Fifty other stalwarts still live on the wider expanse of Kaskaskia Island, about 60 miles south of St. Louis and originally not an island at all. French missionaries settled in 1703 on what was then a peninsula in southwestern Illinois territory, with the Mississippi River (and what is now Missouri) on one side and the Kaskaskia River on the other. The outpost preceded St. Louis as the West’s primary economic center. It was given a mammoth bronze church bell from King Louis XV — 11 years before a different one, in Philadelphia, became the Liberty Bell — and went from French to British to American rule before 1818, when it became the bustling 8,000-resident capital of the new state of Illinois. The capital later moved north to Vandalia and ultimately to Springfield. Floods came and went, but the Mississippi really meant business around the Civil War after upstream steamboats had sheared its shores for firewood, weakening its banks. The river began to creep east across the peninsula’s width until, on the night of April 18, 1881, it finally met and slowly overtook the channel on the other side. Kaskaskians moved their church, their cherished bell and a few other buildings brick by brick two miles inland before the original town began slipping slowly under the relocated river.

Suddenly an island cut off from mainland Illinois, the new Kaskaskia has asked residents ever since to put up with some weirdness. No connection was ever built across the new Mississippi, leaving its only access a bridge from Missouri. So getting to this Illinois town requires a 20-minute detour through the neighboring state. Still very much Illinois residents, Kaskaskians eventually lost postal service and now must receive mail at addresses in St. Mary, Mo., causing tax problems galore and more than a few tiffs at the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles.