City of Dust: A Cement Company Town in the Land of Tom Sawyer

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. In 1901, the Atlas Portland Cement Company built a cement plant outside Hannibal. Shortly thereafter, Ilasco, whose name was an acronym for cement manufacturing ingredients, quickly developed as a town for the plant's predominantly immigrant labor force. The introduction of Rumanian, Slovak, Italian, and Hungarian immigrants into this agricultural area located next to Tom Sawyer's cave on the edge of Little Dixie created cultural and social tensions. These tensions peaked during a 1910 strike when Governor Herbert S. Hadley ordered the Missouri National Guard to occupy the "foreign colony." . Following the strike, Atlas sought to control its labor force by controlling the saloons, other businesses, and real estate of Ilasco. Atlas officials and Hannibal community leaders also sought to legitimize the company's presence by portraying it as the caretaker of Twain's boyhood home and historic heritage. Atlas steadily gained control over Ilasco properties and increased its influence in the Hannibal area. Soon the company had the power to determine Ilasco's future. Ultimately, Atlas officials, Missouri highway officials, and local business leaders promoting the growing Mark Twain tourist industry closed ranks to relocate scenic Highway 79 through the heart of Ilasco, effectively destroying the town. City of Dust weaves together labor, social, business, immigration, and environmental history. Andrews's thorough treatment of the subject places Ilasco in a larger regional and national context and increases our understanding of deindustrialization in twentieth-century America.