Guides
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The Historian Who Found Missouri’s Civil War Secret in a Cooper County Courthouse
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…
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When the War Came to the River: Rocheport in the Guerrilla Autumn of 1864
This is not a story we tell to admire anyone. We tell it because it happened here, and because understanding what the Civil War did…
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The Columbia Lawyer Who Became a Union General: Odon Guitar
Before he led cavalry across central Missouri in the Civil War, Odon Guitar was a Boone County courtroom fixture and one of the University of…
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Running a College Before She Could Vote: Luella St. Clair Moss
For Women’s History Month, a Columbia story that still lands with a jolt: a woman ran a college here — and helped lead a national…
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The Neighbor Who Won Missouri Its University: James S. Rollins
Long before the University of Missouri was a fixture of Columbia life, it was an open question which town would get it — and it…
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Thirty years on, Rocheport still remembers the water: the Flood of 1993
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,…
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From Prohibition’s ruin to the bluff tops: Missouri wine’s long road home
A century ago, Missouri was one of the most important wine states in the country. Then Prohibition arrived, the vines came out, and the industry…
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The Katy came to Rocheport: the railroad era before the trail
For nearly a century, the tracks of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad — the “Katy” — ran along the river bluffs through Rocheport. The trains carried freight…
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The Missouri Intelligencer: the frontier newspaper born in our backyard, 1819
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,…
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When Rocheport Threw Missouri’s Great Log-Cabin Rally of 1840
Long before it was a Katy Trail stop, our little river town drew steamboats, brass bands and — by some accounts — thousands of people…
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