Georgia Street to the river bluffs
Explore Louisiana
A river town that paints its own story: two dozen murals on brick walls, the most intact Victorian streetscape in Missouri, and two centuries of history on the bluffs above the Mississippi.
Louisiana and the Mississippi River from above.
Public art
The Murals of Louisiana
Between 2000 and 2006, the Louisiana Mural Organization, a group organized by Ed Pennington, painted twenty-four murals on downtown brick walls, turning the town's own history into public art anyone can walk past for free. The first, Delta Queen Approaching Hwy. 54 Bridge by John Stoeckley, went up at 5th and Georgia in 2000, showing the steamboat passing the old Champ Clark Bridge. The last, Elks Lodge by Sheri Grote, followed in 2006.
One mural, painted on the old Ice House at 200 South Main, has not been visible since that building burned. About twenty-three remain on view on downtown walls today.
Read the full mural catalog, all twenty-four murals with photos and history (PDF) →
A few of the twenty-four
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Delta Queen Approaching Hwy. 54 Bridge
John Stoeckley · 5th & Georgia Street
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McDannold Livery Stable
Alex Stelioes-Wills · 3rd & North Carolina Street
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Buffalo Fort
Harold Shuler · 3rd & Georgia Street, the War of 1812-era stockade fort south of town
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Louisiana Historic Homes
Louisiana High School Advanced Art Class · 705 Georgia Street
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John B. Henderson
Barb Ehinger · 3rd & Georgia Street, Bank of Louisiana
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Vintage LaCrosse Lumber
Barbara Bliss · 120/123 North Main Street
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Historic Churches of Louisiana
Cindy Logan · Tennessee & 6th Street
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Elks Lodge
Sheri Grote · 105 North 5th Street
National Register of Historic Places
Georgia Street Historic District
Georgia Street's brick storefronts, listed on the National Register in 1987, are what most visitors picture when they picture Louisiana. Fifty-five buildings, raised between about 1845 and 1935 in Greek Revival, Italianate, and Classical Revival styles, still carry their original cornices, arched transoms, and cast-iron storefronts.
“The most intact Victorian streetscape in the state of Missouri.”
– Missouri Department of Natural Resources
A few blocks north, the North Third Street Historic District, added to the National Register in 2005, preserves sixty-one residential buildings on seventeen acres: Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and Craftsman houses built between 1843 and 1935.
A residential streetscape of its own
Further reading: Georgia Street National Register nomination (PDF) · Louisiana historic-district National Register documentation (PDF)
On the bluff
Riverview & Henderson Parks
Two parks share the same bluff above the Mississippi. Henderson Park holds a bust of John Brooks Henderson and a river overlook with a coin-operated telescope, much of it landscaped by the Rotary Club. Riverview Park, next door, has a children's playground, a pavilion, and restrooms, the kind of place where a Saturday gets spent.
Crossing the Mississippi
The river, the bridge & the Great River Road
The current Champ Clark Bridge opened August 3, 2019, an elevated span built to end the flood closures that plagued its predecessor. It carries U.S. Route 54 across the Mississippi, replacing the original 1928 bridge, a steel truss so narrow by the end of its life that its ten-foot lanes had no shoulders at all. Missouri Route 79 through town is the Little Dixie Highway of the Great River Road, a National Scenic Byway that follows the river's west bank.
Two centuries on the Mississippi
Two hundred years on the river
Louisiana was settled in 1816 and 1817 and platted in 1818 by Kentucky emigrants Joel Shaw and Samuel Caldwell. Local tradition holds the town was named for early resident Louisiana Basye; nineteenth-century county historians maintained it was simply named for the state. Either way, it was incorporated as a city on March 10, 1849, with W. K. Kennedy as its first mayor, and it remains the oldest incorporated city in Pike County.
Stark Bro's Nurseries, founded here in 1816, is the world's oldest fruit-tree nursery still in business. It introduced the Red and Golden Delicious apples to the market and, after Luther Burbank died in 1926, carried on decades of his unfinished plant-breeding work under a bequest of his notes and stock.
John Brooks Henderson practiced law in Louisiana as a young man before his election to the U.S. Senate, where in 1864 he introduced the resolution that became the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery.
Champ Clark served as Louisiana's city attorney in the late 1870s, years before he became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. The bridge across the river carries his name, though his home and house museum are in nearby Bowling Green, not Louisiana.
George S. Clason was born in Louisiana. He went on to found a map-publishing company in Denver and write The Richest Man in Babylon, a personal-finance book still in print a century later.
Colorfest, the city's largest festival, fills Georgia Street each year on the third weekend of October with a parade, a car show, live music, and more than a hundred vendors.
