Cape Girardeau County recognized its bicentennial with a special presentation after Thursday’s County Commission meeting.
The original Cape Girardeau County was far larger than the one we know today.
Cape Girardeau County was born on October 1, 1812.
It was one of the first five counties in Missouri. The others were Ste. Genevieve, St. Louis, St. Charles, and New Madrid.
And Cape Girardeau County was much bigger back in the day. Its boundary to the north was Apple Creek, the Mississippi River on the east, and the Mississippi and Ohio River confluence to the south. And to the west, it stretched all the way through the Ozarks, to within sniffing distance of the modern day Kansas border.
Stephen Pledger is the director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center. He says it was challenging to administer such a huge county.
“It would have been very difficult. You would have to have had people, you know, if they had some type of land dispute, some type of, you know, what to record something, they would take days just to have to ride all the way in just to have something recorded,” Pledger said.
And what about Jackson as the county seat? Pledger says the county seat moved to Jackson in 1813 due to a land dispute. He says there was a petition in 1833 to bring the seat back to Cape Girardeau.
“They had commissioners drawn from Scott County to pick the new county seat, the location of it,” Pledger said. “And they presented their findings to the County Court at that time, and nothing was ever done.
Pledger says he has never found any documentation to find out why the petition was dropped.
Pledger and other archivists dressed in period costume at Thursday’s event and brought with them the first county court minute book.