Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 March 1887 — THE ST. JO BOOM. [ARTICLE]

THE ST. JO BOOM.

A City of CO,OOO That Will Number 100,000 in Twelve Mouths. “Most remarkable statements are heard : in every hotel lobby nnd on every railroad i train abotft St. Joseph, Mo.,’’ wjites a press ogriespondent. *£large amount of Kaunas City, Chicago and St. Louis capital is being invested in St, Joseph real estate, and 1 hear that a number of large enterprises, employing thousands of men and with a capital that tops millions, have completed arrangements 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, Hock Island and Pacific Railroad. This great system is making St. Joseph its Missouri River depot for its freight and stock traffic between C’hioago 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 ami St. Paul to extend the diagonal southward to St. Joseph, and the Santa Pe 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, nnd that will send the Burlington and Missouri trains from Denver straight through St. Joseph, eastward via the Hannibal. These and other favorable c -rcumstauces have combined to br:ng about a boom which, as I said in the outset, has become the absorbing topie of conversation in every prominent hotel lobby half way acioss the continent. I hear of men who have mado a fortune in one day on an investment of SI,OOO. People are buying lots in hollows nnd oil 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 whole- __ sale trade, have.made hpr perhaps the-beat manufacturing and pork-packing point in the West. The new Stock Yards, the most complete west of Chicago, cover 410 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 roacls, while the Council 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. Under such like circumstances, my informant thought, (he boom rested upon a solid footing. Strangers nro coming in bv ever}’ train, and lie predicted that the city would have a population of 100,000 in the next twelve mouths. Largo additions to the city are platted, put 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.”