ABOUT THIS BOOK

Mark Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, often brings to mind romanticized images of Twain's fictional characters Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer exploring caves and fishing from the banks of the Mississippi River. In City of Dust, Gregg Andrews tells another story of the Hannibal area, the very real story of the exploitation and eventual destruction of Ilasco, Missouri, an industrial town created to serve the purposes of the Atlas Portland Cement Company.

In this new edition, Andrews provides an introduction detailing the impact of this book since its initial publication in 1996. He writes of a new twist in the Ilasco saga, one that concerns the Continental Cement Company’s attempt, not unlike Atlas’s one hundred years earlier, to manipulate the sale of a piece of land near its plant in the town. He explores the uneasy relationship between preservationists and the plant’s CEO and officials in St. Louis; the growing movement to preserve Ilasco’s heritage, including the building of a monument to commemorate the early residents of the town; and the grassroots petition drive and letter-writing campaign that stopped the Continental Cement Company’s machinations.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Gregg Andrews was born in Hannibal, Missouri, and grew up in Ilasco. He is Professor of History at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos and the Assistant Director of the Center for Texas Music History. Andrews is also the author of Insane Sisters, or, the Price Paid for Challenging a Company Town (University of Missouri Press) and Shoulder to Shoulder? The American Federation of Labor, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1924.

REVIEWS

"City of Dust, a well-researched account and powerful testimonial, will strike a particularly strong chord with working people who have suffered the trauma of the devastation of their communities and ways of life."—H-Net Book Review

"Throughout this book, the author draws on his own experience growing up near Ilasco and the personal accounts of people who lived there to create a sensitive and vivid portrait of working- class life in a small company town."—American Historical Review

"This book is a superb example of what historians can do to preserve the history of company and industrial towns whose existences are now endangered by rapid economic change. City of Dust is a significant contribution to the social and industrial history of the trans-Mississippi West."—Missouri Historical Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

New Introduction

Introduction

Part I. A Foreign Colony in Mossback Missouri

1. From Robber Caves to Robber Barons: Atlas Portland Cement and the Transformation of Mark Twain's Boyhood Playground

2. Woodchopper Landlords and Cement Mill Tenants: The Social Origins of Ilasco

3. A Labor Camp in the Shadow of Atlas

4. The Wages of Cement

5. The Militia Comes to Town: Labor Unrest and the Strike of 1910

Part II. Whose Community

6. Extending the Control of Old Man Atlas, 1910-1930

7. Schools and Churches

8. Company Patriotism and the War on Booze, Blacks, and Immigrants 1910-1930

9. The Culture of Cement and the Forging of an Identity

Part III. Dust to Dust: Big Business, the State, and the Destruction of Ilasco

10. New Landlord on the Block: The United States Steel Corporation, "Imperfect Collusion," and Depression-Era Ilasco

11. Gypsies Come to Town: A Union at Last

12. Ilasco and the Commercial Construction of Mark Twain

13. Render unto Atlas: The War on Community and Labor

Epilogue: Whose History? Whose Mark Twain?

Bibliography

Index

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