Marthasville is one of 50 towns in the state featured in Caitlin Yager’s new book “Small Town Missouri.”

The book highlights 50 towns across the state, including information about their history, town traditions like festivals and what their impact has been on the state as a whole. 

Yager, a program director with Missouri Humanities, said so much of her work involved interacting with these towns and the people who live there so she decided their stories needed to be told. 

“A lot of it has to do with telling their stories and giving their people and their places and their stories a bigger voice through the programming of Missouri Humanities,” said Yager. “So it was kind of a natural fit to put that into writing.”

Yager worked with St. Louis publisher Reedy Press to put those stories to paper and the book is now available online at https://reedypress.com/shop/small-town-missouri/ and in bookstores throughout the state. 

Yager said she considered a variety of characteristics when choosing which towns to highlight, including population, geographic location and historical significance. 

Yager considered towns in Missouri that had a population of less than 25,000 and did her best to spread her choices out around the state. She said while there are areas of the state that had a number of these towns such as southeastern Missouri or Missouri Wine Country, she wanted to ensure the entire state was fairly represented. 

“We’ve got stories all over the state that are interesting and worthy of exploring,” said Yager. 

She said the pages on each town follow a structure, outlining the town’s history and its founding, then events and attractions followed by notable people who are from or have lived in the towns. 

Yager said she was drawn to Marthasville for her book because of the history of the region as one of the older settlements in the state as well as its German heritage and connection to Daniel Boone. 

“Marthasville and the surrounding area has such interesting cultural heritage,” said Yager. “You think about not just German heritage, but the Daniel Boone heritage in the Warren County and St. Charles County area.”

Yager alluded to the writings of Gottfried Duden, a Warren County resident and German immigrant who wrote to his countrymen in the 1830s about southern Warren County and its similarities to his homeland in the German Rhineland. 

“Germans in the area came to this part of Missouri because it reminded them of the German Rhineland, and it reminded them of home,” said Yager. 

She also pointed to Marthasville, and the surrounding area’s history, as both an important community on the Missouri River and its connection to the former Katy Railroad. 

“Small Town Missouri” is Yager’s first book and while she was familiar with the source material, she agreed that at first, the prospect of writing a book was “daunting.”

She said one of the most difficult parts of the process was narrowing her list to just 50 communities. 

“Missouri has so many communities with really great stories, and people and places,” said Yager. 

Yager hopes the information in her book will inspire Missourians to branch out from their communities and learn more about their state. She felt so much of history in Missouri is focused on larger metropolitan areas like St. Louis and Kansas City and she wanted to make sure small-town Missouri got its time in the spotlight as well. 

“To tell the bigger picture, to tell the full story of this state and sometimes even of this nation, you’ve got to look in the smaller communities. You’ve got to look in those little nooks and crannies and find those stories,” said Yager.