Here are 25 things you probably don’t know about Missouri, as it turns 200

The Show-Me State celebrates its bicentennial, after becoming the nation’s 24th state on August 10, 1821.

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This year, the Show-Me State celebrates its bicentennial, after becoming the nation’s 24th state on August 10, 1821. Missouri’s name (however you pronounce it) derives from the word oumessourit, a term that first appeared on a map of explorer Jacques Marquette in 1673 and refers to the state’s original inhabitants, meaning “people of the dug-out canoes.” And like the rivers that define it, over time, the state has seen its share of rough waters, inspiring adventurers, and unexpected stops along the way.

The Fulton Flash

Even before 18-year-old Helen Stephens faced reigning 100-meter dash champion Stella Walsh of Poland at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, she’d made a splash in the States. She swept the 1936 National A.A.U. Indoor Women’s Championship at St. Louis Arena, where she won the shot put, the standing broad jump, and the 50-meter-dash (in 6.4 seconds, tying the then-world record). “Miss Stephens takes her place in the record books alongside two of the greatest names in women’s track history,” wrote the St. Louis-Dispatch. “Take a look at her, Stella! You’ll learn more about her when you meet in Berlin.” Sure enough, Stephens—nicknamed “the Fulton Flash” for her hometown—beat Walsh, and, at 11.5 seconds, set a world record to boot. Stephens never lost a race during her career and could be spotted competing in the Senior Olympics in St. Louis up through the late 1980s.

The World’s First Superhero

No less an authority than Stan Lee himself declared the fictional character Clark “Doc” Savage the precursor to Superman, Batman, and even Lee’s own Fantastic Four. La Plata native Lester Dent, who originally aspired to become a telegraph operator, invented Savage. When he discovered how much one of his Associated Press co-workers made writing for pulp magazines, Dent met his destiny and began penning stories about “the man of bronze”—the burly, blond, burnished Savage, who was so golden that even his hazel eyes glittered with amber flecks. Beginning in 1933, Dent wrote nearly 200 Doc Savage stories under the pen name Kenneth Robeson, and the character’s superhuman strength, superior science knowledge, globe-trotting adventures, Empire State Building HQ, and dedication to ensuring good triumphed over evil became the template for what makes a superhero super. Comic book historians even say Superman’s Earth name was an homage: Clark, like Doc’s first name, and Kent, a portmanteau of “Kenneth” and “Dent.” You can still visit Dent’s former house at 225 North Church in La Plata. Also known as “the House of Gadgets,” it was designed and built by Dent himself and was the site of his greatest literary output. 

Back to the Land

In the 19th century, the Kerry Patch, St. Louis’ Irish neighborhood, was about as miserable as any corner of the city, with people packed into makeshift shanties and tenement houses that had nicknames such as Thunder Alley and Fort Sumpter. Families already traumatized after escaping the hunger back home arrived in the States to discover Americans despised both Irish immigrants and Catholics. Father John Joseph Hogan, the priest of St. John’s Catholic Church, saw the toxic effects of urban life wearing on his parishioners and decided to do something about it. In 1859, after locating a plot in Oregon County, he and a group of 40 families founded a utopian, agrarian commune. Hogan felt that because so many Irish had been tenant farmers, the transition back to a rural way of life would be relatively easy. Ironically, though, Hogan had forgotten to take one thing into account: religion. After Hogan converted a few neighboring folks to Catholicism, local Protestants—including a Baptist preacher and Confederate guerilla named Tim Reeves—reacted furiously. Reeves preached a fiery, Bible-thumping sermon near the colony, and soon the settlers were forced out and the buildings burned to the ground. After the plot of land reverted back to nature, it was dubbed “The Irish Wilderness.”

