Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1887 — THE ST. JO BOOM. [ARTICLE]

THE ST. JO BOOM.

A City of 60,000 That Will Number 100,000 in Twelve Months. “Most remarkable statements are heard in every hotel lobby nnu on every railroad lain about St. Joseph, M 0.,” writes a press correspondent. “A large amount of Kansas City, Chicago and St. Louis capital is being invested in St. Joseph real estate, ind i hear that a number of large enterorises. employing thousands of men and wrtu a capital that tops millions, have completed arrangement! for moving, bag and baggage, to this new center of emigration. 1 met a St. Joseph man on a Wabash train to-day. He tells me that the immediate cause of the great boom is the extension of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. This great system is making St. Joseph its Missouri River depot for its freight and stock traffic between Chicago and the Northwestern ranges, and has given the city a prominence as a railroad center equaled only by Chicago. The extension of the Rock Island has induced the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul to extend the diagonal southward to St. Joseph, and the Santa Fe to come up direct from Topeka and Atchison, in order to secure a short cut to Chicago, said to be sixty miles shorter than by any other way. The Rulo bridge will be completed by the first of August, and that will send the Burlington and Missouri trains from Denver straight through St. Joseph, eastward via the Hannibal. These and other favorable circumstances have combined to bring about a boom which, as 1 said in the outset, has become the absorbing topic of conversation in every prominent hotel lobby half way acioss the continent. I bear of men who have made a fortune in one day on an investment of SI,OOO. People are buying lots in hollows and on top of bluffs, and half the sales are made from the map without an inspection of the ground whereon they are located. The city has about 00,000 inhabitants, and not the least remarkable fact is that she is quoted in the last United States census as, next to Portland, the richest town of her size in the country, controlling the wholesale trade of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and New Mexico. Her shipping facilities, coupled with her large wholesale trade, have made her perhaps the best manuiactnring and pork-packing point in the West. The new Stock Yards, the most complete west of Chicago, cover 440 acres of ground, and will shortly combine an hotel, stock exchange and several large packing houses, with other facilities. Local capitalists are erecting a new $300,000 holel, a safe depository, and companies have been organized to build a belt line and two cable while the Conned has just granted the right to two of the street-car companies to employ the electric motor. An inspection of the Boston Post’s weekly clearing-house reports for the past three months shows the percentage of increase the largest of any city quoted in the report. JJnder such like circumstances, my informant thought, the boom rested upon a solid footing. Strangers are coming in by every train, and he predicted that the city would have a population of 100,000 in the next twelve months. Large additions to the city are platted, pul on the market and sold in two days for residences, manufacturing and business purposes, the real estate deals ranging from $250,000 to $700,000 a dav, those of last week footing up $3,500,000.”