Two years before Missouri was a state, a printing press began turning just across the river from where Rocheport now stands. On April 23, 1819, the first issue of the Missouri Intelligencer and Boon’s Lick Advertiser came off that press in the town of Franklin, in Howard County. It is generally credited as the first newspaper published west of St. Louis, carrying news, court notices, and advertisements to a frontier that was still years from statehood.
A printer on the edge of the map
The paper was established by Nathaniel Patten Jr., a Massachusetts-trained printer. According to the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Missouri Encyclopedia, Patten brought his press to Franklin, then one of the fastest-growing settlements in the Territory and the eastern anchor of the Boonslick country. There he set type by hand for a readership of farmers, merchants, and travelers heading west.
Ink for a young frontier
When the Intelligencer first appeared, Missouri was still a territory; it would not enter the Union until 1821. The paper chronicled the business of a river frontier: land sales, steamboat arrivals, the opening of the Santa Fe trade, and the everyday notices that knit a scattered population together. Surviving issues are preserved in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America archive and in the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Missouri Digital Newspaper Project.
The paper that outlived its town
Franklin itself did not last. The Missouri River steadily undercut the town through the 1820s, and the press followed the population inland, relocating first to Fayette and later to Columbia, where its lineage fed the mid-Missouri newspaper tradition that continues today. The town that printed the region’s first paper is largely gone, but the habit it started — a community keeping written account of itself — still runs in every county paper that followed, including this one.
Sources
- State Historical Society of Missouri, Missouri Encyclopedia, Nathaniel Patten Jr.: https://missouriencyclopedia.org/people/patten-jr-nathaniel
- Library of Congress, Chronicling America (Missouri Intelligencer): https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83016960/
- SHSMO Missouri Digital Newspaper Project: https://shsmo.org/collections/newspapers/mdnp