This Town Was Supposed to Be Bigger Than St. Louis

Cairo, Illinois sits at the exact spot where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi, one of the most powerful river crossroads in North America. In the age of steamboats, this was supposed to become one of America's great cities. Today, fewer than 2,000 people live here, and much of downtown stands empty. So how does a town in the perfect location lose almost everyone? In this documentary, we follow Cairo from the land promoters who sold it as the city of the future, through Charles Dickens' brutal visit, the Civil War, when Ulysses S. Grant made it a Union stronghold, and its peak in the 1920s. Then we look at what went wrong: the railroads and bridges that moved trade elsewhere, the racial violence and civil rights struggle that tore the town apart, and the night in 2011 when engineers blew up a levee to save it. Do you know a town that should have become a big city but didn't? Tell me in the comments. 🔔 Subscribe for more documentaries about the strangest places and forgotten stories of history. Astronaut photograph courtesy of NASA Johnson Space Center. #cairoillinois #history #documentary #mississippiriver #americanhistory #ghosttown #illinois #historydocumentary