Category: History
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Every Building on Main Street: How All of Rocheport Ended Up on the National Register
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If you’ve ever wondered why nobody’s allowed to slap vinyl siding on a building downtown, here’s the short answer: pretty much the whole town is a federally recognized historic district, and has been for half…
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Kaw Point to St. Charles, mile by mile — Part 3: Miami to Glasgow
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Downstream from Lexington and Waverly, the MR340 course keeps unspooling through Missouri’s midsection, and this stretch brings racers past two more towns that shaped the river long before anyone thought to paddle it for sport:…
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Kaw Point to St. Charles, mile by mile — Part 2: Lexington to Waverly
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Roughly a day’s paddling downstream from the Kaw Point start, MR340 racers pass two of the river’s oldest Missouri towns: Lexington and Waverly. Neither is a place most spectators think about, but both carry real…
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Kaw Point to St. Charles, mile by mile — Part 1: Kaw Point & the Kansas City start
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Every mile of the MR340 tells a story before the race ever gets there. We’re running this course mile by mile over the next two weeks, starting at the beginning: Kaw Point, where the Kansas…
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The Rocheport Bank That Grew Into an Empire: W.S. Woods
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Walk Rocheport’s Main Street today and you won’t find a bank. But in 1869, this small river town is where a Missouri doctor-turned-merchant put down the first stone of what became an eighteen-bank fortune —…
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Annie Fisher — the Boone County Biscuit Queen Who Built an Empire
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Not many people build a small fortune out of biscuits. Annie Fisher did — in Columbia, starting from nothing, in an era stacked against her in every direction. Fisher was born December 3, 1867, in…
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George Caleb Bingham — the Boonslick’s Own Painter of Frontier River Life
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If you’ve ever seen a painting of a Missouri River keelboat or a county election crowded onto a courthouse lawn and felt like you already knew that scene somehow — there’s a good chance you…
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The Bard of Boonville: How Bob Dyer Turned Missouri River History Into Song
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If you spend enough time around Boonslick history circles, you’ll eventually hear someone mention “songtelling” — and then have to explain what that means, because Bob Dyer more or less invented the word to describe…
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The Historian Who Found Missouri’s Civil War Secret in a Cooper County Courthouse
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Most people who go digging through old county court records are chasing their own family tree — a great-great-grandfather’s land deed, a marriage record, proof of who was where and when. That’s reportedly how Mark…
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Thirty years on, Rocheport still remembers the water: the Flood of 1993
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In the summer of 1993, the Missouri River rose out of its banks and into Rocheport. It was part of the Great Flood of 1993, one of the most destructive and prolonged floods in American…