One of the first orders of business for the first Missouri general assembly that convened in St. Louis in 1820 was to find a centrally located site for the state capital. A commission of five was sent out with a mandate to select a site on the Missouri River “within 40 miles of the mouth of the Osage.” There was only one place within that sweep of land that remotely resembled a village, Cote Sans Dessein at the confluence of the two rivers. It was assumed that Missouri’s new capital city would alight there. It was so obvious, however, that speculators drove land prices out of sight.
The commissioners kept traveling upstream and found a bluff on the south side of the Missouri River where it was dictated would grow a capital city. The city was platted in 1822 and preparations made to accommodate the government’s arrival in 1826. But settlement was slow - it seems like not too many people were buying the idea of this Jefferson City as the capital of Missouri. Other towns were making ominous noises about snatching the capital to their more developed embraces.
To help stem the discontent and give the town a sense of permanence, Governor John Miller got a state penitentiary built in the 1830s. Then the capitol burned in 1837. If there was ever a time for the government to vamoose from Jefferson City, this was it. But $175,000 was appropriated to build a new capitol building and in 1839, with 1,174 inhabitants, including 262 slaves, Jefferson City was incorporated.
Government was the main industry but there was a vibrant river trade that peaked when the first trains arrived to great fanfare in 1855. Printing was an important industry and after the 1880s Jefferson City became known for making shoes. By 1900 the population was approaching 10,000 but there were still towns picking at the legitimacy of the state capital. In 1896 an amendment was put to popular vote to move the government to Sedalia. It was defeated.
And so the little city that was chosen for the Missouri state capital so long ago that namesake Thomas Jefferson was still alive remains the seat of state government. And our walking tour of the 190-year old capital city will begin in front of one of the building tabbed by USA Today in 2008 as having the “most beautiful interior of any of the 50 state capitols”...
Kansas City - East of Main Street
Where the mighty Missouri River makes a sharp bend to the north early settlers wishing to travel overland westward landed their boats and disembarked. And it was this quirk of geography that led to the founding of the “Town of Kansas” in 1838. It vied with the nearby settlements of Independence and Westport and Leavenworth as the jumping off point for travelers on the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail and the California Trail.
The tussling for supremacy among western Missouri frontier towns was decided in 1867 when the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad picked Kansas City instead of Leavenworth as the place to build the first bridge across the Missouri River. The Hannibal Bridge established Kansas City as the “Crossroads of the Country.” Leavenworth was twice as big as Kansas City at the time; today its population is about 35,000 while new railroad center Kansas City went on to annex Westport and become a major league American metropolis.
The first stockyards were constructed by the new rail line in 1871 and Kansas City would become second only to Chicago in processing meat. No city would handle more horses and mules. No city would ship more hay and grain than Kansas City.
Kansas City boomtown money attracted the country’s best architectural talent. The influential New York firm of McKim, Mead and White won several commissions in town in the late 1800s; big name Chicago designers like Jarvis Hunt came to Kansas City in the early 1900s to build alongside respected locals like Hoit, Price & Barnes; and Frank Lloyd Wright designed three buildings here. As a result Kansas City is well-represented on compilation lists of great American buildings.
The area east of Main Street developed as the town’s financial district around the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1914 and then came important pockets of retailing but since 1930 the area has been defined as the Government District with the arrival of America’s tallest city hall where we will begin our walking tour...
Kansas City - West of Main Street
Our walking tour of the Central Business District west of Main Street will include the Power & Light District anchored by its namesake Art Deco treasure, the Power and Light Building, but before we get there we’ll begin in the Library District and its namesake structure...
Frenchman Pierre Laclède was a fur trader by vocation but when he was the given the mission of establishing a trading post at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, he turned into town builder with relish. The actual confluence was too swampy to build on so he selected a site 18 miles downriver on February 15, 1764. Laclède organized a group of 30 men and was at the ready with detailed plans for the village complete with a street grid and market area.
