Louisiana, Missouri: Named for a Daughter, Built on the River

Louisiana, Missouri sits on a bluff above the Mississippi River in Pike County, founded in eighteen sixteen by John Walter Basye, who named the town for his daughter. Platted in eighteen eighteen, it grew quickly as a profitable shipping point where goods from the Missouri interior met Mississippi River commerce. The wealth that flowed through those early decades of river trade left a visible mark: Louisiana has an unusually high concentration of antebellum homes for a town of its size, elegant Federal and Greek Revival houses built by merchants and landowners in the years before the Civil War disrupted the river economy.

Pike County itself was named for explorer Zebulon Pike, who passed through this region in his early nineteenth-century expeditions. Louisiana today is one of the better-preserved small river towns on the upper Mississippi, its Victorian streetscapes largely intact along the bluffs above the water.