Sikeston, Missouri

Sikeston sits in the Missouri Bootheel, a finger of geography that protrudes south into Arkansas along the Mississippi River, and the town's farmland exists because of drainage. The Bootheel was once a vast swamp, in a region shaken by the New Madrid earthquakes of eighteen eleven and twelve. Beginning in the late eighteen hundreds and accelerating through the nineteen tens and twenties, massive drainage projects turned the wetlands into some of the most productive cotton and soybean ground in Missouri.

Sikeston grew as the commercial center of this reclaimed landscape, reaching a population of about sixteen thousand today. It is perhaps best known outside Missouri for Lambert's Cafe, opened in nineteen forty-two, where dinner rolls are thrown to customers across the dining room in a tradition that began spontaneously when the place got too crowded to pass the bread.