First Missouri State Capitol: Where a State Was Born on a Merchant's Second Floor

On the main street of St. Charles, Missouri, sits a pair of modest Federal-style brick buildings that once housed the entire government of a new American state. This is the First Missouri State Capitol, and the story of why lawmakers met in a merchant's storeroom says everything about how fast the frontier was moving in the eighteen twenties.

St. Charles had been founded by the French-Canadian trader Louis Blanchette in seventeen sixty-nine, perched on the south bank of the Missouri River where it bends before joining the Mississippi. By eighteen hundred, Daniel Boone had settled nearby, and the town was the last outpost of settled civilization before the wilderness of the west began.

In May of eighteen oh four, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark camped here for six days before departing on their expedition. They made final preparations, gathered supplies, including, the records note, every last scrap of tobacco in St. Charles, and then pushed their boats upriver into the unknown.

When Missouri was admitted to the Union on August tenth, eighteen twenty-one, St. Charles was chosen as a temporary capital while Jefferson City was still being built. The state had no purpose-built capitol, so the government convened on the second floor of two adjoining brick storefronts owned by local merchants Charles and Ruluff Peck. The legislature met there. The governor worked there. The entire executive and legislative apparatus of Missouri operated out of rented rooms above a hardware store.

The arrangement lasted five years. In eighteen twenty-six, when Jefferson City was ready, the state moved on. The buildings survived, passed through various private hands, and were eventually acquired by the state of Missouri and preserved as a historic site.

Today you can walk through the same rooms where Missouri's first legislators debated, argued, and improvised a government for a state of fewer than seventy thousand people, most of whom had arrived within the previous decade.