Herculaneum officials will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the city’s incorporation in 1972 with an ice cream cake party.
The event will be held from 5:30-8 p.m. Tuesday, July 19, at Dairy Queen, 90 Scenic Plaza, in Herculaneum.
Anyone – city residents and nonresidents alike – who stops by the restaurant during that time may receive one free piece of ice cream cake, Mayor Bill Haggard said.
The offer is good only for those who come inside the restaurant, not for drive-thru customers. No substitutions will be allowed for the ice cream cake slices.
Haggard said the Herculaneum Historical Society is paying for the cake.
Attendees may participate in a raffle to win a Herculaneum-themed basket.
While Herculaneum has been operating as a city for just 50 years, its roots go back more than 200 years, Haggard said.
“The incorporation of Herculaneum is kind of odd,” he said. “It was actually incorporated in 1819. But, it never functioned as an incorporated city until 1972. I don’t know why.
“A lot of it was, probably, with St. Joe Lead (a company that operated in the town for many years); they provided everything – fixed the streets, provided water, all the services. There had been several attempts through the years to function as a city. The big push came when one of the local water districts wanted to take over the water. The citizens fought that.”
Haggard, a lifelong Herculaneum resident, said he’s interested in its history.
According to the Herculaneum city website, Moses Austin and Samuel Hammond laid out the town in 1808 at the mouth of the Joachim Creek. The town was to serve as a shipping point for lead smelted in Jefferson and Washington counties.
Herculaneum was home to the first post office in Jefferson County and it remained the only post office in the county for nearly 30 years.
In addition, Herculaneum was designated as the county seat in 1819, but that distinction went to Hillsboro in 1839.
After that, the town experienced a downturn until the late 1880s, when the St. Joseph Lead Co. opened a lead smelting site and the Mississippi River & Bonne Terre Railroad “ran track into town,” according to the website.
Missouri’s first native-born governor, Thomas C. Fletcher, was born in Herculaneum, according to the site.