Flooring in Old Monroe,
north bank of the Cuivre

Old Monroe is one of the smallest towns we write a page for: a 2020 census base of 250 residents, a 2024 estimate of 279, and 91 housing units on 0.362 square miles. The city limits stop at the Cuivre River on the south and southeast, so the whole place is one compact block of houses between the water and the rail line. From our showroom it is 20.7 road miles northeast, about 29 minutes, and the last leg runs east on lettered Route C until the road ends at Missouri Route 79 in the middle of town. Everything below is what that geography does to a flooring job.

Ninety one housing units on a third of a square mile

The housing math is small enough to hold in your head: ninety one units, 73.6 percent of them single unit detached houses, 81.6 percent owner occupied. There is no apartment tower and nothing that reads as a subdivision of matching elevations, so there is no builder floor plan to look up before we knock. A place this size was assembled house by house across generations, which is why we measure every room at the address rather than pattern matching off a neighbor.

The median Old Monroe house was finished in 1960

The median year built for housing in Old Monroe is 1960. In a town of 91 units the median sits inside a stock the Census cannot break down by decade with any precision, so we do not guess at it. What the county's own history does establish is that the town standing today was principally built after the re-survey that followed the railroad. A house on that timeline has had more than one floor put into it, so the question at a measure is never the floor you can see. It is the two or three underneath it, and how level they left the room.

A county seat that emptied out, then came back as a railroad town

The town was laid out on land belonging to Ira and Almond Cottle and Nathaniel Simonds, sometimes written Symonds, and was named for President James Monroe. Sources disagree on the year it was platted: the State Historical Society of Missouri's place-name study by David W. Eaton gives one year, the county's own nineteenth century history says some time before it. Both agree a large portion of the town was donated to the county for the seat of justice. Old Monroe, then simply Monroe, was the first seat of justice of Lincoln County, and the courts sat there until they moved to Alexandria because the town lay in the far southeast corner of the county.

Almost nothing of that original town survived into the later nineteenth century. The county's own history records that Old Monroe was re-surveyed by civil engineer Charles Du Bois after the railroad arrived, and that the town as it then stood had principally been built after that re-survey. The line that made the modern town, the St. Louis, Keokuk & Northwestern, entered the county from the south at Old Monroe and ran north at the foot of the bluffs on the west side of the Mississippi bottoms. The ground is older than either story: prehistoric earthen mounds stood on the valley floor just north of the railroad bridge over the Cuivre, one destroyed outright when the railroad bed was excavated and others partly cut away.

Route C ends at Route 79, and that is our last mile in

Two state highways meet at Old Monroe on MoDOT's official maps: Missouri Route 79 runs north and south through the town, and lettered Route C ends there after running west past Maryknoll and through Ethlyn to Moscow Mills, which sits on the US 61 corridor. That is how we come to you. It is 20.7 road miles and about 29 minutes, close enough to be routine and far enough that a forgotten box of transition strip costs an hour, so an Old Monroe visit is one planned trip: samples ride out in the truck, and delivery gets a date instead of a maybe.

The Cuivre is a county line, and it has closed the road before

The Cuivre River at Old Monroe is a county line. Missouri statute defines Lincoln County's boundary as beginning in the Mississippi opposite the mouth of the Cuivre and running up the middle of the Cuivre's main channel, so the far bank opposite the town is St. Charles County. The river is a scheduling fact as much as a boundary. The Route 79 corridor by the Cuivre River has been closed by flooding before: during the 2019 Mississippi River flooding, MoDOT announced on May 30, 2019 that it had closed Missouri Route 79 near Highway C and south of the Cuivre River. When the river is high we confirm the approach before a truck leaves the dock.

Maryknoll, Winfield buildings and a fire district of its own

Old Monroe is a fourth-class Missouri city and one of eight cities listed on Lincoln County's own community profile. It has its own fire protection district, the Old Monroe Fire Protection District, which the Missouri Division of Fire Safety registers separately from Lincoln County Fire Protection District #1. A separately named community, Maryknoll, sits about a mile west and is labeled as its own place on MoDOT's official General Highway Map of Lincoln County. Old Monroe's parish, Immaculate Conception at Maryknoll, grew out of a settlement of German Catholic farmers and still runs a school. The Winfield R-IV School District names Old Monroe as one of the four communities it serves, and all six of its schools are Winfield buildings.

What the measure looks like at an Old Monroe address

We come to the house, and that visit is the whole discovery process: every room measured rather than estimated from a plan, doorway heights compared so we know what a transition has to reconcile, closet corners opened where we can, and the crawl space or basement read from underneath if there is access. We take a moisture reading before recommending anything that cares about moisture, which on the valley floor beside the Cuivre is most things. The material conversation happens in the same visit, because asking a household 20.7 miles out to drive back for a sample board is no service at all.

Where an Old Monroe project usually starts

We plan a house here in zones rather than one covering wall to wall. For the bedrooms and the quiet end of the house, start with carpet in Old Monroe. For the living space in a house whose crawl space is worth reading first, start with solid hardwood in Old Monroe. For the kitchen, the laundry and anything that has ever met standing water, start with luxury vinyl plank in Old Monroe. Each of those pages is about this town's houses rather than the material in the abstract. For a sense of the ground here, the Missouri Department of Conservation's Cuivre Island Conservation Area lies near Old Monroe off Dalbow Road: timbered bottomland, old field and sloughs, on the mainland and on islands inside navigation pool 26.