History

The area was originally inhabited by mound builders of the Mississippian culture. The French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet passed by during their exploration of the Mississippi in 1673. In 1764 Pierre Laclède Liguest of New Orleans founded a fur-trading post on the site, which at the time was located in Spanish territory. It was laid out by Auguste Chouteau and named for the canonized king Louis IX of France. St. Louis was later retroceded (1800) to France and, following the Louisiana Purchase (1803), became part of the United States. In 1804 the Lewis and Clark Expedition departed from St. Louis on its great exploratory journey to the Pacific Northwest. The city was the seat of government for the Louisiana (1805) and Missouri (1812) territories.

With the arrival of steamboats in 1817, St. Louis began to grow rapidly and became an important river port. German and Irish immigrants settled there in the 19th century. It was the site of the Missouri constitutional convention (1820), but it ceased to serve as capital when statehood was attained (1821). It became the crossroads of westward expansion in the United States and an outfitting point for exploring parties, fur-trading expeditions, and pioneers traveling across the state to Independence and the start of the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon trails. In 1849 a cholera epidemic killed thousands, and a section of the city was destroyed by fire when a steamboat exploded on the riverfront. Railroads arrived in the 1850s, and by the 1870s they had mostly replaced the steamboats as the dominant means of transportation. During the American Civil War, St. Louis was kept under martial law while remaining a Union base.

The fur trade remained important until the mid-1800s, but during the latter half of the 19th century St. Louis developed as an industrial centre for brewing and manufacturing (including clothes, shoes, and iron). The Eads Bridge (1874; now a national historic landmark) connected the railroads across the Mississippi, and the city continued to be a major transportation hub. In 1904 the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair) was held just west of the city in Forest Park to commemorate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. This event, in conjunction with the 1904 Olympic Games in the city, brought it international attention. Financial backing from St. Louis businessmen sponsored Charles A. Lindbergh’s historic 1927 nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in the Spirit of St. Louis.

A crowded street at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. Subscribe today

St. Louis’s population increased steadily during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Growth stagnated somewhat in the Great Depression of the 1930s but boomed again during World War II, and the population reached a peak of more than 850,000 in 1950. During that period, African Americans were a growing proportion of the newcomers. The city’s population subsequently declined rapidly. By 2000 it was only about two-fifths of its 1950 level, roughly comparable to what it had been in 1880. Most of those leaving the city were people of European ancestry who poured into the surrounding suburbs; those communities, in turn, quickly grew in size. The number of African Americans in St. Louis also dropped, but at a much slower rate, and by 2000 blacks constituted more than half of the city’s residents.