Hannibal and the Mississippi River Towns of Marion, Ralls and Pike

Before the railroad, the Mississippi was the road. Moses D. Bates was building keel boats at Hannibal in 1821, and a generation later packets raced up from St. Louis with flame pouring from their stacks. In 1859 the Hannibal and St. Joseph ran the first regular train across Missouri. This page follows the river towns of Marion, Ralls and Pike counties through Thomas H. Bacon's history in A Mirror of Hannibal (1905), A History of Northeast Missouri (1913) and the older History of Pike County, Missouri.

Written from 3 old histories, all free to read on the Internet Archive: A Mirror of Hannibal (1905); A History of Northeast Missouri (1913); The History of Pike County, Missouri (1883). Everything below comes from those books, and where they give an opinion, we say so.

Before the boats: Saverton, Clarksville and Louisiana

The first settlers came by water. The 1913 History of Northeast Missouri says the first white men on Ralls County soil were two Frenchmen, Dr. Antoine Saugrain and Louis Bouvet, who left Paris in 1795 and came up the Mississippi to the mouth of Salt River. Saugrain built a fort at Saverton; Bouvet built one at Spalding and made salt. In 1807 Samuel Gilbert of Kentucky came to Saverton with his family, bought the claim of Victor La Gotra, leader of the small settlement there, and made salt from the spring to ship to St. Louis. He also brought a number of slaves. His son-in-law Shared G. Swain soon followed, then the McDowells, Tompkinses, McCormicks, Ryans and Foremans.

In Pike County the same book quotes Judge T. J. C. Fagg: James Burns of Kentucky made the first temporary settlement near Clarksville in 1800, then came back in 1808 with his brother Arthur and built the first log house in the county. Frederick Dixon, a hunter and Indian trader, kept a trading post where Clarksville now stands. A colony from the Carolinas came in 1807, among them four Watson brothers, John, James, David and Samuel. In December 1811 more than twenty families gathered in Fort Buffalo, two miles south of Louisiana.

Louisiana was laid out in the spring of 1818. The 1913 book says it was named, at John E. Allen's suggestion, for Louisiana Basye, daughter of John Walter Basye, born in St. Louis at the time of the transfer of flags. Upriver, Bacon calls Moses D. Bates the real founder of Hannibal, first there in 1819, and the 1913 history says Bates' store at Hannibal and Vaughn's at Palmyra opened in 1820.

Keel boats and the first steamers

Bacon writes that Bates began building keel boats at Hannibal in 1821. Crews moved them upstream with long poles set in the bank. A loaded boat needed over a dozen men, and Bacon calls it slow and laborious. The crew slept, cooked and ate in a cabin at the back.

In 1825 Bates bought the General Putnam, a small side-wheel steamer meant to run as far north as the Galena lead mines, and both the 1905 and 1913 books name it the first commercial steamer to reach Hannibal. Even so, keel boats kept the upper hand until 1830. The captain was usually the principal owner, and Bacon says boiler explosions became "a constant accessory to steam navigation."

The older Pike County history tells of a Clarksville merchant, Mr. Carter, who early in the twenties took sixty hogsheads of tobacco to New Orleans on a flatboat, part of it shipped on to Europe. About the same time, it says, the first steamboat ever to come that far north of St. Louis looking for freight was loaded from his warehouse.

Packets, races and the Hannibal landing

Bacon took his first steamboat trip in 1844, from Marion City to St. Louis, and his father moved the family from Palmyra to Hannibal on March 3, 1847. "Soon we found that the river and its fleets were always the uppermost topic," he wrote. Inland, people asked a river man "How is the river?" and heard "About on a stand." Hannibal was incorporated on February 24, 1845, with a stern-wheel steamer on its seal, and the 1913 history calls it the leading port in Missouri north of St. Louis.

Hannibal built boats, too. In 1851 a yard there turned out hulls, with the superstructure added at St. Louis; the Robert Campbell, the El Paso and the Charles Belcher were launched there. About 1850 a Louisiana partnership, Gaty, McCune & Glasby, founded the St. Louis and Keokuk Packet Company. Its first boats were named from Sir Walter Scott's novels: three Kate Kearneys, three Die Vernons, two or three Jennie Deans, and the Lucy Bertram.

Racing was the sport, and boats came into Hannibal before daylight with flame streaming from red hot stacks. When the New England limped in hours behind the Lucy Bertram, her backers were told she had broken her cam-rod. A wharf master boarded each boat to collect wharfage, and one stray boat dodged the $2.50 fee by throwing a letter ashore tied to a club. Brison Stillwell, a pork merchant who later became mayor, read the St. Louis papers for the mess pork prices. John W. Stavely, who came in 1842, met the boats so faithfully that about 1857 outsiders called the town "Stavely's Landing."

Deck hands sang as a boat neared the landing, "The Kate Kearney is a bully boat," and Bacon describes mates driving the roust-abouts with a storm of curses. After the war Commodore Davidson's White Collar Line moved the bar back over the wheel and finally abolished it.

Ferries at Hannibal and Clarksville

The first Hannibal ferry was a skiff run by Jordan W. Hyde, who took a traveler across for twenty-five cents. In 1844 Theophilas Stone started a flatboat ferry propelled by hand, and James W. Brady worked one of its oars as a youth. The steam ferry Ibex came in the spring of 1845, and W. B. C. Nash served on her. David Glascock, Jameson F. Hawkins and Jordan W. Hyde bought the Ibex, and she finally sank. In 1846 Daniel L. Hafner built a steam ferry called the Hannibal.

