When Missouri became a state in 1821, it had no permanent capital. The legislature met first in St. Louis and then, for five years, in St. Charles while a permanent site was found. The law that settled the matter set two conditions: the capital had to be on the Missouri River, and it had to be within forty miles of the mouth of the Osage River, close to the middle of the state.
A bluff in the middle of the state
The commissioners chose a bluff on the south bank of the river in 1821. There was almost nothing there. The point was geography: a central site that no single region could claim, on the river that was then the state's main road. The new town was named the City of Jefferson, after Thomas Jefferson, and the name was later shortened in everyday use to Jefferson City.
Not everyone was pleased. St. Louis was by far the largest town in the state, and other river towns had hoped for the prize. For years there were attempts to move the capital elsewhere. They failed, and the bluff stayed the seat of government.
The first years
The legislature met in Jefferson City for the first time in 1826, in a modest building that served as capitol and governor's home. The town that grew up around it was small and rough, and lived off the river: steamboats tied up at the landing below the bluff, the spot preserved today as Jefferson Landing. The state penitentiary opened in 1836, and it would become one of the town's biggest employers for more than a century.
Growing into a capital
Fire took the first capitol in 1837, and lightning destroyed the second in 1911; the story of both is in The Capitol fires. Each time, the state rebuilt on the same bluff, and each time bigger. The railway arrived in the 1850s, the Civil War brought Union troops, and after the war Black soldiers founded the school that became Lincoln University.
Jefferson City never became a big city. It remains a government town of a few tens of thousands of people, which is exactly what makes it easy to visit: the history is compact, walkable and close to the river that put it there.