Robidoux's Town

Platte Purchase Publishers, a Division of The St. Joseph Museums Inc., is proud to announce that Robidoux's Town by Robert J. Willoughby, Ph.D., has been reprinted. Robidoux's Town is a nineteenth-century history of St. Joseph, Missouri, that was first published in hardback in January of 1989. The book has been out-of-print since 2001. The new paperback edition cover features the painting "St. Joseph 1850" by Harry Wright and illustrations from the collections of The St. Joseph Museum.

Robert Willoughby begins the story of St. Joseph with a quote by Colonel M.F. Tiernan, May 6, 1850, "St. Joseph occupies so important a geographic position with reference to all parts of this Continent, and is surrounded by such extraordinary natural advantages, that it requires no uncommon degree of sagacity to foresee the influence she is one day destined to wield, and the consequences she will assuredly attain in the future chronicles of the West."

Dr. Willoughby, a St. Joseph resident, is a former Professor of History and Government at Hannibal-LaGrange College in Hannibal, Missouri. He currently teaches part-time at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. He is also the author of a book about the historic Westward Migration entitled "The Great Western Migration to the Gold Fields of California, 1849-1850."

"Writing an urban biography of a city as rich in history as St. Joseph presented a real challenge. Cities, like the human beings who build them, are immensely complex living organisms that grow, change, and face set-backs. In this book, I examine the city's potential, its successes, how it competed for population, for economic stature, for important transportation links, and for cultural distinction," said Dr. Willoughby. [Contributed by St. Joseph Museums, Inc.]

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