St. Charles: The Town Where Missouri Began

The town of St. Charles, Missouri, is older than Missouri itself, older than the United States, in fact, as an organized settlement. French-Canadian trader Louis Blanchette founded it in seventeen sixty-nine and called it Les Petites Côtes, meaning the Little Hills, for the bluffs that rise behind the river bottom. For a generation it was a fur-trade outpost, a place where the Missouri River and the ambitions of empire met.

Spanish colonial authorities added their layer of governance after seventeen seventy, and then Napoleon's sale of Louisiana to the United States in eighteen oh three brought the Americans. The change arrived in person just a year later: in May of eighteen oh four, Lewis and Clark camped here for six days before heading west on the Corps of Discovery Expedition. The town was their final contact with settled American society. When they returned in eighteen oh six, St. Charles was among the first places they stopped.

St. Charles was also the jumping-off point for the Boone's Lick Trail, the overland road that Daniel Boone's sons had carved into western Missouri following a salt lick they had discovered. For thousands of settlers in the eighteen-tens and twenties, Main Street in St. Charles was the last familiar thing they saw before heading toward a largely unmapped continent.

When Missouri entered the Union in eighteen twenty-one, St. Charles became its first state capital, a practical choice, since Jefferson City was not yet built. The government met in borrowed storefronts for five years before moving on.

Today the historic district along Main Street, Federal-period brick buildings, cobblestone stretches, antique shops where the hardware stores once stood, preserves the physical texture of early Missouri better than almost anywhere else in the state. The river is still there, wide and brown, carrying the memory of everyone who set out from this shore into the unknown.