St. Louis (pronounced /seɪnt ˈluːɪs/ or /sænt ˈluː.i/ ; French: Saint-Louis or St-Louis, ) is an independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. With an estimated population of 354,361 in 2008, it is the principal municipality of Greater St. Louis, population 2,866,517, the largest urban area in Missouri and sixteenth largest in the United States. The city was founded in 1763 just south of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers by colonial French traders Pierre Laclède and René Auguste Chouteau, who named the settlement after King Louis IX of France. In 1800 the land was secretly transferred back to France, whose leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, promptly sold it to the United States in 1803. On August 22, 1876 the City of St. Louis voted to secede from St. Louis County and become an independent city, limiting its geographic growth. Once the fourth largest single city in the United States, St. Louis's city proper population has since slipped to 52nd. The 1904 World's Fair and 1904 Olympic Games, the first ever held in the Western Hemisphere, took place at the peak of the city's influence. Ethnically, St. Louis has historically had a large Italian population which is centered on the southside community of "The Hill." A large number of immigrants primarily from Italy, Germany, Bohemia and Ireland flooded St. Louis in the 19th century coloring the cuisine and architecture of the city. St. Louis and its metro area also has a large African American population which migrated to the city during the great migration to work in factories and other industries.
St Louis has been known as the "Gateway to the West" because of the important role it played in the westward expansion of the United States. In 1965 the Gateway Arch was constructed as part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial; the arch has since become the iconic image of St. Louis. The city is also well known for its contribution to Blues, Ragtime, Jazz and Theatre. The St. Louis Cardinals, one of the most successful Major League Baseball teams, make their home at Busch Stadium. Other professional teams include the St. Louis Rams (football) and St. Louis Blues (hockey). A diversity of successful sports franchises has led to St. Louis being called "North America's Best Sports City." The city has also made important contributions to beer in the United States due to the large number of breweries in St. Louis during the 19th century, most notably Anheuser-Busch.
St. Louis lies at the heart of Greater St. Louis, a metropolitan area of nearly three million people in Missouri and Illinois. The Illinois portion is commonly known as the Metro-East. The region is home to some of the country's largest privately-held corporations, including Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Graybar, Scottrade, Edward Jones, and is also home to some of the largest public corporations, including Emerson, Energizer, Anheuser-Busch InBev (North American Headquarters), Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, Purina, Express Scripts, Charter Communications, Monsanto Company, and Wells Fargo Advisers. Unlike most post-industrial cities there has been a major upturn in urban revitalization in the city of St. Louis. As a testament to this the city received the World Leadership Award for urban renewal in 2006. In 2007, the U. S. Census Bureau reported St. Louis had a net population gain of 7,474 from the 2000 Census, to 355,663, the first gain the city has had since 1950.
History
Main article: History of St. Louis, MissouriPrior to the arrival of French explorers in 1673 the area that would become St. Louis was a major center of the Mississippian mound builders. The presence of numerous mounds, now almost all destroyed, earned the later city the nickname of "Mound Cit. European exploration of the area had begun nearly a century before the city was founded. Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette, two French explorers, 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 the French established a settlement at Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from what is now St. Louis. They founded other early settlements downriver at Kaskaskia, Prairie du Pont, and Fort de Chartres, Illinois, 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 drainage channel near the southern boundary of the City of St. Louis) still bears the name "River Des Peres" (French Rivière des pères , River of the Fathers).
In 1763, Pierre Laclède de Liguest, his 13-year-old stepson Auguste Chouteau, and a small band of men traveled up the Mississippi from New Orleans to found a post to take advantage of trade coming downstream by the Missouri River. 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 forty feet above the river. The men returned to Fort du Chartres for the winter, but in February, Laclède sent Chouteau and thirty men to begin construction at the new site, laid out in a grid pattern as an imitation of New Orleans.
The settlement began to grow quickly after word arrived that the 1763 Treaty of Paris had given Britain all the land east of the Mississippi. Frenchmen who had earlier settled to the river's east moved across the water to "Laclède's Village." Other early settlements were established nearby at Saint Charles, the independent village of Carondelet (later annexed by St. Louis and now the southernmost part of the current City), Fleurissant (renamed Saint Ferdinand by the Spaniards and now Florissant), and Portage des Sioux. In 1765, St. Louis was made the capital of Upper Louisiana.
From 1766 to 1768, St. Louis was governed by the French lieutenant governor, Louis Saint Ange de Bellerive, who was appointed not by French or Spanish authorities, but by the leading residents of St. Louis. After 1768, St. Louis was governed by a series of governors appointed by Spanish authorities, 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. During the period when commandants appointed by Spanish authorities governed St. Louis, meetings of leading residents were also held from time to time, and "syndics" were sometimes elected to carry out certain governmental tasks. In 1780 St. Louis was attacked by the British during the American Revolution. A combined Spanish and French Creole force protected the city.
St. 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. Until the 1820s French continued to be one of the major spoken and written languages in St. Louis, along with English. The Lewis and Clark Expedition left the St. Louis area in May 1804, reached the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1805, and returned on September 23, 1806. Both Lewis and Clark lived in St. Louis after the expedition. Many other explorers, settlers, and trappers (such as Ashley's Hundred) would later take a similar route to the West. After Missouri became a state in 1821, St. Louis was incorporated as a city on December 9, 1822. The city elected its first municipal legislators (called trustees) in 1808. A U. S. arsenal was constructed at St. Louis in 1827.
The steamboat era began in St. Louis on July 27, 1817, with the arrival of the Zebulon M. Pike . Steamboats signified significant progress in river trade, as steam power permitted much more efficient and dependable river transportation. Unlike the hand-propelled barges and keel boats that preceded the steamboat as the choice vehicle of Mississippi River trade, steamboats could travel upriver, and against the current, just as easily as downriver.
Rapids north of the city made St. Louis the northernmost navigable port for many large boats. The Pike and her sisters soon transformed St. Louis into a bustling boom town, commercial center, and inland port. By the 1830s, it was common to see more than 150 steamboats at the St. Louis levee at one time. By the 1850s, St. 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.
Immigrants flooded into St. Louis after 1840, particularly from Germany, Bohemia, and Ireland, the last driven by persecution from the English and secondary a potato famine. During Reconstruction, rural Southern blacks flooded into St. Louis as well, seeking better opportunity. The population of St. Louis grew from less than 20,000 in 1840, to 77,860 in 1850, to more than 160,000 by 1860. At this time, public transit developed in order to
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