A river town, a railroad town, and a rodeo

River and railroad

From Commerce to Sikeston

Scott County sits on the Mississippi where the last hills of Crowley’s Ridge give way to the flat Bootheel. French settlers were at Commerce, on the river, by 1788, which by one account makes it the third-oldest settlement in Missouri still on its original site; a trading post opened there in 1803 and gave the town its name.

The county was created in 1821, just months after Missouri became a state, and named for John Scott, its first congressman. Benton, laid out in 1822, has been the county seat for all but fourteen years of its history.

Founding and early years

One of Missouri’s first counties

Scott County was created on December 28, 1821, and named forJohn Scott, Missouri’s first U.S. representative. Its seat, Benton, was laid out the next year.

The Civil War

A Union river town

Guerrilla raids devastated Scott County during the Civil War. Commerce, on the river, was one of two Union-leaning enclaves in the county and one of the few places with steady mail service. Col. Richard Oglesby’s Union troops landed there in November 1861, and Confederate Gen. Jeff Thompson raided the village that December.

With the countryside unsafe, the county seat moved informally to Commerce around August 1863, and the legislature made it official on January 26, 1864. It stayed there until 1878, when it went back to Benton.

Since the war

Lumber, railroads, and a rodeo

From the 1870s into the early 1900s, lumbering and new railroads brought rapid growth, and in 1905 a railroad bridge crossed the Mississippi at Thebes, landing at Illmo. Sikeston became the market town for the farm country around it, cotton included, and its American Legion post started the Cotton Carnival in 1944. The Sikeston Jaycee Bootheel Rodeo grew into the biggest rodeo in southeast Missouri, drawing headliners like Kenny Rogers and Loretta Lynn.

The county’s history has hard chapters too: in January 1942 a white mob in Sikeston lynched Cleo Wright, a Black man taken from the city jail, prompting the first federal civil rights investigation of its kind. Today Sikeston is best known to travelers for Lambert’s Cafe and its throwed rolls, and the 1916 depot is the city museum.