Saint Louis

SAINT LOUIS

---

SAINT LOUIS. The city of Saint Louis, the heart of a large metropolitan area, lies on the western bank of the Mississippi River in east-central Missouri. Saint Louis's regional identification as a southern, western, and midwestern town has impacted its history since its origins as a French colonial fur trading post in 1764.

When New Orleans–based Pierre Laclède Liquest and René Auguste Chouteau founded Saint Louis on an elevated spot above the Mississippi and named it for the patron saint of King Louis XV of France, the area was home to the Missouri, Osage, Kansas, Otoe, Iowa, and Omaha peoples. Across the river in Illinois, a cluster of giant temple and burial mounds was all that was left of the long-dispersed Mississippians of Cahokia, once the largest settlement of indigenous peoples north of Mexico.

Although Saint Louis was part of the land France secretly ceded to Spain in 1762, colonial Saint Louis remained predominantly French, a legacy still visible in many Saint Louis street names. In 1770, the village population included 339 Creole families (American-born people of French or Spanish descent), along with 33 free blacks and 274 Native American and African slaves.

After Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803, Saint Louis's site as the gateway to the newly opened American West drew land speculators and other fortune seekers from the East. The city served as the territorial capital from 1804 until 1821. The introduction of steamboats on the Mississippi River in the early 1800s catapulted Saint Louis into the center of a national inland water system. By 1821, the city was a thriving commercial steamboat center of approximately four thousand people.

As in other midwestern cities, Saint Louis's population swelled from a wave of Irish and German immigrants in the 1840s. By the eve of the Civil War in 1861, Germans made up the city's largest ethnic group, evident by the publication of nine German language newspapers. Among these immigrants was Eberhard Anheuser, who, with son-in-law Adolphus Busch, founded the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company in 1860 and built it into a major Saint Louis industry.

Missouri was a slave state, but the number of slaves in Saint Louis declined by the beginning of the Civil War.

Saint Louis Population, 1880–2000
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.
1880	350,518
1890	451,770
1910	687,029
1930	821,960
1950	856,796
1970	622,236
2000	348,189

Although many transplanted New Englanders and German immigrants in Missouri actively opposed slavery, Confederate-leaning Saint Louisans had banned antislavery publisher Elijah Lovejoy, who was later murdered by a mob in nearby Alton, Illinois. The 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting Saint Louis slaves Harriet and Dred Scott's suit for freedom (Dred Scott v. Sandford ) further cast the city's image as a racially divided city.

Before railroads replaced steamboats and Chicago overshadowed Saint Louis, Saint Louis ranked as the fourth largest city in the United States. Its population climbed to more than 350,000 in 1880 and to 575,000 by 1900. That same year, Saint Louis had the largest percentage of African Americans outside Baltimore.

In segregated Saint Louis, a group of African American parents started Sumner High School in 1875, the first African American high school west of the Mississippi River. The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World's Fair) may have boosted civic pride for white Saint Louisans, but the fair barred African American visitors. Ironically, Scott Joplin's "ragged time music" (ragtime), composed by one of the city's most famous African American migrants, was first introduced to mainstream Americans at the Saint Louis World's Fair.

By the mid-twentieth century, Saint Louis had evolved into a manufacturing hub—a leader in producing shoes, beer, steel, electronics, pet food and cereal, pesticides, and airplanes. After surviving Prohibition, Anheuser-Busch became the world's largest brewery; the Ralston Purina Company, which started as a horse feed company in 1894, manufactured its popular Chex cereals; and in 1939 James S. McDonnell established the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, a major supplier of World War II jet fighters and later commercial jets.

By the early twentieth century, the once bustling riverfront was a neglected warehouse and industrial district. In 1939 the city cleared thirty-seven square blocks of the riverfront for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Plans were delayed by World War II, but the 630-foot steel Gateway Arch (designed by architect Eero Saarinen) was finally completed in 1965. The following year, the new Busch Stadium opened with promises to revitalize downtown. But the urban renewal projects did little to stem the outflow of businesses and residents to the outlying suburbs. In 1950, 60 percent of the population in the greater Saint Louis area lived in Saint Louis. After 1950, that proportion plummeted to just 15 percent.

After the late 1960s, urban homesteaders rehabilitated many of Saint Louis's older neighborhoods, which, along with the revitalized riverfront and Union Station, improved the city's face. Nevertheless, the population continued to shrink. From a peak of 856,796 in 1950, the population dropped to 348,189 in 2000. The impact of the loss of major corporate headquarters, including Southwestern Bell, McDonnell Douglas, TWA, and Ralston Purina, remained to be seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Corbett, Katharine T. In Her Place: A Guide to St. Louis Women's History. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1999.

Fox, Tim, ed. Where We Live: A Guide to St. Louis Communities. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1995.

Hurley, Andrew. Common Fields: An Environmental History of St. Louis. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1997.

Lipsitz, George. The Sidewalks of St. Louis: Places, People, and Politics in an American City. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991

Sandweiss, Eric. St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001

Elizabeth Armstrong Hall

See also Dred Scott Case ; Missouri .