For context: Pittsburgh (pop. 300,00), St Louis (pop 300,000), and New Orleans (pop 375,000) are all located on critical junctures of the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi river system. Cairo is situated at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and its population is a mere 1,500. Why did Cairo fail to grow into a metropolis unlike the aforementioned cities. It seems like the ideal place to have a big city with excellent access to river transport.
19 comments
Flooding wrecked the town and it was never rebuilt.
Because Cairo is a mean old town.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TShL1EBB5-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TShL1EBB5-0)
Pittsburgh had great access to rivers and lots of great minerals to build it to become the steel empire it once was
Everyone hated the way they pronounced Cairo.
Well, I had to go and read about it.
According to Wikipedia, “Cairo was later bypassed by transportation changes away from…water, which surrounds Cairo and makes such infrastructure difficult…”
So it seems like it just wasn’t a good place for other forms of transportation, once trains and cars became cheaper and easier to build.
And apparently the whole town was evacuated in 2011 due to a major flood.
A lot of reasons.
Flooding.
River confluences were only that useful in bygone eras where longer trips by unpowered vessels had to be broken into stages, meaning their cargoes had to be portaged, break bulked, and stored.
It’s in the middle of nowhere.
Failed to adapt to changes in transportation from river to rail and road
Lots of racial strife.
No other real source of commerce aside from river travel.
The populations you have are just the city itself, not the metro area.
what made cities grow were trading posts or big spots for other reasons.
Cairo was a big city years ago and it was a large railroad and steamboat hub. The civil war hurt it and the swampy land around it restricted its ability to develop. As industry dies, nothing replaced it. The town also has been prone to floods.
a thing about city survival is the ability to adapt during changing times.
Illinois laws/regulations/taxes are by far the most unfavorable in comparison to Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, and Tennessee, which are all close enough to be suitable replacements.
Thank the Commodore, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who ushered in railways.
Cairo is below the flood plain, so had multiple devastating floods which affected its growth. It also has a long history of racial violence that lead to the wealthy citizens who owned banks and stores and things like the fleeing en masse.
More recently, the large public housing complexes were torn down, depleting the already small and impoverished population even more. Last I checked, the closest thing Cairo has to a grocery store is a Dollar General. There’s maybe 2,000 people left in the city, down from 15,000 in the 1920s. That’s an absurd level of population decline.
Long story short, the floods killed the town and the race riots put the nail in the coffin
Good answers so far, just a quick note;
When comparing US cities, its better to use metro population as city lines are more arbitrary. Pittsburgh: 2.5 Million, St. Louis: 2.8 Million & New Orleans: 1 Million. You can clearly see, in your list, New Orleans is the biggest city, but its metro area is not even half of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. It’s just hard to built large metros at the downstream of a big river.
>Developed as a river port, Cairo was later bypassed by transportation changes away from the large expanse of low-lying land, wetland, and water, which surrounds Cairo and makes such infrastructure difficult, and due to industrial restructuring, the population peaked at 15,203 in 1920, while in the 2020 census it was 1,733.
Of course, could’ve also been some political skulduggery happening and Cairo boosters lost.
Pastor Dave says that God cursed the town because of its devotion to the pagan gods with the animal heads.
River confluences don’t actually promote the building of cities. Cities based on transport tend to spring up where people moving goods need to transfer those goods from one form of transportation to another. So you have ports like New Orleans and Philadelphia where oceangoing ships could load and unload cargo. In Philadelphia this meant loading onto ships for transport around New England, as well as overland transport, and in New Orleans it meant loading and unloading to ships from barges and riverboats on the Mississippi. St. Louis is as far north as steam powered riverboats could go, and served as a point to load on and off those boats, at first just on to wagons, but later onto trains.
Cairo in contrast is just where two rivers joined. Riverboats coming down or up one river didn’t actually have to stop there to offload cargo onto boats going up the other river, they could just go directly up the other river. And with no pressing need to offload cargo there was no pressing need for all the things that come with that…warehouses to hold the goods, the people to move them on and off the ships, etc.
What really put Pittsburgh on the map wasn’t just its geography of three rivers, but coal, which was used to heat furnaces to make pig iron and steel. There’s a massive coal seam under Pittsburgh as well as south of the region in West Virginia. The rivers helped transport that abundant natural resource west, but it was also being transported east through the railroad (which had been in Pittsburgh since the 1830s).
Pittsburgh and New Orleans are also much older cities than Cairo. Pittsburgh was founded in 1669 with the French establishment of Ft. Duquesne. New Orealns was founded in 1718. By contrast, Cairo wasn’t really “founded” until 1850. So they had time to stabilize (and learn to deal with things like flooding and Native attacks) for a century or two before Cairo got off the ground.
/r/ProjectCairo/
The idea was that Reddit could save and revitalize Cairo, IL.
Alas, there are some things that you just can’t keyboard-warrior into existence…
Cairo is no longer in decline because things actually can’t get worse for it.
It all started when the city’s entire economy was destroyed. It was based around ferrying people across both the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Once bridges were built, that was ruined. Flooding and racial conflict did not make things better.
Those other cities all started out as big river towns that exploded into railroad cities. Cairo’s geography makes it extremely undesirable for rail transit. It’s bottlenecked by two massive rivers prone to flooding and would be a terribly difficult location to construct the bridges necessary for rail transitz
Only speaking to St.Louis– not only is it situated along the Mississippi, but it is also along the notorious Route 66 which further added to its growth.