The Electric Horseman

Born in 1859 to an enslaved mother and the son of a plantation owner in Boone County, Tom Bass spent his childhood surrounded by horses. But his proximity to stables only explains so much; his connection to horses has been described in almost mystical terms. “Horses are like people,” Bass once said, and that attitude was reflected in his creation of the Bass bit, now a common piece of tack. Designed to be as gentle as possible on a horse’s mouth during training, Bass refused to patent it because he wanted to “give it to the horses of the world … something to make their way in life a little easier.” Bass’ tender approach with his animals was part of what made him the finest equestrian of his generation. He awed as a rider (he was the first African American to perform at Madison Square Garden) and was a saddle-bred horse trainer bar none. After starting his own stables, he was sought out by Buffalo Bill Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, P.T. Barnum, Will Rogers, William Jennings Bryan, William McKinley, the Busches, the Vanderbilts, and department store magnate Marshall Field. At the height of his fame, he even turned down an opportunity to perform with his prized horse, Belle Beach, for Queen Victoria at her Diamond Jubilee. (The story is that the voyage made him nervous, but perhaps he worried more about the stress on Belle.) When he died of a heart attack in 1934, not long after losing Belle Beach, his friends said it was primarily grief that triggered it.

Missouri’s Betsy Ross

It took half a decade for Missouri to adopt Marie Watkins Oliver’s flag. Appointed in 1908 by the state chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution to head up a flag committee, Oliver pursued a slow, careful approach from the beginning, writing to every secretary of state and asking, “Hey, how did you guys design your flag?” Using the letters that she received as inspiration, she started with a field of red, white, and blue to represent the nation and then dropped the state seal in the center to symbolize both Missouri’s central geography and its independence. She then ringed it with 24 stars to symbolize Missouri’s entrance into the union as the 24th state. In 1909, she commissioned an artist to paint a paper version of her flag and presented it to the state legislature—but nothing happened right away. Lawmakers bickered back and forth about whether to adopt Oliver’s flag or one proposed by Numa Holcomb, which was basically just the U.S. flag with the abbreviation MO plopped among the stars in the left-hand upper quadrant. Then Oliver’s paper flag, along with pretty much everything else in the state capitol, perished during the fire of 1911. Two years later, the ever-patient Oliver returned to Jefferson City, this time with a silk version of her flag, which was finally approved. The original spent years in Oliver’s dresser drawer and nearly disintegrated, but it was restored in the 1980s. It’s now on display in the James C. Kirkpatrick State Information Center in Jeff City. 

LGBTQ+ Pioneers

Walk to the corner of Wynadotte and 12th in Kansas City, and you’ll see a marker commemorating the Phoenix Society for Individual Freedom. Not only was it one of Missouri’s earliest LGBTQ+ organizations, but its founder also played a central role in one of the first national conferences on gay and lesbian rights. In February 1966, representatives from a network of 15 grassroots LGBTQ+ organizations gathered in K.C. They chose Missouri because of its central location and because of the efforts of a young activist named Drew Shafer, who would soon go on to found the Phoenix Society. The group published The Phoenix, which was equal parts art and literary magazine, community networking tool, and activist ’zine. (Shafer’s supportive father, Robert, donated the printing press, and his mom, Phyllis, wrote a regular column titled “A Mother’s Viewpoint.”) In 1968—that watershed year of the Stonewall riots—the Society opened Phoenix House, the city’s first LGBTQ+ community center.

The Osage in Paris

In 1827, an 18-year-old Osage woman, Mi-Ho’n-Ga, traveled with five other members of her tribe to Europe. They were led by a French-born St. Louisan, David de Launay (who, by some accounts, duped them). The delegation was met with great fanfare—and de Launay took advantage of the publicity, selling tickets for a “Fête Extraordinaire,” which included Osage dances. At the peak of the frenzy, the Osage even visited the court of Charles X. But as the novelty wore off, so did the cash flow, and the delegation limped through Europe, struggling to find food and shelter. In 1828, Mi-Ho’n-Ga gave birth to twin daughters, Maria Theresa Ludovica Clementina Black Bird and Maria Elizabeth Josepha Julia Carola, in a Belgian hotel room; Mi-Ho’n-Ga agreed to let a rich Belgian woman adopt Maria Theresa. Around the same time, French creditors spotted de Launay and threw him in prison, leaving the Osage stranded. For two years, they vagabonded through the Continent, splitting into two groups. One made it home with assistance from Bishop William DuBourg, the others with help from Marquis de Lafayette. The group reunited in Washington, D.C., having lost two of its members to smallpox on the journey home. There, Mi-Ho’n-Ga sat for a portrait, which depicts her baby playing with the presidential medal hanging around her mother’s neck. Mother and daughter returned to St. Louis in 1830. Mi-Ho’n-Ga died in 1836, also of smallpox, at age 27.

