De Soto, Missouri

De Soto is a city in southern Jefferson County, Missouri, one of eleven towns in the United States to be named for the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. It had a population of 6,400 at the 2010 census.

History

De Soto is among the oldest-settled areas in Jefferson County. It can trace its existence back to a pioneer by the name of Van Horne, who cleared a farmstead along Joachim Creek in 1808. However, it did not really come into its own as a community until the arrival of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway in 1857, at which time it was laid out by Thomas C. Fletcher, a local lawyer and railroad agent and later governor of Missouri (1865-69). The new town was named De Soto in honor of the 16th-century Spanish conquistador, who explored the lower Mississippi Valley and is thought to have ventured as far north as present-day Missouri (though it is unlikely he ever visited the future town named for him).

First incorporated in 1869, the new town grew rapidly after the Civil War, thanks in part to the railroad's relocation of its car works and machine shops to that site. Other significant businesses, such as a bottling works, an ice plant, and a wagon factory, soon followed. De Soto was also blessed with the presence of a number of artesian wells, whose water was shipped to the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. These varying livelihoods, balanced against the city's relative isolation from the St. Louis metropolitan area, have given De Soto a remarkable stability; after reaching the 5,000 mark in 1920, it has grown at a very slow rate ever since.

Tornado Activity

One occasional problem for the De Soto community has been an unusual frequency of damaging tornadoes. Two deadly storms struck the surrounding area in the 1960s, and in April 1981, another tornado destroyed two businesses in the town itself, killing one person. Most recently, an F3 tornado hit De Soto on May 6, 2003, part of a broader outbreak of severe weather in the Midwest. This storm destroyed 58 houses and badly damaged several facilities of the De Soto school district, inflicting a total of $12.8 million in damage. Nine people were killed, and 23 were injured, making it the worst natural disaster in the town's history.