Alexander County IL Archives History - Books .....Chapter XXXIII Cairo As A Business Place 1910 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/il/ilfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com September 20, 2007, 7:57 pm Book Title: A History Of The City Of Cairo Illiniois CHAPTER XXXIII CAIRO AS A BUSINESS PLACE OR POINT-THE FUTURE OF THE CITY THE geographical position of Cairo is certainly as favorable for business purposes as nature has anywhere afforded the people of the country, at least so far as inland points are concerned. The low site and the abrading rivers have been great drawbacks. As to these features of our situation, it has always been a question of money, much money, to put us on an equality with other places. They have no doubt turned away men and capital, which would have sought the place time and time again, had these deterrent causes not existed. They have always been with us and will so continue, until we attain such strength in population and wealth as will make the burden to counteract them comparatively light. They are great disadvantages, clearly seen to be such, when we consider what the situation would be, had there been a higher and an unyielding point of land here. This was the reason given by General George Rogers Clark in 1779 for establishing Fort Jefferson on the Kentucky side just below us instead of at this place. But after all, the advantages of the location will always outweigh its disadvantages, although the same have long seemed to be about equally balanced. A sufficient time has elapsed to show that Cairo is a good business point. Its trade has been and is chiefly with the south. It is largely a southern city. Its local trade has never been large. What the prosperous and strong cities of other parts of the state have had as their chief and sometimes their sole reliance, we have had here in the minimum. The rivers have their advantages. They make Cairo what it is; but they have been as walls encompassing the city and shutting out local trade, which would otherwise have been a constant source of growth and prosperity. Every stranger remarks upon the fine, not to say the wonderful geographical position, and ask why there isn't a large, even a great city here. Cairo business men express different views about the matter. They concede that the question is a very pertinent one, but their answers are sometimes far from satisfactory. Let me give here a few lines from a man who was here during the war, and who a few years since wrote a fine book in which Cairo is often mentioned. General Clark E. Carr, in "The Illini," heretofore quoted from, writes as follows, on pages 19, 20 and 418: " 'So you think, General, that Chicago will be the great city of Illinois,' my father asked. 'Not at all, sir, not at all. Chicago-will be a great city, but Cairo will be the great city. Look at her position, on the great Father of Waters, at its confluence with the Ohio! Think of the trade and commerce that is already coming up the Mississippi from New Orleans and all the parts of the south. Think of all that comes down the Ohio from Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and Louisville, and the other cities, besides what comes from the Tennessee and Cumberland. Think of all that will come down from the upper Mississippi and the Missouri;- and all this to meet at Cairo! It will be the largest city on this continent; and the time is sure to come when Cairo will be the largest city in the world.' " . . . . . . . . . . . . "As we rounded the point at Cairo into the Ohio River, I asked the General if he remembered prophesying, on our boat trip around the lakes, that Cairo would be a great city. 'That was before the days of railways,' he replied. 'Had there been no railways, my prophesy would have proven correct. Cairo possesses more natural advantages for inland water transportation than any other of the west; but the railways have taken the business elsewhere. There is another thing in which I was mistaken. I thought the great prairies could never be settled, and if they were, the prairie land would be worth far less than the timber land. It now seems that we were all mistaken, and that the prairies could all be brought under cultivation, and that the best lands are the prairie lands.' " How much of General Carr's book is matter of fact and how much is matter of fiction I do not know. I give the above simply as another strong evidence of what the expectations of the public were regarding our city of Cairo, which has proved such a disappointment to so many people and for so long a time. The time has probably passed for making Cairo a great or a relatively large city. Time and opportunities for cities, like time and opportunities for individuals, pass by. Large cities absorb, not to say exhaust, the population of large districts of country and therefore large cities are found only at considerable distances apart. There are too many large cities, comparatively, near us now to justify any hope that Cairo will ever attain to anything like what was expected of it half a century ago. All that can be hoped for now is a wholesome steady growth, which will assure a population and business that can give it something of a commanding place among the more important cities of the valley of the Mississippi. Further than as just stated, we cannot venture an opinion about the future of the city, except only to point to the picture of the Concord facing the beginning of this chapter. That war vessel in the harbor means only one thing to us, and that is, that if the Mississippi River were deepened or otherwise improved, as the interests of this great valley seem to require, instead of one sea-going vessel seen in our harbor here, there would be a score of them. The river should be what it is not now, a great commercial highway, worthy of the twenty-five states whose waters it carries to the sea. There is now no probability that the site of the city will ever be raised to or near to the level of the surrounding levees, as was urged by Judge Miles A. Gilbert and was for a while intended fifty to sixty years ago; and hence the