Pocahontas: Named for a Princess He Never Forgot

When Samuel Green opened a post office in Cape Girardeau County in the eighteen fifties, the government told him he had to give the settlement a name. Green chose Pocahontas. According to local tradition, he had fallen in love with a princess of the Shawnee and Delaware tribes who had lived along Apple Creek nearby, but she had gone west with the rest of the tribes when they were pushed out of Missouri.

He named the town for her, and the name stuck. German and Austrian immigrants followed, building Lutheran churches in the eighteen seventies and eighties. The Pocahontas town charter came in eighteen ninety-three.

A flour mill built in those early years survived as the Bowman Milling Company, still turning grain long after the man with a bittersweet memory had gone.