Flooring for Lincoln County,
counted in metro St. Louis,
planned with northeast Missouri

This page is about the whole of Lincoln County rather than any one place inside it, and what earns it a page is that the county refuses to resolve into a single description. The federal government files it with metro St. Louis, the state files it with northeast Missouri, no interstate crosses it, the ground under it changes character several times between the western prairie edge and the Mississippi bottoms, and all of its surface water ends up in the same river. That reaches an appointment before color does.

Two governments file this county in two different regions

The federal government counts Lincoln County as a component of the St. Louis, MO-IL Metropolitan Statistical Area, alongside St. Charles, Warren, Franklin and Jefferson counties. So it is formally part of metro St. Louis while remaining the metro's northern rural edge. For state and regional planning purposes it is grouped away from St. Louis altogether: it forms the Boonslick Region with Montgomery and Warren counties under the Boonslick Regional Planning Commission, and Missouri State Parks likewise files Cuivre River State Park under its Northeast Region, with parks such as Mark Twain and Thousand Hills, rather than under its St. Louis Region. Warren County is filed those same two ways, so the double filing is not unique. What this county adds to it is a third answer for its state park.

That stops being filing-cabinet trivia once somebody is standing in your hallway with a tape. A house here may have been built to a pattern that would look at home an hour south, or it may sit on ground farmed long before anyone drew a metropolitan boundary, and the two do not hand you the same subfloor.

No interstate crosses it, so the run north is planned by route

The county's major transportation routes are U.S. Highway 61 and State Highways 79 and 47. Interstate 70 does not pass through Lincoln County; it runs directly south of it. That one sentence separates this county from the others we publish. The showroom is at 15570 Veterans Memorial Pkwy in Wentzville, in St. Charles County, and a trip up here is a highway and county road run from end to end rather than an interstate one with a short exit at the finish.

So mileage predicts less here than the route does, and what decides whether an appointment starts on time is the last few miles, on ground laid out for farms rather than for delivery trucks. A visit up here is booked as its own block of a working day, and the in-home measure page covers what that visit takes in.

Several different grounds inside one county line

The county is a set of distinct physiographic regions rather than one landscape: loess, glacial till and residual soils in the central part, a prairie region of loess and glacial till along the western boundary, alluvial flood plains along the Cuivre River and Big Creek dissecting both, a band of residual soils bordering those flood plains, and the Mississippi River flood plains along the eastern boundary, bordered by a loess-covered region. Ordovician bedrock, which the soil survey names as its earliest unit, sits in the northeast corner.

The Cuivre has cut perpendicular bluffs and steep slopes through all of that, so two houses a few minutes apart can stand on genuinely different footing. What a slab or a crawl space is doing with moisture is therefore not a county-wide answer anybody can look up from a town name. It is read on your floor, with a straightedge and a meter: see what subfloor problems delay a flooring installation.

Everything drains to one river, and the flood maps reach inland

Surface water in all of Lincoln County drains into the Mississippi River. The county is bounded on the east by that river, which separates it from Illinois; Pike County adjoins it on the north, and Big Creek forms part of its southern boundary. The eastern part drains straight to the Mississippi through Bryants Creek, Lost Creek and smaller streams, and the 1990 soil survey names Bryants, Bobs, McLeans, Lost, Hurricane and Sandy Creeks as those eastern drainages. It borders St. Charles County on the south, along with Warren and Montgomery counties and Calhoun County, Illinois.

FEMA's flood hazard determinations put the Cuivre River's confluence with the Mississippi at East Sycamore Road east of Old Monroe, and identify Mississippi River flooding as affecting Elsberry, Foley, Old Monroe, Winfield and unincorporated Lincoln County, with McLean Creek at Winfield and Sandy Creek at Foley. A later round of map revisions also covered Troy and Moscow Mills, so the flood plain question reaches inland as well as along the river, and is better asked on the phone than discovered at the door.

There is a record of what the low ground does in a bad year. B.K. Leach Memorial Conservation Area occupies the Mississippi bottomland in northeastern Lincoln County, holding marshes and deep backwater sloughs managed to feed migrating waterfowl, and part of it was assembled after the 1993 flood from willing sellers whose land was hit by a river levee failure. That rules nothing out on bottom ground. It means crawl spaces, slabs and rooms below grade get asked about in earnest out there, in the order the basement page sets out.

