Cape Girardeau, Missouri

Cape Girardeau takes its name from Jean Baptiste de Girardot, an eighteenth-century French trader who established a post on this limestone bluff above the Mississippi around seventeen thirty-three. The Spanish later fortified it, and the United States acquired it with the Louisiana Purchase in eighteen oh three. Sitting at a natural crossing point on the river, Cape Girardeau grew into the commercial center of southeastern Missouri, a town of about forty thousand today known locally as the Cape.

It is also the hometown of Rush Limbaugh, born here in nineteen fifty-one, who grew up listening to radio in a town that had always been oriented toward the river and the commerce flowing past it. The old floodwall along the riverfront is painted with a mural of local history spanning hundreds of feet, and downtown still sits along the river that built it.