Curryville, Missouri: No Saloons by Condition

Curryville, in western Pike County seven miles west of Bowling Green, was laid out in eighteen sixty-six by Perry A. Curry, Judge Harmen Caldwell, and Aaron McPike. Curry, a Kentucky immigrant who had arrived in the county in eighteen forty, donated the land for the new town on a single condition: there were to be no saloons.

The condition held, shaping the character of the community from the start. The post office has operated since eighteen sixty-nine. Curryville today is a small town in northeast Missouri, not far from the Mississippi River, a community whose founding story is unusual even by the standards of nineteenth-century town-building, where the platters of new communities routinely traded moral conditions for cheap land and the promise of growth.