Safe Passage

During the early days of Reconstruction, Black families poured out of the South and headed to Kansas—a free state and the birthplace of John Brown. About a fourth of those 40,000 Exodusters (so named for their great exodus from the South) passed through St. Louis. In March 1879, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and Missouri Republican wrote accounts of the first families to walk down the gangplank from the steamers Colorado and Grand Tower. Huddling together on the levee under a curtain of falling snow, they faced not just uncertainty but outright hostility, including from Mayor Henry Overstolz, who soon threatened legal action against steamers bringing Exodusters to St. Louis. In an effort led by Charlton Tandy, a coalition of leaders from the Black community sprang into action—feeding, clothing, and housing thousands of people as they arrived. After appealing to the Mullanphy Emigrant Relief Board and receiving only $100, three Black churches raised $800 in four days, feeding 2,500 people and working with the Missouri River Packet Co. to arrange passage for that first wave of arrivals to Wyandotte, Kansas. It was an effort that would continue for the next two years; Tandy traveled the eastern coast of the U.S., raising awareness and gathering resources, even meeting with President Rutherford B. Hayes and testifying before Congress. And Tandy was just getting started—he would later integrate St. Louis’ streetcars.

The “Hospital with a Soul”

In 1941, the Army quietly acquired the Springfield municipal golf course, and by November of that year, had transformed it into the campus for O’Reilly General Hospital. Post commander Colonel George B. Foster envisioned “a hospital with a soul,” but at its peak, the 160-acre site had 258 buildings and functioned more like a small city than a medical complex. (It even had its own newspaper, The Shamrock.) During its five-year run, O’Reilly became one of the most cutting-edge medical facilities in the country, training specialists and creating new plastic surgery techniques for burns and facial injuries. O’Reilly also pioneered the use of plastic eyes, each one painstakingly painted by hand to match it to the recipient’s remaining eye. It also offered art-focused occupational therapy, including access to a full pottery studio, and in the building adjacent to campus (a repurposed Knights of Pythia Hall that resembled a castle) soldiers danced with visiting WACS in the ballroom and bowled. By the time it closed its doors in 1946, the hospital had treated 42,000 soldiers—including Italian and German prisoners of war—as well as 60,000 civilians, including military spouses, who birthed their babies there. 

Mind, Body, and Soul

Known as Asylum No. 1 when it opened in 1851, Fulton State Hospital was the first mental health treatment facility to open west of the Mississippi. During that era, patients were referred to as “lunatics” and, according to the Missouri Department of Mental Health, conditions for admittance included “indigestion, religious anxiety, disappointed love, intense study, and jealousy,” as well as epilepsy and tuberculosis. Although early therapies often seem borderline barbaric (including “needle cabinets,” in which people were placed in boxes and subjected to high-pressure water jets), the institution was one of the first to shift away from treating patients as inmates to be warehoused, firing any employee who did not treat patients as “friends and brothers.” That attitude grew even firmer after a visit from legendary mental health reformer Dorothea Dix in 1859. By then, the hospital had already adopted its own early forms of music, recreational, and occupational therapy. The original building was in use until 2019, when its 300 patients were transferred to the new Nixon Forensic Center. 

