Flooring in Marthasville
Where two state routes cross above the bottoms

Marthasville is small, it is old, and it is not built the way its age suggests. The Census Bureau counted 1259 residents in the 2020 base and estimated 1302 by 2024, living across 0.854 square miles of land in 721 housing units. The median year built is 1988, 84.7 percent of the units are single-unit detached houses, and 82.8 percent of the occupied ones are owner occupied. This page is about the town itself: how it sits on the ground, how it grew, what its housing stock is made of, and what happens when someone here asks to have a floor measured.

A bluff town with the bottoms below it, not a town in the bottoms

The City of Marthasville describes itself as located in the southern-most part of Warren County, along the Missouri River and near historic St. Charles, and as part of the St. Louis Metropolitan area. Warren County's Master Plan places it in southeast Warren County along the Missouri River Valley. The distinction that matters once you are standing in a hallway with a tape measure is that the town sits back from the river on a bluff rather than on the riverbank. A county history from the 1880s, quoted in the National Register nomination for the Marthasville Hardware Building, calls Marthasville 'the first town settled in Warren county' and describes it as sited on a bluff, visible from the hills on the opposite Franklin County side. The low ground is a boundary rather than a footprint: the Master Plan notes that because of the Missouri River floodplain, Marthasville would most likely only annex along the bluffs or north toward Warrenton.

Two state routes cross here, and one of them leaves the county

Marthasville sits at the crossroads of Missouri Route 94 and Missouri Route 47, which the Master Plan credits for the town's accessibility to commercial, residential and tourist traffic. Route 94 runs east and west; Route 47 provides north-south travel through Warren County and meets it here in town. South of Marthasville, at the City of Washington, Route 47 crosses the Missouri River on a bridge MoDOT calls a vital link between Warren County to the north and Franklin County to the south. That southern link shows up in weekday life more than the county seat does. Marthasville's public elementary school, though inside Warren County, is run by the Washington School District, whose middle and high schools sit across the river in Franklin County.

Older than the county it belongs to, and older than that again

Marthasville is older than Warren County itself. The city's history states that when Montgomery County was formed Marthasville was the only town in it, and that Warren County was not formed until years afterward. Before that, the French village of La Charette stood near present Marthasville on Charette Creek and was, in 1804, the westernmost white settlement on the Missouri River. Lewis and Clark camped there on May 25 of that year and described a small French village of seven houses; the site has since been washed away by the river. The founding date is genuinely contested: the city says the plat was surveyed for Dr. John Young of Kentucky in the late 1810s and that he named the town for his wife Martha, while the National Register nomination credits Dr. John A. Young of Virginia and notes accounts naming Daniel Boone and his son-in-law Flanders Callaway as founders decades earlier.

German families on Tuque and Lake Creeks, and Boone's first grave

German immigrants who followed Gottfried Duden to Missouri settled along Tuque and Lake Creeks near Marthasville, and the city states the area is still largely populated by their descendants. Daniel Boone's original grave is here, beside his wife Rebecca in the Bryan and Boone family cemetery on a knoll above Tuque Creek just outside the city limits. The city notes his remains were believed disinterred for reburial in Kentucky, and that a local claim holds they never left Missouri. Deutsch Country Days, a German living-history festival, is held at Luxenhaus Farm on State Highway O, and the city states that because of the many wineries running east from town to Defiance, Marthasville is considered to mark one end of the Missouri Weinstrasse.

Depot Street, the Katy Trail, and a register list that keeps naming this town

The Missouri, Kansas and Texas railway, the MKT or Katy, reached Marthasville and created Depot Street as the town's commercial center. The Marthasville Depot stood on the alignment that is now the Katy Trail, built on the former MKT corridor, and State Parks operates a Marthasville Trailhead here with parking, restrooms and water. Of the ten Warren County entries on the Missouri SHPO's National Register list, seven name Marthasville or its vicinity; two sit on Depot Street in town, the Marthasville Hardware Building, listed in 2008, and the Herman H. Fortmann Building. One rural listing, the Flanders Callaway House south of town off Route 94, was recorded as sitting on the Missouri River flood plain and as having suffered flood damage throughout its history.

721 housing units, and two build waves inside one small plat

For flooring, the two useful numbers are 721 and 1988: the entire housing stock and its median year built. The stock is not uniform behind that median. 24.3 percent of the units went up in the 2000s and 10.0 percent in the 1990s, so a town whose beginnings predate the county carries a recent, subdivision-era wave inside the same 0.854 square miles. Two houses a few streets apart can be a generation and a half apart in how they were framed, decked and finished.

Detached houses, long ownership, and what that does to a room-by-room decision

84.7 percent of the units are single-unit detached houses and 82.8 percent of occupied units are owner occupied. There is very little of the shared-wall housing that comes with an association telling you what may go in which room, so the choice in each room is genuinely the owner's, and stairs, closets, back halls and additions are all common. The compact plat matters too: 721 units inside 0.854 square miles is a town of ordinary lots and short blocks.

24.7 miles southwest, and how that shapes the appointment

Marthasville is 24.7 road miles and about 37 minutes southwest of the showroom at 15570 Veterans Memorial Pkwy in Wentzville. That is a real drive rather than an errand, and it changes the process in your favor. Instead of asking you to make the trip repeatedly to narrow a color, we bring samples to the house and book the in-home measure as its own block of time. Plenty of people still make one deliberate showroom trip to see the full range, then decide at home.

What an in-home measure looks like at a Marthasville address

We come to you. We measure every room you want done, note the doorways and every place two materials are going to meet, count and measure stair treads one at a time, check the closets and the returns, and write down anything under the current floor that needs attention first. In a town with two clear build waves, that last list is what separates a quote that holds from a number that changes on install day. Whether the house sits on the bluff side or on lower ground toward the bottoms comes into it too. Call 636-332-0654.

The three material pages written for this town

Each of these is about a material meeting Marthasville houses, not the material in general. Read carpet in Marthasville for what turns up when a floor from the town's median era comes out. Read solid hardwood in Marthasville for what bluff ground and bottom ground each ask of a fastened floor. Read luxury vinyl plank in Marthasville for the 24.3 percent of town built in the 2000s. The in-home measure is the same free visit either way.