South of the junction with US 61, US 67 crosses the wide valley of Saline Creek, and enters Fredericktown, 1 m. (722 alt, 3,414 pop.), half hidden by old trees and secure from the flood waters of Castor (Fr., beaver) and Saline Creeks.

Wooded hills and knobs of igneous rock form an arc to the south.

In the town's center is the two-and-a-half-story, red brick Madison County Courthouse, built in the modified Romanesque design of the early 1900's.  

The business buildings on the square, and the prosperous, well-kept homes indicate a county with economic resources somewhat above the average.

In 1800 a group of 13 Creoles erected a number of log houses on a Spanish Grant in the bottomland north of Saline Creek, within the present limits of Fredericktown, and all of the of village St. Michael.

They cultivated farms in the valley and occasionally worked Mine la Motte for lead.

In 1811-12, the “Year of the Great Shake,” the St. Michael area survived the New Madrid Earthquake with little damage, but in June 1814, flood waters of Saline and Castor Creeks almost destroyed the community.

In 1818 Madison County was organized, and the following year Fredericktown, established on the south bank of the Saline Creek, was made the County Seat.  Gradually Fredericktown expanded to include the site of St. Michael.

The community’s growth was slow until the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railroad was extended from Pilot Knob into Arkansas in 1872, affording shipping facilities for the timber and mineral industries of the region.

The valley farms, many of them specializing in dairying, have given the county a certain stability of income, increased sporadically by the production of local mines. 

Lead is the chief mineral product, but appreciable amounts of copper, bismuth, zinc, iron, manganese, antimony, arsenic, nickel, tungsten, and cobalt are also mined.

Granite and marble outcroppings near Fredericktown afford a supply of stone for local building, but the rock has not been quarried to any great extent on a commercial basis.

St. Michael’s Catholic Church, two blocks west of the courthouse, is a red-granite structure of modified Romanesque design, erected in 1927.

Father Lewis Tucker, in charge of the parish from 1845 to 1880, made plans in 1846 for a new Church of St. Michael to replace the log church dating from about 1800.

The Reverend John Rothensteiner, in his Chronicles of an Old Missouri Parish (1917) records that “Father Tucker had ordered a marble slab to he placed above the church door, bearing the inscription of Matthew 21:13;

“My house shall be called a house of prayer.”

The Sculptor, on opening the Bible at the place indicated, read the entire verse:

“My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves,” and so he chiseled in all in the patient stone….”

The unwanted words were filled in with putty, but, as the years passed, the putty became whiter then the surrounding stone so the for nearly a century pious worshippers passed beneath this withering indictment.

Since the razing of the building in 1927, the stone has been preserved in the parish school adjoining the present church.  In the parish house is a painting, The Holy Family, which tradition says was sent to Upper Louisiana by a king of France.

Missouri A Guide to the “Show Me” State – Missouri State Highway Department - 1941

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