no descendants he has an absolute right to one-half of her property,
both real and personal.
Finance.—Revenue is drawn mainly from a general property tax. In 1904 the gross valuation of all taxable wealth was put at $1,155,402,647, and taxation for state purposes aggregated $0·17 per $1000.[1] In the years 1851–1857 a debt of $23,701,000 was incurred in aiding railways, and all the roads made default during the Civil War. The state could not meet its guarantee obligations (hence the strict bonding provisions of the constitution of 1875), and in 1865 had a bonded debt of above $36,000,000 This was reduced to $21,675,000 by 1869, and in 1903 was wholly extinguished, every obligation having been fully discharged. A small debt[2] (at the close of 1906, $4,398,839) is carried in the form of non-negotiable state certificates of indebtedness issued in exchange for money taken from the educational funds of the state, and is intended as a permanent obligation to those funds. An amendment to the constitution adopted in 1908 permitted counties to make an extra levy of 25 cents on each 100 dollars valuation for the construction and repair of roads and bridges.
Charitable and Penal Institutions.—The charitable and penal institutions of the state include the penitentiary at Jefferson City, opened in 1836, which is self-supporting; a training school for boys at Boonville (opened 1889), an industrial home for girls at Chillicothe (established 1887), hospitals for the insane at Fulton (1847), St Joseph (opened 1874), Nevada (1887), and Farmington (1899); a school for the blind at St Louis (opened 1851); a school for the deaf at Fulton (opened 1851); a colony for the feeble-minded and epileptic at Marshall (established 1899); a state sanatorium, for consumptives, at Mount Vernon (established 1905, opened 1907); a Federal soldiers’ home at St James, and a Confederate soldiers’ home at Higginsville (both established 1897).
Education.—The expenditure upon public schools is much greater in Missouri than in any other of the old slave states. Most of the total expenditure (in 1908, $12,769,690) is made possible by local taxation. The percentage of the enumerated school-population (children 6 to 20 years of age) attending school in 1908 was 48, and the percentage of the total enumeration enrolled was about 71; the general showing being excellent, and that for negroes remarkably so. Blacks and whites are segregated in all schools. Various high-schools scattered over the state are given over to the negroes; and in 1904 the number of pupils attending these was exceeded only by the corresponding numbers in Texas and Mississippi—states with five- and sixfold the negro population of Missouri. Illiterate persons above 10 years of age constituted in 1900 6·4% of the total population—28·1% of the negroes, 7·1% of the natives, 6·9% of the foreign-born. The idea of providing a university and free local schools as parts of a public school system occurs in the constitution of 1820 (and in the Acts of Congress that prepared the way for statehood), and the occurrence is noteworthy; but the real beginnings of the system scarcely go back further than 1850. Nor was very much progress made until a law was passed in 1853 requiring a quarter of the general yearly revenue of the state to be distributed among the counties for schools. This appropriation was made regularly after 1855 (save in 1861–1867), and since 1875 has rested on a constitutional provision. The maintenance of a free public school system was placed on a firm and broad foundation by the constitution adopted in that year. In the years after 1887 one-third of the total revenue was appropriated to the public common schools; and in 1908 the total appropriation for public schools, normal schools and the state university was about three-fifths of the entire state revenue. Local taxation is another source of the school funds. In 1908 the total school fund, including state, county, township and special district funds, was about $14,000,000, of which the state fund was nearly one-third. The schools of St Louis have a very high reputation.
