Jefferson City, Missouri: Why Its Legal Name Is City of Jefferson

Jefferson City’s legal name is still the City of Jefferson, the name Missouri’s legislature gave its new capital in honor of Thomas Jefferson. The federal place-names database files the town as Jefferson City but adds a note: “Legal name is City of Jefferson.”

“Whose treaty bound us to the Union”

In 1821, Missouri’s lawmakers were meeting in a temporary capital at St. Charles and arguing over a permanent one. When they finally picked a site, a St. Charles paper, the Missourian, announced it on January 17, 1822. David W. Eaton, who compiled the origins of Missouri place names for the Missouri Historical Review in 1916, copied the notice: the capital would sit “at the mouth of Wier’s Creek, on the south side of the Missouri,” and “it is called the City of Jefferson, in honor of the late President Jefferson, whose treaty bound us to the Union.”

That treaty was the Louisiana Purchase. A month later, Niles’ Weekly Register in Baltimore spelled it out for the rest of the country: “The legislature of Missouri have named the permanent seat of government of the state, the City of Jefferson, in honor of Thomas Jefferson, under whose presidency the territory, which forms the present state of Missouri, was added to the union.” You can read that line yourself on page 416 of the February 23, 1822, issue.

The site nobody recommended

Here’s the odd part. The men the state hired to find a capital didn’t want this spot. Jonas Viles went through their reports for a 1919 article in the same journal. In 1821 the commissioners had marked four sections of public land at the future Jefferson City just to cover themselves under the law, but they said the bluffs were “badly broken,” the river bottom “very limited,” and the country around “too poor to support any considerable population.”

Their favorite was Cotes sans Dessein, a long, narrow hill by the river where a few French families had settled. The trouble was the land titles there, tangled in old Spanish grants and New Madrid claims. On December 31, 1821, the legislature went with the four sections instead. Viles admits the reasons aren’t “altogether clear,” but he thought there was “substantial truth in the local tradition that disputes as to land titles lost the capital to Callaway county.”

A capital on paper first

Eaton says Maj. Elias Barcroft laid out the lots in 1822, and Viles says the government didn’t actually move there until 1826. So the name and the survey came first, and the government took another four years to arrive. If you’ve ever wondered why the legal name is City of Jefferson while even the federal place-names database lists it as Jefferson City, that’s the reason: the 1822 name never went away, it just picked up a shorter everyday version.

Sources & further reading

• GNIS feature 758233 (U.S. Geological Survey). The note “Capital of State of Missouri. Legal name is City of Jefferson.”
• Niles’ Weekly Register, February 23, 1822, p. 416. The national notice that the capital was named for Thomas Jefferson because the territory was added to the Union under his presidency.
• David W. Eaton, “How Missouri Counties, Towns and Streams Were Named,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 10 (1916), pp. 278–279. The Missourian notice of January 17, 1822, Wier’s Creek, the act of December 31, 1821, and Barcroft’s 1822 survey.
• Jonas Viles, “The Capitals and Capitols of Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 13 (1919), pp. 146–151. The commissioners’ doubts about the site, Cotes sans Dessein, the land-title tangle, and the move in 1826.