Perryville, Missouri

Perryville is the seat of Perry County in Missouri's limestone hill country, but its most significant institution has nothing to do with county government. In eighteen eighteen, Catholic settlers offered six hundred forty acres of land to Bishop Louis William DuBourg in exchange for a resident priest and a school for their children. The bishop accepted, and two groups of Vincentian priests traveled from Europe, through Baltimore and Kentucky, to establish Saint Mary's of the Barrens on a wooded plateau just outside town.

It became the first Catholic seminary west of the Mississippi River. The priests trained clergy who fanned out across the frontier, and the institution shaped the Catholic presence in Missouri and the broader Mississippi Valley for generations. The church and grounds remain active today.