A Brief History of St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis owes its existence to a man by the name of Pierre Laclede. Who founded the settlement and would eventually name it. The settlement started as a fur trading post that was near perfect in its geographical composition. It was one of the few central places on the Mississippi river that would not flood regularly and was still close enough to a central position on the way north or south on the Mississippi river. The town was named after the crusader King Louis the IX, of France.

The town grew steadily over the years and received what would essentially amount to “booster shots” once in a blue moon. The first one was the land handover to Great Britain in 1763 that made many French settlers settle at the town after fleeing from their previous homesteads. The second came in the form of the steamboat Zebulon M. Pike, the first steamboat to run the waters of the St. Louis section of the Mississippi. With the introduction of the steamboat in 1817, traveling upstream became a lot easier and St. Louis quickly became a boomtown. The third and last came in the form of immigrants flooding into the area for various reasons. The largest of which was the Irish coming over to escape the potato famine that had gripped the peoples of that nation.

The town suffered only two serious disasters in its history, a Cholera outbreak which killed one tenth of the population, and a fire which burnt down a quarter of the town and roughly 150 steamboats. Also the St. Louis took a great hit during the Civil War between the union and the confederates. The prosperous trade with the South completely evaporated because the Union troops blocaded the Mississippi for the duration of the war. Even worse, when the war finished the Souths economy would be so broken that trade was nearly non-existant.

St. Louis hosted both the Worlds Fair and the Olympics in 1904 with the event being so fondly remembered that a centennial celebration was held in 2004. St. Louis experienced major expansion in the early 20th century due to the formation of many industrial companies. Like many U. S. cities, the city reached its peak population at the 1950 census. The Gateway Arch was built in the mid-1960s. In January 1999, the city hosted Pope John Paul II for a day. Suburbanization in conjunction with the GI Bill, interstate highway construction, and changes in housing preferences shifted the population out of the city and into newly-formed suburbs.