St. Charles Riverfront and First Missouri State Capitol

In May 1804 St. Charles was the last town the Corps of Discovery would see. William Clark brought the keelboat and two pirogues up from Camp Dubois and landed here on May 16 with about forty men. They spent the week loading, attending dances, dinners and a church service, and waiting for Meriwether Lewis, who joined them from St. Louis on May 20. The expedition set out up the Missouri the next afternoon, May 21. With it went York, a man Clark held in slavery.

On the riverbank, the Lewis and Clark Boat House and Museum keeps full-size working replicas of the boats, which its re-enactors, the Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, take to river towns across the Midwest. The Katy Trail runs past the door.

A few blocks north on Main Street stand two Federal-style brick buildings where Missouri's first legislators met. St. Charles beat eight other towns for the temporary capital by promising free space, and from June 4, 1821, the Senate, the House and the governor worked on the second floor, above Charles and Ruluff Peck's general store and Chauncey Shepard's carpentry shop. The first sessions were taken up with fights over states' rights and slavery. Four governors ran the state from these rooms until the capitol at Jefferson City was ready in 1826. When the state bought the decaying buildings in 1960, their ten-year restoration began the revival of the old riverfront town. Eleven rooms are restored, and the Peck brothers' store is stocked with the furs and goods of the 1820s.