Missouri

Introduction

Facts for a Notoriously Skeptical People

Missourians, the Project’s preface begins, are notoriously skeptical; they want the facts. Missouri: A Guide to the “Show Me” State set out to honor that tradition, packing in as many facts about the state as its limited wordage allowed. Because Missouri was unusually rich in history and its resources, people, and heritage extremely varied, the editors had to make an arbitrary choice from a wealth of collected material. Minor details were dropped and interesting legends discarded, for no single volume had covers far enough apart to hold all the people, places, and things that make up the story of Missouri.

In gathering that material the Project’s field workers found themselves pioneering. Research turned up architectural, art, folklore, and music survivals, along with historical details that had gone unexplored—and the sifting was delicate work, since family, county, and state histories did not always agree, even on such matters as dates. This was especially true of the early exploration period and of the turbulent Civil War years, when Missouri was bitterly divided. The book, its editors insisted, was a guide and not a commentary: every effort was made not to editorialize but to set down the salient facts.

Governor Lloyd C. Stark, contributing the foreword from the executive office in Jefferson City, framed the volume as a long-needed record of communities large and small as they appear to the native of the state. The traveler carrying it, he wrote, would gain an insight into the history, customs, and general character of Missouri towns and cities that the uninformed visitor was denied, and might trace through its pages the rise of the arts, the sciences, industry, agriculture, and architecture. As governor he thought it fitting to thank the Federal program for a project that gave useful employment to writers while promising to publicize the attractions of the state.

Compiled later than the first wave of guides, Missouri bears the imprint of the renamed Work Projects Administration and the Writers’ Program. Its general-background section opens with Irving L. Dillard’s essay on “People and Character” and ranges across the land, archeology, history and government, agriculture, industry, transportation, folklore, literature, the theater, music, art, and architecture. A section on the principal cities—from St. Louis and Kansas City to Hannibal, Ste. Genevieve, and Springfield—precedes fifteen numbered tours, with lettered branches, that cross the state along the great river roads and the Ozark highways.

Sponsored by the Missouri State Highway Department and published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce in 1941, the guide represented, in a very real sense, a collaboration of the people of the state. It is reproduced here exactly as issued, foreword and preface intact, with the complete table of contents that follows.