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| St. Louis Apartment Locator Services : St. Louis Apartments |  | Contents | |
| History |
| The settlement that would become the city of Saint Louis was
founded by French explorers in 1763. |
| European exploration of the area had begun nearly a century
earlier. Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette, both French, traveled
through the Mississippi River valley in 1673, and five years
later, La Salle claimed the entire valley for France. He called
it "Louisiana" after King Louis XIV; the French also
called their region "Illinois Country". In 1699, a
settlement was established across the river from what is now
Saint Louis, at Cahokia. Other early settlements were downriver
at Kaskaskia, Illinois, Prairie du Pont, Fort de Chartres, and
Sainte Genevieve. In 1703, Catholic priests established a small
mission at what is now St. Louis. The mission was later moved
across the Mississippi, but the small river at the site (now
a channelized drainage ditch near the southern boundary of the
City of Saint Louis) still bears the name River Des Peres (River
of the Fathers). |
| In 1763, Pierre Laclede, his 13-year-old stepson Auguste Chouteau,
and a small band of men traveled up the Mississippi from New
Orleans. In November, they landed a few miles downstream of
the river's confluence with the Missouri River at a site where
wooded limestone bluffs rose 40 feet above the river. The men
returned to Fort de Chartres for the winter, but in February,
Laclede sent Chouteau and 30 men to begin construction. The
settlement was established on February 15, 1764. |
| The settlement began to grow quickly after word arrived that
the 1763 Treaty of Paris (1763) had given England all the land
east of the Mississippi. Frenchmen who had settled to the river's
east moved across the water to "Laclede's Village".
Other early settlements were established nearby at Saint Charles,
Carondelet (now a part of the city of Saint Louis), Saint Ferdinand
(now Florissant), and Portage des Sioux. |
| From 1766 to 1768, St. Louis was governed by the French lieutenant
governor, Louis Saint Ange de Bellerive. After 1768, St. Louis
was governed by a series of Spanish governors, whose administration
continued even after Louisiana was secretly returned to France
in 1800 by the Treaty of San Ildefonso. The town's population
was then about a thousand. |
| Saint Louis was acquired from France by the United States
under President Thomas Jefferson in 1803, as part of the Louisiana
Purchase. The transfer of power from Spain was made official
in a ceremony called "Three Flags Day". On March 8,
1804, the Spanish flag was lowered and the French one raised.
On March 10, the French flag was replaced by the United States
flag. |
| The Lewis and Clark Expedition left the Saint Louis area in
May 1804, reached the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1805, and
returned on Sept. 23, 1806. Many other explorers, settlers,
and trappers (such as Ashley's Hundred) would later take a similar
route to the West. |
| The steamboat era began in Saint Louis on July 27, 1817, with
the arrival of the Zebulon M. Pike. Rapids north of the city
made Saint Louis the northernmost navigable port for many large
boats, and Pike and her sisters soon transformed St. Louis into
a bustling boomtown, commercial center, and inland port. By
the 1850s, Saint Louis had become the largest U.S. city west
of Pittsburgh, and the second-largest port in the country, with
a commercial tonnage exceeded only by New York. |
| Missouri became a state in 1820. Saint Louis was incorporated
as a city on December 9, 1822. A U.S. arsenal was constructed
at Saint Louis in 1827. |
| Immigrants flooded into Saint Louis after 1840, particularly
from Germany, Bohemia and Ireland, the latter driven by an Old
World potato famine. The population of Saint Louis grew from
fewer than 20,000 in 1840, to 77,860 in 1850, to just over 160,000
by 1860. |
| Two disasters occurred in 1849: a cholera epidemic killed
nearly one-tenth of the population, and a fire destroyed numerous
steamboats and a large portion of the city. |
| In the first half of the 19th century, a second channel developed
in the Mississippi River at Saint Louis. An island ("Bloody
Island") formed between the two channels, and a smaller
island ("Duncan's Island") developed below Saint Louis.
It was feared that the levee at St. Louis might be left high
and dry, and federal assistance was sought and obtained. Under
the supervision of Robert E. Lee, levees were constructed on
the Illinois side to direct water toward the Missouri side and
eliminate the second channel. Bloody Island was joined to the
land on the Illinois side, and Duncan's Island was washed away. |
| Militarily, the Civil War (1861-1865) barely touched St. Louis;
the area saw only a few skirmishes in which Union forces prevailed.
But the war shut down trade with the South, devastating the
city's economy. Missouri was nominally a slave state, but its
economy did not depend on slavery, and it never seceded from
the Union. The arsenal at Saint Louis was used during the war
to construct ironclad ships for the Union. |
| On July 4, 1876 the City of Saint Louis voted to remove itself
from Saint Louis County and become Saint Louis City and Saint
Louis County. At that time the County was primarily rural and
sparsely populated, and the fast-growing City did not want to
spend their tax dollars on infastructure and services for the
inefficent county. This decision would gravely come back to
haunt the City as white flight with suburban development and
population migration outside the City limits would cost the
City millions of lost tax dollars and contribute to the City's
deterioration. |
| Saint Louis is one of several cities that claims to have the
world's first skyscraper. The Wainwright Building, a 10-story
structure designed by Louis Sullivan and built in 1892, still
stands at Chestnut and Seventh Streets and is today used by
the State of Missouri as a government office building. |
| Nikola Tesla made the first public demonstration of radio
communication here in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light
Association, he described and demonstrated in detail the principles
of radio communication. The apparatus that he used contained
all the elements that were incorporated into radio systems before
the development of the vacuum tube. |
| In 1904, the city hosted the World's Fair and the Olympic
Games, making the United States the first English-speaking country
to host the Olympics. |
| The uranium used in the Manhattan Project to build the first
atomic bomb was refined in Saint Louis by Mallinckrodt Chemical
Co., starting in 1942. |
| The Pruitt-Igoe housing project, built in 1955 and demolished
in 1972, is one of the most infamous failures of urban planning.
(The buildings were the first major work by Minoru Yamasaki,
who later designed the World Trade Center.) |
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