Zion in the Valley

The Louisiana Purchase brought a lot of radical changes, including for Jewish families, who were now free to settle in America’s newly acquired territories. In 1803, Missouri recorded its first Jewish resident, Ezekiel Block, an immigrant from Schwihau, Bohemia, whose descendants settled in Troy, Perryville, Cape Girardeau, and Louisiana. More commonly, Jewish immigrants—first from Germany and later Eastern Europe—headed for cities. Joseph, Jacob, and Simon Philipson arrived in St. Louis in 1807, working in the fur trade as well as in real estate and brewing. Kansas City’s first Jewish residents included Herman and Benjamin Ganz, Henry Miller, and Lewis Hammerslough, who arrived in 1839 during a major wave of German immigration (at a time when the town was still called by its old name, Wynadotte). St. Louis’ Jewish community formed a minyan in 1837 and established its first cemetery in 1841; United Hebrew Congregation was founded one year later. It took a few decades for K.C. to catch up—its first synagogue, B’nai Jehudah, was formed in 1870—but by the 20th century, both cities were home to equally large and thriving Jewish communities. 

The Apple that Conquered America

The iconic, ever-present Red Delicious apple (originally known as the Hawkeye) first grew on a feral tree in the Iowa orchard of Jesse Hiatt. Those bumps on the bottom initially confused apple connoisseurs, which is one reason that Hiatt didn’t have high hopes when he mailed a sample to Missouri-based Stark Bro’s for their International New Fruit Fair in 1893. After the Hawkeye’s flavor wowed the judges, Stark Bro’s quickly bought the rights from Hiatt and trademarked it Stark Delicious, eventually renaming it Red Delicious after it had been bred to produce a thick red skin. Today, Stark Bro’s still operates a nursery in Louisiana, Missouri.

Lost and Found

Sadly, in the United States, when someone says “Vietnam,” the first association is often not the country but the war. It was that conflict that brought Huynh Quang Nhuong to the U.S., and, eventually, Missouri, where he became the first Vietnamese writer to publish in English. While serving as a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Army, Nhuong was shot and paralyzed; after traveling to the U.S. for physical therapy, he remained here, earning a master’s in comparative literature at Long Island University, then moving to Columbia in 1973 to earn his M.A. in French at Mizzou. A decade later, Nhuong published The Land I Lost: The Adventures of a Boy in Vietnam. In it, Nhuong writes of growing up in the highlands of Vietnam, riding his pet water buffalo, Tank,through rice fields, taming pythons with his cousin, and fleeing tigers in the jungle. It was translated into five languages and won several awards, including the Library of Congress’ Children’s Books Award. In 1990, Nhuong published another children’s book, Water Buffalo Days: Growing Up in Vietnam, which tells how Tank was killed when the French invaded Vietnam. Though the focus of both books is the war and how it destroyed everything he loved, Nhuong’s books helped American readers see Vietnam as a country first—and a military theater second.

The State’s First Freedom Suit 

Ten years after an 1807 statute was passed in the Louisiana Territory that gave people the right to sue for wrongful servitude, a woman named Susan petitioned the courts for her freedom and won on the legal precedent of “once free, always free” (which, of course, was tragically overturned by the Dred and Harriet Scott case). Documents filed by her attorney tell how, while living as a free woman in Illinois, she was abducted by a man named Henry Hight, who brought her to Missouri to enslave her. The jury first sided with Hight, but Susan and her attorneys appealed to the Superior Court. In 1821, after the case was sent back to the St. Charles Circuit Court, it was decided in her favor—and Hight was ordered to pay the costs of her appeal. Susan became the first person to win a freedom suit in Missouri.

The Benefactor

In 1857, 24-year-old Alla Lee became the city’s first Chinese resident. Lee had grown up in Ningbo, a Silk Road city dating back to 6300 B.C. Here, Lee found a home with the Irish community, marrying a woman named Sarah Graham. Later, when hundreds of Chinese people immigrated to St. Louis, with many settling in a downtown neighborhood called Hop Alley, Lee became their guide. He often learned a completely different dialect to communicate. He was also, for a while, a one-man force in helping immigrants receive citizenship. In September 1876, for instance, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported that two men had just been naturalized, thanks to Lee’s “vouching for them that they were both ‘first-rate men.’”

A St. Louis Icon

Frankie Freeman’s life and career are so tightly intertwined with St. Louis, it’s hard to think of her living anywhere else. She grew up in Danville, Virginia, graduated from law school in Washington, D.C., and moved to St. Louis because her husband, Shelby, had family here. After opening her own practice in the Jefferson Bank Building (a foreshadowing of the civil rights work she’d do supporting CORE and its protests against the bank for its hiring practices), she decided to establish herself with some pro bono work. After getting calls at 2 a.m. and defending a man who stole a bathtub, she realized criminal law wasn’t for her. But there was another kind of pro bono work that was a perfect fit: civil rights cases. “There were not a whole lot of lawyers who would also handle those cases,” Freeman told SLM in 2007. So when Sidney Redmond, Robert Witherspoon, and Henry Espy invited her to work on a discrimination case against the St. Louis Board of Education in 1949, she recalled, “That was an NAACP case, so I don’t think I even thought of the term as being pro bono.” Five years later, she served as the lead attorney in the landmark case Davis et al vs. the St. Louis Housing Authority. Her superlative civil rights legal work led to her nomination by President Lyndon Johnson to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She served in that role until 1979, when President Jimmy Carter appointed her as inspector general for the Community Services Administration. Eventually, she returned to her law firm and reengaged in St. Louis, serving on a bipartisan Citizens Commission on Civil Rights and practicing law well into her nineties. “A lot of folks ask me, ‘Have you had more problems with race or gender?’” she recalled years ago. “I say, ‘Well, I’ve got scar tissue from both. You know? But you just try to work through it all.’ That’s what I’ve done.”

The Blue, the Gray… and the Zouaves

You’d think a soldier wouldn’t want to be wearing bright red trousers, a flamboyant embroidered vest, or a fez on the battlefield. But during the Civil War, soldiers on both sides of the battle line formed Zouave units, inspired in drill and dress by the North African troops of the same name who fought in the French Army. In the mid-19th century, Zouave-inspired infantries traveled the country performing drills as entertainment, and their flashy uniforms captured the imagination of young men signing up to enlist during the Civil War. One of the most complete accounts of the Civil War comes from the diary of a Zouave, Prussian immigrant named Phillip A. Smith. He enlisted in 1861, joined the Eighth Missouri Volunteer Infantry in St. Louis, and served for three years. After the war, he returned to Peoria and put on a much quieter uniform: that of a postal carrier.

Reading, Writing, and Revolutionizing 

In the mid-19th century, Braille was barely removed from its military origins as “night writing” that allowed soldiers to decode messages in the dark. Though Louis Braille improved it for the use of people without sight, it still wasn’t widely adopted by that point, even in Europe. In 1860, the Missouri School for the Blind became the first in the U.S. to teach Braille to its students, even creating its own special presses to print books in Braille. Started in 1850 by teacher and administrator Eli Whelan (who was sight-impaired) and ophthalmologist Dr. Simon Pollack, MSB was the first school for the blind west of the Mississippi. Because the state didn’t want to pay to educate blind students, Whelan set out to prove to legislators that they learned just as well as the sighted. Beginning with two students who came to his boarding house for lessons, including in music, Whelan brought them in front of lawmakers to demonstrate their skills. The state eventually lent its financial support—with the caveat that the school must raise its own funds as well. By the turn of the century, the school had already outgrown its first building in Mill Creek Valley (one of its most famous pupils during that era was musician John William “Blind” Boone) and eventually moved across the street from Tower Grove Park, where it remains today.

