest there. The Italians were very pleased with the land and soil conditions which were similar to their native communities in Italy. Bandini wanted to name the settlement "Montebello" (Beautiful Mountain). On Jan. 1, 1898, a contract was signed to purchase 1,200 acres from the railroad in 40 acre parcels. The land was $3 per acre with a required down payment of $15. The remainder was due over the following five years.

On January 21, 1898, a group of about ten men from the Sunnyside Settlement under the management of Tullio Malesani arrived at Knobview. They were offered boxcars to live in until houses could be built. Construction then began on houses for the men, their families, and others who were on their way from Sunnyside. After a few houses were built, multiple families moved into each one while more houses were being constructed. By March, thirty families had arrived and it wasn't long before each family had their own home.

One year later, more families arrived from Arkansas while still other families came from places such as Illinois. A few immigrants had been directed to Knobview by the Italian Consulate in St. Louis. Many of the families who settled outside of the central Knobview area along the railroad lived to the north and west. The Friendship School was located one and one-half miles west-northwest of Knobview and many of its students in the early 1900s were the children of Italians who settled in that area.

With few farm animals and few fruit trees old enough to bear fruit, there was little income during the first few years, and life was very difficult. Starting around 1900 and for the next decade or so, some families and single men left Knobview and found employment in St. Louis or Illinois towns such as Aurora, Staunton, and Galesburg while others moved to Morgan and Logan Counties in Colorado. Some families which had moved to St. Louis and towns in Illinois, later moved back to Knobview.  Despite the hardships, businesses started to spring up within two years of the Italians' arrival in 1898. Within the first ten years, there were two stores, a saloon, canning plant, post office, school, depot, and church, all situated where only trees, brush, and some barren land had existed just a decade earlier.

The Italians began doing business in nearby St. James, five miles to the west on Springfield Road. A merchant there named John Sutton believed that the immigrants were honest and hard working, and he became one of the first businessmen in St. James to offer them credit. They started raising various farm products but they did not have any grapes, which they were accustomed to growing. Grape cuttings were obtained from Italy but the plants would not adapt to their new climate and soil, and all of them died. A New England variety (Concord) was then acquired from French immigrants in the township of Dillon, located along the railroad between St James and Rolla. The Concord grapes did well and became the predominant variety for many decades.

Through the early 1900s, everyone had a garden, and most families raised grapes and other fruits such as apples, peaches, strawberries, and pears. Nearly everyone with a vineyard made wine. There was even a chestnut grove near the Gherardini home. Cows, pigs, and chickens were commonplace and large amounts of cheese were made and sold by several families. Antonio Piazza and his wife Amelia shipped cheese to various places and sold milk to Quality Dairy in St. Louis. Trains picked up the cans of milk and returned the empty containers.

In 1925, the Knobview Boys Club hall was built and in 1927, a new, brick schoolhouse was built next to the hall. The new school was larger and had two rooms separated by a movable partition. One room was for grades 1-4 and the other was for grades 5-8. Knobview had a high school for some years in the 1920s but for most students, grades 9-12 had to be completed at the high school in St. James. The Boys Club wasn't just for boys but was also used as a place for social gatherings such as pie suppers, dances, and the popular St. Anthony Church spaghetti dinners. The girls had their own clubs and met there, too. The school closed in 1963 and all students began attending school in St. James from that point on. In the mid 1960s, the Knights Of Columbus purchased the buildings, and shortly thereafter moved the hall approximately 200 ft. to the east, rotated it 90 degrees and connected the two buildings. In the years following the connection of the buildings, many dances, new year parties, wedding receptions, Christmas parties, turkey shoots, and Knights Of Columbus meetings were held there. The Rosati chapter of the Knights was eventually combined with the St. James chapter and the building was sold near the year 2000.

After W.W.II ended and the sons and grandsons of Rosati's Italian settlers began to come home from military service, most of them took up grape farming. As the years went by, many of them began raising cattle along with grapes while some took part or full time jobs away from their farms. When the next generation began graduating from high school in the mid 1960s to late 1970s, many of these young people went to college and later found jobs in various, larger towns and cities. As their parents got older, the labor intensive farming required for grapes became difficult for them and the total acreage of vineyards owned by members of Welch's Cooperative began to decrease in the second half of the 1970s. By 1990, Welch's stopped renewing contracts to purchase the growers' grapes. During this time, more new wineries opened and the acreage of wine grapes kept increasing. The Concord vineyards which had been owned by many, individual farmers and used mainly for the production of juice and jelly were gradually replaced with vineyards of other varieties needed for modern wine production. They were primarily owned by a few winery owners. Most of the old vineyards planted many decades ago are gone, and modern, irrigated vineyards account for most of the grapes grown in the Rosati-St. James area today. As for passers-by on I-44 and Historic Route 66, they still see vineyards and grape stands, just as they have for more than 90 years.
 

Below is a timeline of events at Knobview/Rosati starting when the first Italians arrived.

Much of this information was acquired from newspaper articles.

January 21, 1898 - The first group of Italians from the Sunnyside Plantation in Arkansas arrive at Knobview. About 10-11 men arrive to build temporary housing.

February 1898 - Aufder Heide Bros. sells 13 car loads of lumber to the first group of Italians at Knobview.

February 1921 - Approximately 40 local farmers form the Knobview Fruit Growers Association with Sam Flaim as president, Dr. O. L. Beeney as secretary and Louis Zulpo as treasurer. The cooperative is formed to help area farmers sell their grapes, apples, strawberries and other fruits. Eleven boxcars of grapes are shipped the first year.

May 28, 1922 - The grape growers of Knobview decide to build a shipping house near the railroad.

August 1922 - Due to the needs of the Knobview Fruit Growers Association, telephone service comes to Knobview. The first telephone is for that purpose only but others are soon connected. At that time, customers were required to construct and maintain their line from Knobview to St. James, which was nearly five miles away.

1923 - The St. Anthony Church rectory burns for the second time. Church records also burn again.

March 1923 - The Knobview Boys Club is formed.

December 29, 1923 - The Friendship Schoolhouse burns but is quickly rebuilt one-quarter mile west of the previous location.

March 1925 - The Knobview Boys Club Hall is built.

November 1929 - Route 66 is completed through Knobview.

1948 - The Missouri Department of Conservation erects a fire lookout tower on the southwest side of Rosati where it had purchased 92 acres of land from Sam and Mary Vitali in 1947. The tower still stands today but it has become obscured from view due to the height of the trees around it. It stands on top of the westernmost of the three knobs which Knobview was named for.

2009 - Drew Mendez, an architect and native of Rolla, Missouri, purchases the Rosati Winery building and begins major renovations to convert the building into a museum and gift shop, along with a banquet hall/meeting room.