A cape, a trading post, and a river city

On the Mississippi

From the cape to the city

Cape Girardeau County faces Illinois across the Mississippi. Its eastern edge is river bluffs and bottomland, the Delta and Dutchtown lowlands to the south were once cotton country, and the hills to the west and north are wooded. The “cape” was a rock promontory on the river where Jean Baptiste de Girardot, a French officer from Kaskaskia, set up a trading post around 1733; railroad builders later blasted most of it away.

The town itself began in 1793, when the Spanish government gave Louis Lorimier the right to open a trading post. It grew into the biggest city in southeast Missouri, home to Southeast Missouri State University, while Jackson, a few miles inland, has been the county seat since 1814.

Founding and early years

One of the first five counties

Cape Girardeau County was organized on October 1, 1812, and named for Jean Baptiste de Girardot, a French officer who set up a trading post on the river around 1733. Its seat, Jackson, was set on Hubble Creek in 1814 and named for Andrew Jackson in 1819.

The Civil War

Four forts and a battle

Cape Girardeau was a river town the Union meant to hold. Beginning in August 1861, soldiers including the 20th Illinois Infantry, Bissell’s Engineers of the West, and militia under Lt. John Wesley Powell, later famous for running the Grand Canyon, built four earthen forts around the city to designs by German-American engineers from St. Louis.

On April 26, 1863, Confederates under Gen. John S. Marmaduke’s command fought Union forces for about four hours outside the city in the Battle of Cape Girardeau, a small fight with casualties in the low double digits. Of the four forts, only Fort D survives, saved by civic action in the 1930s and now a city historic site on the National Register.

Since the war

A railroad, a university, and a bridge

In 1877 Jackson and Cape Girardeau were linked by the first long-distance railway line in Missouri, and Cape grew into the largest city in southeast Missouri and the home of Southeast Missouri State University. A tornado on May 21, 1949, killed 22 people there. The Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge, a cable-stayed span across the Mississippi, opened in December 2003.

The past is close at hand: the downtown floodwall carries the Mississippi River Tales Mural, nearly 18,000 square feet of painted history; Lorimier’s Red House was rebuilt in 2003 for the Lewis and Clark bicentennial; and in Jackson the Iron Mountain Railway runs excursion trains past the square where Jones Drug Store has been in business since 1871.