Escaping the City—and Jim Crow

For Black people living under segregation, road trips, camping trips, or even stepping a few feet into the wrong part of a city park could be incredibly dangerous. Dr. P.C. Turner, the superintendent of Kansas City’s General Hospital No. 2 and an avid outdoorsman, refused to accept that situation. So in 1934, he began looking for land to buy. He first tried Lake of the Ozarks, only to find the deal would fall through as soon as he met the sellers in person. Eventually, he and Kansas City printer J.M. Sojourner jointly purchased 346 acres of land in Morgan County, working with the WPA to build a dam and create Lake Placid. At the time, the only green space available to Black families in Kansas City was a tiny segregated area of Swope Park. When Turner and Sojourner formed a resort and began selling lots around the lake’s shores, it quickly attracted dozens of Black families, who built cabins and spent weekends and sometimes even months at a time there. After World War II, it became a destination for church groups, fraternities, sororities, and, eventually, several couples from the Ville neighborhood, who dubbed themselves “The Travelers” and visited the lake as a group, many eventually buying their own cabins. The vibrancy of the lake community faded after Turner’s death and the end of segregation, which created other recreational options for Black Missourians. But it was still a beloved place, and cabins were passed down to children and grandchildren. 

A Three-Room Log Cabin Hospital

Bishop Joseph Rosati wrote to Mother Augustine of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent DePaul in the fall of 1828, “The buildings are poor, the furniture is not brilliant, everything bespeaks of the poverty of a new country. But the Sisters give me great courage, and I have no doubt that such beginnings will meet with the particular blessings of heaven.” Several days before, a group of four nuns had arrived from Maryland by stagecoach at his invitation, opening a hospital in a three-room log cabin—the first Catholic hospital in the U.S. While traveling, Rosati left the nuns to navigate city politics, building management, bookkeeping, and nursing patients. Philanthropist John Mullanphy donated land for the hospital to expand in 1832. Not long after, a cholera epidemic hit the city. The hospital run by the Sisters of Charity became one of the few places willing to treat cholera patients. After emerging from that crisis, their facility was rechristened City Hospital, then Mullanphy Hospital (after the city opened its own City Hospital), then DePaul. After the sisters sold it to SSM Health in 1995, it became SSM Health DePaul Hospital in Bridgeton.

Getting the Lead Out

In 1949, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the Potosi Lions’ Club proposed funding a new town hall in a very creative way: by digging up the bones of “Missouri’s first industrialist,” Moses Austin, and selling them to the state of Texas for $50,000. (It wasn’t the first time the two states had bickered over the bones. Things had really heated up in 1938, when a Texas undertaker, Thurlow B. Weed, was caught trying to break open the tomb with a sledgehammer so that he might abscond with Austin’s remains.) Potosi dug in its heels, protecting the final resting place of its town founder, who at one time controlled nearly all the area’s lead mining interests. Austin eventually decided to leave Potosi and start an American colony in Texas—but died before he was able to realize this vision. His son, Stephen, made good on his father’s dream and became “the Father of Texas.” As for Moses? He’s still in Potosi, resting in a grave that’s now sealed with concrete.

Painting the Common, Uncommonly

During the 1930s, Ste. Geneviève was home to one of the most original art colonies in America. Formed by a group of St. Louis painters, including Bernard Peters, Frank Nuderscher, Aimee Schweig, Jessie Beard Rickly, and the radical social realist painter Joe Jones, it forged a brand of Missouri regionalism that drew on contemporary art movements such as Cubism as well as the electrified political consciousness of the Great Depression. Rather than romanticized rural landscapes, the Ste. Gen artists painted tenant farmers’ encampments, quarries, and fallow winter fields, as well as portraits of lime kiln workers, sharecroppers, and gravediggers. Though it flourished for several years—even founding a summer art school and receiving glowing feedback from coastal art critics for the work that it produced—the colony began to fall apart at the end of the decade. Jones helped stage a strike at Mississippi Lime, making many locals hostile to the artists, and the cultural zeitgeist shifted as World War II began. You can still see the artists’ work, including in the town’s post office, where Schweig’s daughter Martyl painted a mural of La Guignolée, the medieval French new year’s tradition that’s still celebrated in Ste. Gen.

