What if Jefferson City had become like Washington, D. C.? What if it wasn’t the county seat of Cole County? What if the state capitol was not even in any county?
What if everything within a four-mile radius of the Missouri Capitol, south of the river, was the District of Jefferson?
On February 26, 1923, Representative Casper M. Edwards of Malden offered a proposed constitutional amendment to create such a district. If the legislature approved it, the matter would go to a statewide vote in November, 1924. His proposed four-mile line would have taken in almost all of the city, at the time a town of more than fifteen-thousand people (and growing fast; the population would be almost fifty percent bigger in 1930)
All laws governing the district would be decided by the General Assembly which also would appoint all local authorities.
The proposed district would have devastated Cole County’s tax base, of course, and would have required relocation of the county seat. But where would it go? The population in the farmland outside of Jefferson City at the time would have been pretty small. Russellville had 364 people in 1920; St. Thomas, probably not more than 150; Lohman had 120 in1920; St. Martins, Taos, and Wardsville had a few hundred each. Osage City was unincorporated.
We could have had one heckuva fight for the county seat! Or maybe later laws would have merged the remainder of Cole County with surrounding counties.
We haven’t found any records of what Edwards was thinking about or what prompted him to suggest the District of Jefferson. While some contemporary accounts contemplated the district as being like the District of Columbia, it’s likely Edwards did not intend his proposed district to be part of no state. Even then, Missouri had districts of various kinds.
We’re not sure how much square mileage his plan would have totaled, but today, Jefferson City sprawls over almost 37.6 square miles (about 26 square miles fewer than Columbia but six more than Joplin, eight more than Cape Girardeau, eight fewer than St. Joseph) so the city would have grown far outside his circle. The Jefferson City Country Club is 5.4 miles from the Capitol, for instance. Binder Park is 3.2 miles farther west. (And it’s pronounced BIN-der, not BINE-der. It’s named for a German fellow who was a powerful civic leader in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)
And what a mess would things be if the General Assembly was the agency that appointed local officials?
Citizens might have been offended by losing their rights to vote for members of the city council, the mayor and the municipal judge. Instead of a local police department, would there be a state police department and would it be in charge of penitentiary security and capitol safety as well as making sure the city streets were safe?
Would the appointment of local officials mean no election of school board members? Who, then, would hire teachers and on what basis. Would state taxpayers be financing the local high school football team?
Would the city have been more prosperous if state funds made up its budget? What would it be like if the legislature-appointed mayor had to go before the appropriations committees each year to ask for money for everything the city has or does now?
Good Heavens!
Fortunately for the City of Jefferson (that’s what its real name is), Edwards’ resolution was assigned to the House Committee on Constitutional Amendments and was not heard from again.
Who was this guy Edwards anyway?
He was a Representative from Dunklin County for three terms, born in Farmington in 1870, a lawyer and a newspaper publisher. Robert Sidney Douglas, in his 1912 History of Southeast Missouri, wrote that the Malden Clipper moved to Kennett in 1886 and became the Dunklin County News, a weekly paper. Several years later Casper Edwards formed Edwards Publishing Company, and took over the News. He was described as “a brilliant and forceful writer.” He finally sold the paper to the Malden Printing Company. The newspaper continued until 1931 when it became the Twice A Week Dunklin Democrat until 1956 when it became the Daily Dunklin Democrat, which continues to publish in Kennett.
Edwards died of a head injury suffered when his car overturned down an embankment near Malden in August of 1936. He appeared not seriously injured by died five hours later of a cerebral hemorrhage. One newspaper report said the hemorrhage was brought on by “excitement over the accident.
Another account said he had practice law in Malden since 1900, had been an Assistant Attorney General under John Barker (1913-1917), and had published newspapers in Malden, Caruthersville, and Van Buren.
As we have noticed, from time to time, discovering a long-forgotten incident while prowling through old newspapers can lead to being involuntarily drawn down a path to other stories. This is one of those. It eventually leads to a poem saluting a legislative colleague who had died, the story of a disappearing rabbit, the discovery of a huge hoard of bat guano, and the early days of Missouri tourism.
It’s a long and winding road from the story of the Casper Edwards and the District of Jefferson and we’ll have to tell it some other time.
I love this kind of story. The “how we got here” is often lost . . . and it often explains the “why things are the way they are.”