Mark Twain's up and coming cities

In his book "Life on the Mississippi", Twain describes a number of newly formed cities on the banks of the upper Mississippi river.

FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical nineteenth-century populations. The people don't dream, they work. The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear.

Quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things.

In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town: and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a square. The population of the city is thirty thousand. There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a great scale.

He described Quincy so glowingly that I just needed to see what has happened to the town in the intervening 120 years. It happens to be just up the river from Twain's hometown of Hannibal Missouri. From Wikipedia;

Quincy, known as the "Gem City", is a city on the Mississippi River and county seat of Adams County, Illinois, United States. As of the 2000 census the city had 40,366 people. . . . In the fall of 2010 Quincy was listed as eighth in the top fifteen small cities to raise a family in the United States by Forbes magazine for its commute times, high school graduation rate, median household income, home ownership rate and cost of living.

Very interesting that over 120 years, the population grew by only 33%. It peaked at almost 44,000 in 1960. Fortunately manufacturing is still one of the largest sources of employment (wheels, compressors and some other industrial products) topped only by the local health care industry - a hospital, the physicians for that hospital, and the local VA hospital (I've discovered health care is the number one or two source of employment is most medium sized American cities - hmmmm). Walmart is the eleventh largest employer. The local US Post Office is the fifteenth.

Explaining Twain's description of Quincy as a "model New England town" is this history;

Quincy’s earliest 19th century settlers were primarily from New England, Yankees who moved west in a continuing search for good land. They brought a culture of progressive values, such as support for public education. In the 1840s they were joined by a wave of German immigrants, who left Europe after the Revolutions in German provinces. The new residents brought with them much needed skills for the expanding community.


Makes me wonder why a town like Quincy stayed small, while a town like St.Paul, which Twain also describes glowingly, has grown by a factor of seven in population and become part of the much larger Minn/St.Paul Metro area with millions of people. Both had good locations on bluffs above the river, good rail connections, good starts and local resources. I wonder where their paths diverged.