imperative need of their maintenance to a grade above any and all floods. What these may be, or how high they may rise, no one can tell. There are many contingencies. For the maintenance of the levees we may regard ourselves as amply able; but there is another matter of much greater importance; and that is, the safe maintenance of the site of the city against abrasion by the rivers. I have spoken of this once or twice elsewhere. It should be kept constantly in mind as the first of all things concerning our city. While we will be able to bear, from time to time, a certain part of the expense incident to the preservation to the river banks or shores, the erosion may at times become so great as to require government aid. We hardly know what we would have done or how we would have escaped, had not the government come to our aid thirty to thirty-five years ago, and at later times. We can in most cases depend, I suppose, upon such aid; but that we should need it at all or at any time is not a very pleasant contemplation. Our interests may now and then be regarded by the government authorities as differing from the interests of navigation or river improvement. Our stone wall fronting the Ohio reminds us that our whole attention must not be given to the Mississippi; but the latter river is by far the chief source of concern. Its long straight stretch toward us, for miles above the. city, presents a kind of threatening aspect that we would be glad to see changed. It has moved backward and forward, now away from us and again toward us, but its general tendency, for seventy-five years, has been to the eastward. Pushed over to the west or prevented from moving eastward, the great river has turned somewhat aside and to the south and has been for years devouring the Missouri shore and uniting with the Ohio further down. I do not know that it is so; but it would seem that there is a tendency of uniting rivers to move their point of junction further in the direction of the united streams. If this is true, and there are no other intervening causes, the Mississippi will continue to draw the junction point further to the southward, leaving the Egbert A. Smith possessions entirely undisturbed This may somewhat relieve the pressure upon1 our western and most threatened border. But it is very conjectural, indeed. When one takes a map or chart of the Mississippi River, he will see both above and below us that there is no discoverable rule of movement in that great river. Bend after bend, of varying lengths, everywhere appear, defying all reasons for their existence. There are, however, so many interests represented here now that we can safely hope that all the needed aid will be forthcoming in ample time. The large interests of the government and those of the great railroad companies, not to mention any other sources of power and influence, ought to forbid any serious apprehension of danger. And yet our location or situation is highly peculiar, and requires from us an attention and care, from which almost all other places in the country are free. If we discharge faithfully our duty in respect to our levees and river banks, we can safely depend upon the general movement of things elsewhere and quite beyond us for our much greater growth, if such we are to have. River improvement on a large scale is seemingly growing in favor, and should it materialize in proportion to its importance, Cairo may well hope to share more largely in its benefits than almost any other city in the great valley. It is not, however, very clear, at this time, that a depth of fourteen feet, or anything close thereto, can be had and maintained to points north of us, or even to this place, to the satisfaction of the country at large, whose means are to be devoted to the enterprise. It will be a great valley movement in which our own interests here will be regarded as merely incidental- incidental, it is true, but great, nevertheless. It will not be long until the valley of the Mississippi contains a population as large as the present population of the whole country- a hundred millions and Illinois ten millions thereof. This may be too far hence to be made much of now; but we hope this for the future of our city. It would be wrong for me to omit saying that Cairo's future depends, in one important sense at least, upon the people of the city themselves. They cannot change its geographical features, nor its topographical features very much; but they can and should make it a place from which good and desirable people will not turn away except for business reasons or supposed business disadvantages. I have desired to keep the size of this book down to very moderate proportions, but have not been able to do so. It seems large for the size of the city; but it must be remembered that while a small city it has had quite a remarkable history. Few cities of the state have been the objects of more legislation or of more documentary transactions of almost every kind. It is the history of three several attempts to start a city, one in 1818, one in 1836, and one in 1846, out of the latter of which the present city has grown. Had I used all the materials collected and which might well have found a place in the book it would have been very much larger. I may also add that I have probably, here and there, devoted too much space to certain matters and too little or perhaps none at all to others of greater importance. Whether this be so or not, I can truly say that there are very many matters of more or less importance which have had to remain unnoticed in order to keep the book within the desired limits. Additional Comments: Extracted from: A HISTORY OF THE CITY OF CAIRO ILLINOIS BY JOHN M. LANSDEN WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS CHICAGO R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY 1910 COPYRIGHTED, 1910 BY JOHN M. LANSDEN The Lakeside Press R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY CHICAGO File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/il/alexander/history/1910/ahistory/chapterx147gms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/ilfiles/ File size: 12.4 Kb