Missouri
Imperial Mistress of States
Our Cities
St. Louis factories employ 100,000 laborers and have an annual output valued at one third of a billion dollars.
Her dry goods and grocery business amounts annually to a quarter of a billion dollars.
She leads any city in the world in the manufacture of plug tobacco, beer and street cars.
She has the largest shoe factory, cracker factory, white lead factory and stamping plant in the United States, and her six thousand factories, some of which lead the world in their output, consume upwards of four million tons of coal annually.
Indicating her continued increase in population and her prosperous condition the estimated cost of buildings for which permits were issued in March, 1898, was $1,096,630-.
Kansas City has a population estimated at 200,000, is located practically in the geographical center of the United States, and the center of the greatest grain belt in the world.
She has the finest live stock exchange building, leads all other markets in receipts and sales of stock cattle, and is the second live stock market in the world.
Her live stock receipts in 1897 amounted to $125,000,000, grain receipts over 25,000,000 bushels; output of flour and corn meal one million barrels; has $35,000,000 invested in manufacturing business. With an annual output of over $100,000,000; a wholesale mercantile trade of $200,000,000; annual real estate transfers of nearly $75,000,000; and buildings erected at a cost of about one and a half million.
St. Joseph, it is said, is the wealthiest city per capita in the United States. Her business men are noted for their thrift and enterprise, and their integrity and financial standing is gilt edged and business failures are practically unknown.
Her wholesale mercantile trade amounts .Annually to sixty million dollars, manufactured articles twenty million, her packing plants do an immense business, which is increasing with unprecedented rapidity, and her live stock sale yards recently established are commensurate with the demand that will come from the extensive feed yards that surround St. Joseph.
Besides the cities named Missouri has thirty-two others with a population from 4,000 to 75,000 each, among which are Springfield, Sedalia, Hannibal, Moberly, Carthage, Joplin and others, all flourishing and enterprising cities, with modern improvements and conveniences, and notwithstanding unfavorable financial conditions for the last several years, are making rapid gains in material wealth and population.