The Welsh Frontier 

In 2012, Welsh musician Gruff Rhys visited St. Louis to retrace the footsteps of his ancestor John Thomas Evans. (Rhys published this odyssey as a book and concept album, American Interior.) Born in Wales, the 22-year-old Evans had traveled to the States in 1792 to locate the Mandan tribe. Folklore had it that they were descendants of a mythical Welsh prince, Madoc, who had sailed to America centuries before Columbus. Evans’ goal was to establish a Welsh claim on North American Spanish territory. After he landed, Evans began walking west with only a dollar and change in his pocket. He hacked through the wilderness, wrestling swamp monsters, contracting malaria, and eventually landing in jail in St. Louis because the Spanish suspected he was a spy. To survive, he defected to Spain, accepting a commission to chart the headwaters of the Missouri River and creating the map later used by Lewis and Clark. He then spent a season with the Mandans—and realized there was nothing Welsh about them. He died of malaria at age 29 in Louisiana. “He went down to New Orleans, to the Spanish capital, I suppose for new work, because his dreams were kind of broken,” Rhys told SLM in 2012. “He only came to America to look for the tribe. I suppose he had a broken heart… It was all over for him by that point.”

Missouri’s Quirky Shape

Why are we shaped funny? There are at least as many reasons as borders. Most of the lines were drawn for predictable reasons, like the presence of the Mississippi River; French and Spanish land grants; treaties with the Sac, Fox, and Osage tribes; lawsuits; and wars. But our weirdest stretch—around the Bootheel—turned out that way because one guy said so. That would be John Hardeman Walker, one of a handful of English speakers in a now-vanished French village called La Petite Prairie, which stood near modern-day Caruthersville. In mid-December 1811, Walker went hunting with his friend Jean-Baptiste Zegon. They were woken in the night by what turned out to be the first in a series of violent earthquakes that would roil the area through the spring. They returned home to find the village decimated, and a few months later, the only evidence people had lived there were the collapsed buildings and some free-roaming cows. Walker, who knew opportunity when he saw it, rounded up the cattle and took ownership of hundreds of acres, earning him the title “the czar of the St. Francis River Valley” before he turned 30. When Missouri became a state in 1821, it’s said that Walker exerted his wealth and influence, including in the halls of Congress, to make sure his land stayed in the state—though to this day, no one’s sure what he had against Arkansas. 

Founded by Irishman Joseph Charless, the Missouri Gazette was the first newspaper published west of the Mississippi. In 1808, Meriwether Lewis lured Charless to St. Louis from Kentucky with a contract to serve as “printer to the territory.” The first issues of the Gazette appeared that July, rolling off the same hand-cranked printing press used to print official territorial documents. In the July 26 issue, the paper published stories from London, Paris, Boston, Philadelphia, Norfolk, and St. Louis, including news of its own arrival. “The Gazette will be published once a week on a handsome type and paper, the day of publication will be regulated by the arrival of the mail,” the publisher wrote. “Terms of payment will be Three Dollars payable in advance, or Four Dollars in Country Produce.” Despite its small size, the paper was committed to running at least a few columns in French. Charless’ antislavery views, as well as his tendency to call out St. Louis’ elite, sometimes led to him being punched, shot at, and criticized—factors that likely contributed to his decision to retire from the newspaper business in 1820.

Turning the Page 

Just in time for the state’s 200th birthday (and on the heels of his 2020 book Missouri: An Illustrated Timeline), FOX 2 news anchor John Brown is releasing Missouri 365: This Day in State History, published by Reedy Press. Similar to his day job, the book sees Brown identify the top stories of each day—except spanning the state’s entire history. The resulting book covers such events as President Harry Truman’s decision to the drop the atomic bomb, the Streetcar Series in 1944, and Missouri’s first reported COVID-19 case last year.

A Timely Treat

On August 10, during the anniversary of Missouri’s statehood, Clementine’s Creamery will be among the businesses and nonprofits hosting a statewide ice cream social—complete with new Missouri Pride flavors to mark the occasion. 

200 years of Missouri history

1820: The Missouri Compromise allows Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state

1821: Missouri becomes a state, with the capitol initially situated in St. Charles before moving to Jefferson City five years later

1837: Missouri’s first capitol in Jefferson City is destroyed by fire; it’s destroyed again in 1911, after being struck by lightning

1841: The University of Missouri, the first state university west of the Mississippi River, opens

1849: During the Gold Rush, Missouri becomes known as the Gateway to the West

1850: The town of Kansas, later Kansas City, is incorporated. (As for St. Louis? It was established as a trading post decades earlier, in 1764.)

