Jackson, Missouri

Jackson, Missouri claims a modest but genuine footnote in American history: it may be the first community in the nation to have been named after Andrew Jackson. The county seat of Cape Girardeau County was moved inland from the riverfront in eighteen fourteen, and the new town was briefly known as Birdstown. On August thirty-first, eighteen nineteen, residents renamed it Jackson to honor the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, which had taken place just four years earlier.

At the time Jackson was a celebrated general, not yet a president or a polarizing figure. About three hundred people lived here by eighteen eighteen, and over the following two centuries the town grew into the commercial anchor of southeast Missouri, now home to roughly fifteen thousand residents.