Three railroads put the towns where they are

Three railroad lines once crossed Lincoln County. The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy followed the outer edge of the Mississippi flood plain across the county, a second CB&Q branch ran from Old Monroe to Mexico across the southern part, and the St. Louis and Hannibal crossed the central part. An earlier federal soil survey of the county lists Winfield, Old Monroe, Foley and Hawk Point as towns on the CB&Q, Silex, Whiteside, Moscow Mills, Briscoe and Davis on the St. Louis and Hannibal, and Olney, Truxton and Louisville as the principal inland towns.

Lay that over a present-day map and the county stops looking random. The town names are strung along two old lines with inland ground between them, so an address is usually either in one of those towns or out on the county road joining two of them. Worth saying when you call: what the last half mile is like, and where material can sit dry.

One county seat, four school districts, one fairground

Troy is the county seat and sits in the south-central part of the county. The Lincoln County offices are on Main Street in Troy, and the City of Troy's city hall is on Cap Au Gris Street. Lincoln County has four public school districts: Silex R-I, Elsberry R-II, the Troy-area district serving Troy, Moscow Mills and Hawk Point, and Winfield R-IV serving Winfield and Foley. The Troy district is unusual in branding itself the Lincoln County R-III School District on its own site rather than Troy R-III. The Lincoln County Fair is held at the fairgrounds in Troy.

A flooring page bothers with district names for one reason: those lines cross town lines out here, so a family names its schools before its town, and the window a household has is set by a school calendar.

The state park the state describes as a different kind of country

Missouri State Parks states in its own words that nowhere else in northeast Missouri or the St. Louis region can you find as large an example of the oak woodland, savanna and prairie landscape the first Euro-American settlers encountered, and describes Cuivre River State Park as lending a wilder, Ozarkian flavor to an otherwise agricultural landscape. The park began as federal land, run as a Recreational Demonstration Area under the National Park Service and developed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and President Harry S Truman signed the letter transferring it to Missouri.

A stone picnic shelter and the rock bridge over Little Sugar Creek survive from the Corps work. Missouri's State Historic Preservation Office lists five National Register properties in the county, and their spread is a fair map of the place: Camp Sherwood Forest Historic District and the Cuivre River State Park Administrative Area Historic District, both southwest of Elsberry; the Downtown Troy Historic District; the Lock and Dam No. 25 Historic District at Winfield; and the Old Rock House, at Second and Mill streets in Moscow Mills.

Lincoln County set beside Warren, the one it gets taken for

The county this one gets confused with is Warren, which it shares a county line with. The confusion is fair enough. Neither is a subdivision county, both put more open ground than town between one address and the next, and both get a page of their own here rather than being folded together into a single rural one. What separates them is worth stating, because it is the part a visit runs into.

Where this county parts company with Warren is water and access. Warren County has an interstate through the middle of it. Lincoln County has none, carries a major river for the whole of its eastern boundary, and sends all its runoff to that river. If your address sits on the far side of a county line, read St. Charles County, Warren County or St. Louis County instead, and the service area page holds the whole map.

What a visit up here is planned around

Booking one is short: the address, the rooms in play, what is on the floor now if you know, and any date you are working toward. After that it is ordinary work, walking the house, checking level, reading what sits under the covering, and writing out every transition, threshold and stair. The in-home measure and the written estimate are free at every address in the county, and nothing is ordered before that estimate is in your hands.

The reviews read the way they do for the same reason. There are 140 of them at a 5.0 average, two are not five stars, and both are still up, because a tidied rating tells a homeowner nothing. The reviews page carries the whole set.

The five Lincoln County towns with a page of their own

Each is written about the town itself, with its own figures and its own account of what a tape finds there. Five town pages is not the edge of where a truck goes, only of what has been written down.

• Troy: the county seat, sharing a town line with the county offices, the fairgrounds and the state park.
• Moscow Mills: listed among the old St. Louis and Hannibal towns through the middle of the county.
• Winfield: on the flood plain edge the CB&Q followed, and the town the Winfield R-IV district takes its name from.
• Old Monroe: where the second CB&Q branch began its run west, near the Cuivre's confluence with the Mississippi.
• Hawk Point: named among the county's CB&Q towns, out at the inland end of them.

Which page to read once you know the town

The material pages here are written per town, so read them in that pairing: carpet in Troy, luxury vinyl plank in Moscow Mills, hardwood in Winfield, carpet in Old Monroe and luxury vinyl plank in Hawk Point. To settle the product first, the pillars are carpet, hardwood, luxury vinyl plank and tile.