1857: The Dred Scott case goes to the U.S. Supreme Court

1861: President Abraham Lincoln revokes Major General John Fremont’s emancipation proclamation for the state 

1865: Slavery is abolished in Missouri 

1866: Lincoln Institute (later Lincoln University) is incorporated as an institution for Black students in Missouri

1867: The Missouri Women’s Suffrage Club is organized in St. Louis

1873: Susan Blow opens the nation’s first public kindergarten in St. Louis

1874: The Eads Bridge opens

1876: St. Louis voters decide to separate the city from the county

1878: Joseph Pulitzer acquires the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

1882: The St. Louis Browns take the field as Missouri’s first pro baseball team

1884: Mark Twain publishes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 

1891: The Wainwright Building becomes one of the first skyscrapers in the U.S.

1899: Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” is published in Sedalia

1901: The first state fair is held in Sedalia

1904: The World’s Fair opens in St. Louis

1917: Shepherd of the Hills spurs a wave of tourism to the Ozarks, long before Branson becomes a tourism hub

1918: During the 1918 influenza pandemic, best practices help St. Louis’ death rate remain below the national average

1918: Annie Turnbo Malone establishes Poro College

1919: Missouri becomes the 11th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, granting suffrage to women

1920: Prohibition dramatically impacts Missouri breweries

1920: Walthall Moore becomes the state’s first African-American state representative

1920: The Kansas City Monarchs begin playing in the Negro National League

1921: Missouri’s centennial is celebrated in Sedalia, at the same time as the state fair

1922: Mellcene T. Smith and Sarah Lucille Turner become the first women elected to the state legislature

1926: Planning begins in Springfield for Route 66

1927: Charles Lindbergh lands the Spirit of St. Louis in Paris

1929: Count Basie, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Josephine Baker help popularize jazz and bebop

1930: Diamond native George Washington Carver’s agricultural innovations help farmers during the Great Depression

1932: Laura Ingalls Wilder publishes Little House in the Big Woods

1939: J.S. McDonnell starts the St. Louis–based McDonnell Aircraft Corporation 

1944: The St. Louis Cardinals defeat the St. Louis Browns in the World Series

1945: Independence native Harry S. Truman becomes president. The same year, the formal end of WWII takes place aboard the USS Missouri

1946: Winston Churchill delivers his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton

1948: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down racially restrictive housing covenants in the landmark Shelley v. Kraemer case that originated here

1952: Leonor K. Sullivan becomes Missouri’s first woman U.S. representative

1955: Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” tops the charts

1955: Marceline native Walt Disney opens Disneyland 

1957: The Missouri Commission on Human Rights is established

1965: The Gateway Arch is completed

1977: Gwen B. Giles becomes Missouri’s first African- American woman state senator

1980: The first PrideFest is held in St. Louis

1982: Times Beach is evacuated after dioxin is found in soil samples

1985: The Kansas City Royals upset the St. Louis Cardinals and win the World Series. The Royals will win a second championship 30 years later

1990: The first section of the Katy Trail opens near Rocheport

1993: The Great Flood causes billions of dollars in damage and results in dozens of deaths

1997: Waves of Bosnians begin migrating to St. Louis, which comes to have the largest Bosnian American population

2000: Gov. Mel Carnahan dies in a plane crash

2000: The St. Louis Rams defeat the Tennessee Titans in a nail-biter Super Bowl

2011: The St. Louis Cardinals win the team’s 11th World Series in dramatic fashion, following the heroics of St. Louis native David Freese

2014: The police shooting of Michael Brown spurs protests across the nation

2019: The Blues win the Stanley Cup, going from worst to first in the league

2020: The Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl

2020: More than 5,000 Missourians die in the COVID-19 pandemic. St. Louis scientists at Pfizer help develop a vaccine to combat the virus

2021: Tishaura Jones becomes the first African-American woman to serve as mayor of St. Louis