The town bounced between French and Spanish control more or less unmolested until it was part of the 828,800 square miles acquired by Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Most of the settlers tended to their farms - only 43% of the population lived in the village when they became Americans. While most of the people farmed, most of the town’s wealth came for furs until the first steamboats appeared on the Mississippi River. Rapids north of the city made St. Louis the northernmost navigable port open to large riverboats and it developed into a bustling inland port supplying the vast western lands.
In 1850 St. Louis became the first town west of the Mississippi River to crack the list of ten largest American cities and would remain among the country’s ten largest cities until 1970. In 1874 James B. Eads completed the longest arch bridge in the world, with an overall length of 6,442 feet, across the Mississippi River. He first paraded an elephant across the bridge - more of a superstition than a stability test - and then ran 14 locomotives back and forth to prove its viability. With the first access by rail to Eastern markets, more trains soon met in St. Louis than any other American city.
Industry in St. Louis boomed. The town was busy milling flour, machining, slaughtering and processing tobacco. But the biggest industry was brewing which began with a large German immigration in the years after the Louisiana Purchase. By the time of the Civil War there were 40 breweries cranking out the new lager beer that had been introduced in 1842 by Adam Lemp. In 1876 Adolphus Busch became the first brewmeister to pasteurize his beer so it could withstand any climatic change and Anheuser-Busch was soon the first national brewer shipping product in refrigerated railroad cars.
By 1904 only New York, Chicago and Philadelphia were bigger cities than St. Louis and the town supported two major league baseball teams, hosted the first Olympic Games outside of Europe and staged a World’s Fair. The city streetscape mirrored the town’s importance with a flurry of massive warehouses, office buildings, and hotels rising from the 1880s through the 1920s. The population would peak at over 850,000.
The last decades of the 20th century saw most of the people, more than a half-million, disappear and many of the buildings as well. Those that escaped were often vacant for years, awaiting their date with the wrecking ball. Recent times have seen many of those hulking shells re-adapted and our exploration of downtown will visit the old retail center along Washington Avenue and the banking and business corridor around Olive Street but first we will begin at the symbol of St. Louis, a structure itself that demanded the demolition of 40 city blocks...
In 1874 James B. Eads completed the longest arch bridge in the world, with an overall length of 6,442 feet, across the Mississippi River. He first paraded an elephant across the bridge - more of a superstition than a stability test - and then ran 14 locomotives back and forth to prove its viability. With the first access by rail to Eastern markets, more trains soon met in St. Louis than any other American city.
Industry in St. Louis boomed. The town was busy milling flour, machining, slaughtering and processing tobacco. But the biggest industry was brewing which began with a large German immigration in the years after the Louisiana Purchase. By the time of the Civil War there were 40 breweries cranking out the new lager beer that had been introduced in 1842 by Adam Lemp. In 1876 Adolphus Busch became the first brewmeister to pasteurize his beer so it could withstand any climatic change and Anheuser-Busch was soon the first national brewer shipping product in refrigerated railroad cars.
By 1904 only New York, Chicago and Philadelphia were bigger cities than St. Louis and the town supported two major league baseball teams, hosted the first Olympic Games outside of Europe and staged a World’s Fair. The city streetscape mirrored the town’s importance with a flurry of massive warehouses, office buildings, and hotels rising from the 1880s through the 1920s. The population would peak at over 850,000.
And just as the country was moving west through St. Louis, the town itself was pushing west. As the 1800s wound to a close the business district broke through 12th Street that had been the tradtitional boundary of downtown. St. Louis came here to work in one of the country’s busiest garment districts, to buy the new horseless carriages and to catch a train.
But the westward expansion did not stop at 20th Street and inevitably the population of the city continued to move west. No one was making clothes in America anymore, cars were sold in the suburbs and people took planes instead of trains. Today most of the century-old buildings in Downtown West are no longer functioning as they were intended to but our walking tour will begin at one where it has been business as usual for over 110 years...