There was never an incorporated ferry company. Usually John Morris, Henry Morris, Daniel L. Hafner and Tilden R. Selmes held the line under licenses from both shores. Selmes once loaded the ferry with wheat for St. Louis; while she was delayed the wheat market jumped, and he sold at a profit. In 1871 the company bought the Ella, named for the daughter of J. T. Davis, the old ferry captain and part owner.

At Clarksville, the Pike County history says Warren Swayne started and ran a horse ferry between 1826 and 1830. After his death William Simonds took over its franchises. More than fifty years later it was a steamboat partly owned by Swayne's heirs and run by a son of Simonds.

The railroad comes to the river

The 1913 history says the first survey and grade for a Missouri railroad were made on Railroad Street in Marion City in 1835, and the Palmyra & Marion City Railway was projected in 1847 with Stanton Buckner as president, James F. Mahan as treasurer and Joseph G. Easton as secretary. Bacon says an early Hannibal railroad meeting was held in the office of John M. Clemens. On February 16, 1847, the legislature chartered the Hannibal & St. Joseph, with Samuel J. Harrison, Zachariah G. Draper and Erasmus M. Moffet as its Hannibal incorporators.

Ground was broken at Hannibal in 1853, with A. W. Lamb as grand marshal, the St. Louis Greys, and a barbecue in Draper's Meadow. Bacon remembered a steamboat at the landing unloading railroad iron. The first train ran to Palmyra about June 10, 1856, and the first through passenger train between St. Joseph and Hannibal ran February 14, 1859. Monroe City, Hunnewell, Lakenan, Shelbina and Clarence sprang up along the line.

Bacon saw what it cost the river. Steamboats began waiting all day at the railroad's freight depot on the lower landing, "sealing the doom of Hannibal's river trade," and the forwarding business at Hannibal ended. On June 12, 1861, Col. Smith of the Sixteenth Illinois landed his regiment at Hannibal, and the South River trestle south of Palmyra was seized and guarded.

More lines followed. The Hannibal & Naples was launched in 1857. The Hannibal & Central Missouri, organized March 23, 1867, with R. F. Lakenan and J. P. Richards among its directors, passed to the M., K. & T. in 1873. The Hannibal bridge, for wagons as well as trains, was built in 1870 to 1871; nitroglycerine was used on the tunnel, and a number of fatal explosions occurred. As late as the spring of 1877, passengers on the river line still had to change cars at Louisiana.

Lime, lumber, flour and a railroad debt

The 1905 Mirror ends with a business section written like advertising, so only its names and figures are used here. It says lime had been made at Hannibal for forty years, under brands such as "Bear Creek White Lime," and that three firms ran eighteen perpetual draw kilns with a capacity of 500,000 barrels a year. It names the Hannibal Lime Company on Collier Street and the Star Lime Company, S. N. Carter president, with its plant at Oakwood, which the 1913 Ralls chapter calls the home of lime manufacture.

Lumber was rafted down the Mississippi to Hannibal and shipped west by rail, and the city had three planing mills. An early firm, Johnson & Smith, built a saw-mill at Broadway and Main; years later Margaret Johnson, a widow, went to court for her dower. A list of Marion County shipments in the 1913 history includes 87,600 barrels of lime and 86,200 barrels of flour.

In Ralls County the cement plant at Ilasco turned out 2,013,137 barrels in 1910, and at the New York World's Fair in 1853 the first premium for flour went to Hiram Glascock, of four miles east of New London. At Clarksville a steam flouring mill went up in 1830, owned in part by Warren Swayne and John R. Carter. It burned in 1842.

Not every railroad paid. At the March term of 1869 the Ralls County court, Judges Nathan S. Dimmitt, Nimrod Waters and William E. Harris, subscribed $275,000 to the St. Louis and Keokuk Railroad, though the people had twice voted against the bonds. The courts held them legal, and the 1913 writer, Joe Burnett of New London, calls it money paid for a railroad that was never built, to be paid off in 1914.

Finding river-town families in these books

The 1913 Ralls County chapter prints a long list of early settlers, from Joseph Wright, William Dabney, Robert Burns and Joshua Massey to William Jameson, the founder of New London, at whose home the first circuit court met in 1821. It names the first estates the court handled: John B. White and Joseph D. Gash for William Mitchell, and Lydia Young for her husband, James Young. It notes that Daniel Ralls, the county's namesake, settled four miles west of New London in 1818, and that no one now knows where he was buried.

The Pike County chapter reads the old books of Uriah J. Devore's Louisiana store, naming buyers such as Samuel K. Caldwell on October 14, 1818, Col. James Johnson, Samuel Watson and John Mathews. The Marion chapter lists firsts such as Adeline Palmer, the first American child born in the county, in 1818, and Patrick McGee, the first teacher.

For boats and boatmen, Bacon points to the records: every steamboat landing at St. Louis was registered there with its name and where it was built, and one hundred and fifteen cases with steamboats as defendants appear in the fourth volume of Pattison's Digest of Missouri Reports. The ferry owners, packet names, railroad directors and lime firms on this page are the names to watch for in deeds, court files and obituaries.

The counties in this history

Where to look next on this site for families from Marion, Ralls and Pike Counties.

• Marion County: Biographies from the county histories
• Ralls County: Biographies from the county histories
• Pike County: Biographies from the county histories

Finding your ancestor in Marion, Ralls and Pike Counties

• Census records (free through 1950) list each person's occupation and town, so a work family shows up decade by decade.
• Death records: search our Missouri database by surname.
• The county histories themselves: the biographical sections of A Mirror of Hannibal and A History of Northeast Missouri hold hundreds of family sketches.
• Newspapers on the Library of Congress's Chronicling America carried obituaries, accidents, and local news.

Frequently asked questions