History
The area that was to become St. Louis was visited by many early European explorers, including Louis Joliet, Jacques Marquette, and René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, Several small settlements were established nearby or even, briefly, on the site that became St. Louis, but the settlement that established the continuous occupation of the area and is generally regarded as the direct precursor to today’s city was established on February 15, 1764 by a party led by French fur trapper Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau, the thirteen year old son of Laclede’s beloved Marie Therese Bourgeois Chouteau, forever known to St. Louisans as Madame Chouteau, who soon joined traveled upriver from New Orleans with her four children by Laclede to settle in the new village, located north of the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Because the Treaty of Paris of 1763 all the land East of the Mississippi to England, Frenchmen on the frontier who had been living East of the river were suddenly displaced and in need of a home on the West side of the river. They converged upon the area and the population grew rapidly. It was not to be the last crisis of nationality these settlers experienced. St. Louis was governed by a French lieutenant governor from 1766 to 1768, then it was placed under the rule of Spanish territorial governors whose leadership continued even after the entire Louisiana Territory was secretly transferred back to France under the terms of the Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800). By this time, approximately 1000 people called St. Louis home -- an enormous number for such a remote frontier settlement. After Thomas Jefferson made the “Louisiana Purchase” from France in 1803, a series of ceremonies in March 1804 made hasty work of formalizing the sometimes hazy chain of custody of the administration of St. Louis and the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. In St. Louis, on March 8, 1804, the Spanish flag was ceremonially replaced by the French and two days later the French flag was replaced by that of the United States. Two months later, on orders from President Jefferson, the Lewis and Clark Expedition departed from St. Louis to explore the uncharted land route to Oregon through the northwestern part of the lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. They returned to St. Louis in September 1806. St. Louis served as a supply source and a last outpost of “civilization” for many of the thousands of trappers, prospectors and explorers whose ambitions were fed by the Lewis and Clark Expeditions reports. This function earned the city its title as “Gateway to the West” – a name now applied to the famously iconic arch which now dominates the city’s riverfront landscape.
In 1817, steamboat navigation became possible as far north as St. Louis on the Mississippi River. River conditions further north were navigable only by the smaller boats for several decades, making St. Louis one of the most important ports on the river for a long time. Thanks to freight and passenger traffic on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, St. Louis had, by 1850 become the largest city west of Pittsburgh, the population having grown from somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand in the 1840s to more than 75,000 in 1850, even after the 1849 cholera epidemic had killed nearly ten percent of the population and, in the same year, a fire burned several steamboats at their moors and many blocks of waterfront buildings.. Despite these significant setbacks, the city’s docks and warehouses handled more freight than any American port city except New York by the middle of the nineteenth century. Thanks largely to the commercial value of the city of St. Louis, Missouri achieved statehood in 1820. The city, though long organized as a civic body, was not formally incorporated until December 9, 1822. The Federal government placed an arsenal at Saint Louis in 1827. This first permanent United States military installation in St. Louis is still memorialized in the name of Arsenal Boulevard. By 1860, thanks in large part to the arrival of European immigrants, the city’s population had more than doubled in ten years, numbering just over 160,000 by 1860. A few minor incidents of the Civil War occurred in the area but the military aspects of the war were, for the most part, an abstraction to the residents of the region. The impact of cessation of trade with the Confederate states, however, was disastrous to the local economy. The economy made a dramatic recovery immediately after the war however, with St. Louis becoming a wealthy city of broad boulevards, many large houses, parkland, marble buildings, and a tremendous commitment to the development of civic life. Combined with the industrialization that came to the area in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, these factors made St. Louis a city that epitomized The Gilded Age of the late Victorian era. With the city’s focus on developing world-class infrastructure in the city, residents voted on July 4, 1876, to separate Saint Louis City from Saint Louis County, not wishing to “squander” resources on the rural areas. Ironically, this decision would ultimately play a large role in the deterioration of city systems and structures, and even the existence of an area inside the city limits that is actually referred to by today’s traffic helicopter reporters as “The Blighted Area.” The population and, consequently, the tax base of the city has been steadily eroding since the 1950s as just about anyone who can afford to has moved to the suburbs in the county. There remain a few beautiful oases of good living in the city, which bring with them a kind of cachet for conscious political choices to keep the old mansions genteel. Most of these areas are among the more than four hundred private streets in the St. Louis area. The private streets are gated communities - many of them on old, gated, nineteenth century streets or squares – that operate in some ways as gated condominium communities do in other parts of the country, with private security provisions and covenants. The tide in housing may be turning, though, with the re-development of several areas in the city, most especially the Soulard District -- a riverfront neighborhood famed for its nightlife as the birthplace of St. Louis-style Blues and for its public market where farmers have been selling their products since the eighteenth century, the Shaw Neighborhood which surrounds the Missouri Botanical Garden and named after the gardens’ founder, and the neighborhood east of Forest Park near the Missouri Historical Society’s Jefferson Memorial Building. This last area is made up of beautiful brick apartment buildings built between the end of the World’s Fair and the outbreak of World War I. Since the late 1970s, these buildings have been gradually gutted and rebuilt on the inside as modern condominiums that, with their proximity to the university, the medical campus, several hospitals, Forest Park, and the Metrolink (urban light rail transit) station, beautifully suit the needs of graduate and professional students at Washington University and the young families and professionals who depend on the hospitals or the park’s cultural institutions for their livelihoods.
In 1904, St. Louis played host to the world for the simultaneously conducted Olympic Games and Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposition, better known as the 1904 World’s Fair. These events occurred on the grounds of today’s Washington University and the adjoining Forest Park. The events of the summer of 1904 remain a point of pride for many of the city’s modern residents.