Among institutions of higher learning the university of Missouri at Columbia is the chief one maintained by the state. It was opened to students in 1841, received aid for the first time from the state in 1867; women were first admitted to the normal department in 1869, to the academic department in 1870, and soon afterwards to all departments. In addition to the academic department or college proper, the university embraces special schools of pedagogics (1868), agriculture and mechanic arts (1870), mines and metallurgy (1870, at Rolla), law (1872), medicine (1873), fine arts (1878), engineering (1877), military science, commerce, a graduate school of arts and sciences (1896), and a department of journalism (1908). An experiment station supported by the national government was established in 1888, and is part of the school of agriculture. The state Board of Agriculture organizes educational farmers’ institutes; and agriculture is taught, moreover, in the normal schools of the state. Of these five are maintained as follows: at Kirksville (1870), at Warrensburg (established 1870), at Cape Girardeau (established 1873), at Springfield (established 1905), at Maryville (established 1905), and there is a normal department in connexion with the Lincoln Institute, for negroes, at Jefferson City. Lincoln Institute (opened in 1866) is for negro men and women. The basis of its endowment was a fund of $6379 contributed in 1866 by the 62nd and 65th regiments U.S. Colored Infantry upon their discharge from the service; it has agricultural, industrial, sub-normal, normal and collegiate departments. Among privately endowed schools the greatest is Washington University in St Louis; it is non-sectarian and was opened in 1857. Noteworthy, too, is the St Louis University, opened in 1829, the oldest institution for higher learning west of the Mississippi; it is a Jesuit college and the parent school of six other Jesuit institutions in the states of the middle west. There are many minor colleges and schools, most of them co-educational, and special colleges or academies for women are maintained by different religious sects. Finally, there are various professional schools, most of them in St Louis and Kansas City.
History.—The early French explorers of the Mississippi valley left the first trace of European connexion in the history of Missouri. Ste Genevieve was settled in 1735; Fort Orleans, two-thirds of the way across the state up the Missouri river, had been temporarily established in 1720; the famous Mine La Motte, in Madison county, was opened about the same time; and before the settlement of St Louis, the Missouri river was known to trappers and hunters for hundreds of miles above its mouth. It was in 1764 that St Louis (q.v.) was founded. Two years before, the portion of Louisiana west of the Mississippi had secretly passed to Spain, and in 1763 the portion east passed to England. When the English took possession a large part of the people in the old French settlements removed west of the river. Not until 1770, after O’Reilly had established Spanish rule by force at New Orleans, did a Spanish officer at St Louis take actual possession of the upper country; another on the ground, in 1768–1769, had forborne to assert his powers in the face of the unfriendly attitude of the inhabitants. Spanish administration began in 1771. French remained the official language, and administration was so little altered that the people quickly grew reconciled to their changed allegiance. Settlement was confined to a fringe of villages along the Mississippi. French-Canadian hunters and trappers, and soon the river boatmen, added an element of adventure and colour in the primitive life of the colony. Lead and salt and peltries were sent to Montreal, New Orleans, and up the Ohio river to the Atlantic cities.
The Americans were hospitably received; the immigrants, even Protestant clergymen, enjoyed by official goodwill complete religious toleration; and after about 1796 lavish land grants to Americans were made by the authorities, who wished to strengthen the colony against anticipated attacks by the British, from Canada. Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia furnished most of the new-comers. The French had lived in villages and maintained considerable communal life; the Americans scattered on homesteads. With them came land speculation, litigiousness, the development of mines and mining-camp law, and the passion of politics, of which duels were one feature of early days. In 1804 there were some 10,000 inhabitants in Upper Louisiana (mainly in Missouri), and of these three-fifths were Americans and their negroes. Racial antipathies were unimportant, and all parties were at least passively acquiescent when Louisiana became a part of the United States. On the 9th of March 1804, at St Louis, Upper Louisiana was formally transferred. In 1818, after passing meanwhile through four stages of limited self-government,[3] that portion of the Purchase now included in the state of Missouri made application for admission to the Union as a state.[4] In 1812–1813 a remarkable earthquake devastated the region about New Madrid. A large region was sunken, enormous fissures were opened in the earth, the surface soil was displaced
- ↑ The constitutional provision requiring assessments at cash valuations is not at all observed; according to the State Revenue Commission of 1902 the average tax valuation was 40 to 50% of the real value. The national censuses of 1880 and 1890 (no estimate being made in 1900) put the total value of all property at $1,562,000,000 and $2,397,902,945 respectively.
- ↑ In 1902 the bonded debts of counties and townships aggregated $8,066,878; that of towns and cities (mostly that of St Louis), $31,193,370.
- ↑ In 1804, the District of Louisiana, in the administrative system of the Territory of Indiana; in 1805, an independent government, renamed the Territory of Louisiana; in 1812, the Territory of Missouri; in 1816, another grade of territorial government.
- ↑ Until 1836 the state boundary in the north-west was the meridian of the mouth of the Kansas river drawn due north to the Iowa line. The addition of the triangle west of that line—the so-called Platte Purchase—violated the Missouri Compromise.
