Arrow Rock State Historic Site

The bluff here appears on a French map of 1732 as pierre a fleche, the rock of arrows, and an 1819 account explained that Native people came to it for the stone they used to point their arrows. By 1815 a ferry crossed from the foot of the bluff to the boom town of Franklin on the north bank, and in the 1820s some of the first traders bound for Santa Fe crossed on it; local tradition says caravans filled their water barrels at the Big Spring, which still runs below the tavern. Platted as New Philadelphia in 1829 and renamed for the bluff in 1833, the town grew past 1,000 people and became one of the busiest landings between Kansas City and St. Louis. The painter George Caleb Bingham lived here, and the site keeps his house.

The wealth of the Boonslick rested on hemp and tobacco, crops raised by enslaved people, who also built much of the town. By 1880 Black residents were more than half of Arrow Rock's population. In 1856 Dr. John Sappington, a pioneer of quinine against malaria, set aside a cemetery for the people he enslaved, and most of its 350 or so burials are unmarked.

After the Civil War the river trade ebbed and the railroads went elsewhere; about fifty people live here now. The whole town became a National Historic Landmark in 1964. Joseph Huston's tavern of 1834 still serves meals, and tram tours run with the Friends of Arrow Rock take in the old courthouse and the stone calaboose.