Just across the water from Rocheport, where the Missouri bends north toward Boonville, there is nothing but a grassy bank and a wayside marker beside the highway. That is all that remains of a town that, two centuries ago, was one of the most consequential places west of St. Louis.
Old Franklin is gone. The river took it.
A Town at the Edge of the Known World
Franklin rose on the north bank of the Missouri in the years when this stretch of river marked the practical edge of American settlement — a gateway into what settlers were beginning to call the Boonslick country, the rolling corridor of Howard, Cooper, and Boone counties made viable by the salt operations Daniel Boone’s sons had established upriver a decade earlier. The Boone’s Lick Road, which connected Franklin to those salt springs, would eventually become the opening miles of a trail to Santa Fe.
By 1819, Franklin was prosperous enough to support a printing press. That year, Nathaniel Patten Jr. — a Massachusetts-born printer who had already run a paper in Kentucky — set up the Missouri Intelligencer and Boon’s Lick Advertiser in town. The Missouri Encyclopedia records it as “the first newspaper published west of St. Louis and north of the Missouri River,” and Patten as “the father of journalism for a vast portion of the trans-Mississippi West.” For settlers pouring into the Boonslick and for anyone pushing further west, the Intelligencer was the paper of record — the sound of a civilization laying down roots on raw ground.
Like all prosperous Boonslick settlements of the era, Franklin’s wealth was built substantially on enslaved labor. Missouri Territory’s river towns were slave-holding communities, and the agricultural and commercial economy that sustained a place as ambitious as Franklin depended on that workforce. Any honest accounting of the town’s achievements must carry that fact alongside its successes.
The Trail That Started Here
In 1821, Missouri was gripped by a financial depression. Farmers in Franklin could not sell their produce locally. It was in that climate that William Becknell — described in Santa Fe Trail accounts as a thirty-one-year-old saltmaker deep in debt — gathered five men and rode out of Franklin in September of that year, heading west into uncertain country.
What Becknell found changed the continent. His party reached Santa Fe and returned to Franklin in January 1822 with substantial profits. The National Park Service records the journey as “the first successful, legal trade on the Trail between the US and Mexico” — the proof of concept that opened a commercial highway stretching nearly 900 miles to New Mexico. The Santa Fe Trail Association records that Franklin, and “indeed the whole state, caught the fever and the Santa Fe trade was off and running.”
The National Park Service now designates the Old Franklin Site as the original eastern terminus of the Santa Fe National Historic Trail. The Boone’s Lick Road leading west from town had already shaped the route; Becknell and his party walked the first miles of what would become a defining artery of the American West.
The River Takes Its Due
The Missouri that had made Franklin possible made it vulnerable. The town sat on the river’s north bank, in the bottomland that shifts without warning. Between 1826 and 1827, the river flooded with devastating force. According to the National Park Service, the waters forced residents to relocate further inland. In 1828, the successor community of New Franklin was established to the northeast of the original site.
The Missouri Intelligencer followed its readers. The Missouri Encyclopedia records that Patten maintained the paper in Franklin for roughly seven years before declining subscriptions prompted a move to Fayette; the press later relocated to Columbia in 1830. The paper survived. The town did not. The original site was left to the river, which over the following years consumed what the floods had not already taken.
What Remains, and How to Find It
The Old Franklin Site today is a certified location on the Santa Fe National Historic Trail, managed by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. There are no buildings, no streets, no surviving structures. What exists is the land itself — and the story carried on a highway marker beside Missouri Highway 87.
The National Park Service notes that visitors can learn about Old Franklin through interpretive wayside exhibits at the site, located approximately half a mile west of the Boonville Bridge. The townsite can also be viewed from the Harley Park Overlook in Boonville — just across the Missouri from Rocheport’s limestone bluffs.
The overlook is worth the stop. Standing there, looking south across the water toward the Boone County hills, you are seeing roughly what Franklin’s residents once saw of their neighbors — two towns that faced each other across the same river for a few brief decades, before the water decided, as it always does, to have the last word.
Sources: National Park Service — Old Franklin Site; Missouri Encyclopedia — Nathaniel Patten Jr. (Missouri Intelligencer and Boon’s Lick Advertiser); Santa Fe Trail Association — Trail History; National Park Service — Boone’s Lick State Historic Site