Missouri’s oldest town

River and hills

Bottomland, salt springs, and pine hills

Ste. Genevieve County lies along the Mississippi across from Illinois, from the river bottoms up into the hills that climb toward the St. Francois Mountains, with part of the Mark Twain National Forest and the pine woods of Hawn State Park in the west. Salt springs on Saline Creek were one of the first things that drew French settlers across the river from the Illinois Country.

The town of Ste. Genevieve is the oldest permanent European settlement in Missouri. Its founding date is debated, 1735 by tradition and about 1750 by historian Carl Ekberg, but its French colonial houses are not in doubt: 27 vertical-log buildings survive, among them some of the last poteaux-en-terre houses in North America. Paw Paw French, the old local dialect, is still spoken by a few.

Founding and early years

From Le Grand Champ to the new town

Ste. Genevieve County was organized on October 1, 1812, and named for Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris. It is one of Missouri’s original counties, and the town of Ste. Genevieve has always been its seat.

The great flood

The town moves uphill

The first Ste. Genevieve sat on Le Grand Champ, the “big field” of rich bottomland along the Mississippi about three miles south of today’s town, where the French settlers farmed long, narrow strips in common fields. The river that fed the fields also threatened them, and in 1785 floods swamped the village.

Over the next ten years the townspeople moved to higher ground near the mouths of the creeks, rebuilding their houses in the old way, with log posts set upright, either straight in the ground or on a sill. The church followed in 1793. Many of those houses still stand, and the new town became the Ste. Genevieve visitors walk today.

Since then

A landmark district becomes a national park

After the Louisiana Purchase, Americans came to the French town; the Felix Vallé House, built in 1818 in the American Federal style, shows the change. The historic district became a National Historic Landmark in 1960, and in 2020 its core became Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park, the 422nd unit of the National Park System, run with the state’s Felix Vallé House and local partners.

Today the town keeps its French traditions with the King’s Ball each February and Jour de Fête each August, and the hills around it hold the wineries of the Route du Vin.