Guides
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Lewis and Clark Through Rocheport: What the Journals Actually Saw at the Manitou Bluffs
On the morning of June 7, 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition worked its keelboat and pirogues past the limestone bluffs just west of what’s…
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The Boone County Lawmaker Who Won Missouri Its University
Drive through Columbia today and Mizzou feels like it’s always just been there. It wasn’t a given. Missouri had to decide where to put its…
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George Caleb Bingham: The Boonslick’s Own Painter of River Life
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired a canvas called Fur Traders Descending the Missouri in 1933, curators were rediscovering a painter…
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The Santa Fe Trail for Automobiles: Driving the Historic Corridor from Old Franklin to Arrow Rock
Most people who’ve heard of the Santa Fe Trail picture it out west — wagon ruts in the Kansas prairie, adobe walls in New Mexico.…
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Andrew McAlester: The Rocheport Boy Who Built Missouri’s Medical School
Every good-sized town likes to claim a person who went out into the world and built something that lasted. Rocheport has a strong one, and…
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The Rocheport Winery Earns Wine Spectator Recognition — Two Years Running
Les Bourgeois Vineyards has earned a coveted spot in Wine Spectator, putting Rocheport’s Missouri wine country on the national stage in a way the whole…
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Annie Fisher: The Boone County Baker Who Built a Nationwide Empire
Before overnight shipping existed, before anyone dreamed of ordering food from across the country with a click, orders for Annie Fisher’s beaten biscuits were arriving…
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Blind Boone: The Ragtime Genius Who Made His Home Just Up the Road
Just up the road from Rocheport, in a two-story house on North Fourth Street in Columbia, one of the most remarkable musicians this country ever…
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Rocheport Plein Air: The Columbia Art League’s Annual Painting Event Comes to Town
Rocheport’s arts scene runs year-round — from the Columbia Art League’s Plein Air event to working studios and galleries you can walk to in an…
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Missouri Life’s Love Letter to Rocheport
Missouri Life recently praised Rocheport for staying exactly itself — genuinely historic, walkable, and unpolished in the best way. Here’s what a bypassed river town…
About This Desk
This is the desk that writes the useful stuff — how to spend a Rocheport weekend, where the trail actually goes, how town elections actually work. Every guide is researched and sourced, and built to be kept and come back to, not skimmed once and forgotten.
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