Cairo, Illinois

• 1. Introduction

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  Cairo, Illinois sits at the exact point where the Ohio River pours into the Mississippi, the two largest rivers in North America meeting at a sliver of flat, flood-prone land at the very tip of the state. The city was named after Egypt's capital city on the Nile, and the comparison was deliberate. Its founders looked at the watery confluence and saw something like the Nile Delta, a place where geography itself seemed to promise wealth and power.

  At its peak in 1920, Cairo held more than 15,000 people. By 2024, fewer than 1,600 remained. That collapse, from a city of thriving banks and the third-busiest post office in the United States to a place where the last grocery store closed in 2025, is the story this documentary will trace. What built Cairo, what the rivers gave and then took away, and what a century of racial violence and economic abandonment left behind.

• 2. A City Built on Confluence

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  The first municipal charter for Cairo and the Bank of Cairo were both issued in 1818, before a single settler had arrived and before the bank had a single depositor. That gap between ambition and reality defined Cairo's early decades. A second attempt to establish the town, by the Cairo City and Canal Company in 1836-37, included the construction of a large levee to encircle the site. That effort collapsed in 1840 as well, with only a handful of settlers staying on.

  Charles Dickens passed through in 1842 and was so unimpressed that he later used the place as his model for the nightmare City of Eden in his 1843-44 novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Despite that grim literary reputation, investors kept coming. In 1846, a group that included the writer John Neal purchased 10,000 acres in Cairo through the Cairo City Property Trust, aiming to make the city the southern terminus of the projected Illinois Central Railroad. The railroad finally arrived in 1855.

  By the time a new city charter was written in 1857, Cairo was genuinely flourishing. Steamboats ran south all the way to New Orleans, Congress had designated the city as a port of delivery in 1854, and by 1860 the population had exceeded 2,000. Mark Twain took note of the city too. In his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Cairo was the original destination for Huck and Jim, who planned to reach it and then head north to freedom. They drifted past it by mistake.

• 3. Fort Defiance and the Civil War

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  On the 6th of September 1861, Admiral Andrew Hull Foote designated Cairo as the naval station for the Mississippi River Squadron. The choice was purely strategic. Whoever controlled Cairo controlled access to both major rivers flowing into the heart of the continent.

  Because the city had no suitable land for a traditional naval yard, the repair shop machinery was kept afloat on wharf-boats, old steamers, tugs, flat-boats, and rafts. The Navy improvised on the water the same way the city had always improvised on land. In January 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant occupied Cairo and ordered Fort Defiance built to protect the confluence. From that base, Grant launched the campaigns south that proved decisive for the Union cause, using Cairo as a supply base and troop training center for the rest of the war.

  The military occupation came with an economic cost that outlasted the war. Army logistics diverted much of the city's commercial trade by rail to Chicago. After the fighting ended, Cairo could not win that trade back. Chicago was growing too fast, drawing in stockyards, meat processing, and heavy industry. Cairo's post-war economy settled into agriculture, lumber, and sawmills instead.

• 4. The Custom House and Peak Prosperity

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  Construction began in 1869 on the United States Custom House and Post Office in Cairo, designed by Alfred B. Mullet, the Supervising Architect of the Treasury. The building was completed in 1872 and served simultaneously as a custom house, post office, and federal court. At the height of Cairo's prosperity, the post office inside it was the third busiest in the entire United States.

  The Custom House is one of only seven Victorian structures by Mullet that still stand anywhere in the country. It has since been converted into a museum and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois held sessions there until 1905, and various federal courts continued using the building until the new U.S. Post Office and Courthouse was built at 1500 Washington in 1942.

  The city that surrounded the Custom House in those prosperous decades was built by wealthy merchants and shippers. The Italianate Magnolia Manor was completed in 1872 by the Cairo businessman Charles A. Galigher. The Second Empire Riverlore Mansion was built in 1865 by Captain William P. Halliday. Anna E. Safford paid for the construction of the Cairo Public Library in 1883 and donated it to the city; it was dedicated on the 19th of July 1884 as the A. B. Safford Memorial Library.

  By the late 19th century, nearly 250,000 railroad cars could be ferried across the river in as little as six months. Motor vehicles joined that traffic as well, because there were no automobile bridges in the area in the early 20th century. The ferry industry alone sustained a significant portion of Cairo's workforce.

• 5. Levees and Flood Gates

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  Cairo's geography made wealth possible and made destruction a constant threat. The city sits at the lowest elevation of any location in Illinois and is the only city in the state completely enclosed by levees and flood walls. Several of the city's most important buildings, including the old Custom House, were originally designed to be built up to the height of the levee tops. The cost of raising the surrounding streets and land proved too high, and the plan was abandoned.

  In 1914, a massive flood gate was constructed by Stupp Brothers of St. Louis, Missouri. Known as the "Big Subway Gate", it seals the northern levee by closing over U.S. Highway 51. The gate weighs 80 tons, stands 24 feet high, stretches 60 feet wide, and runs five feet thick. When closed, Cairo becomes an island.

  The Ohio River flood of 1937 pushed water in Cairo to a crest of 59.5 feet, a record level. To protect the city, the Corps of Engineers closed the flood gate and breached the Bird's Point levee for the first time, relieving pressure on the Cairo flood wall. After the flood, the concrete wall was raised to its current height, designed to hold back water up to 64 feet. The entire city was evacuated again during the Mississippi River floods of 2011, when the Ohio River rose above even those 1937 levels, with the prospect of Cairo being submerged under 15 feet of water.

• 6. Racial Violence and the United Front

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  In 1900, Cairo held a population of nearly 13,000 people, of whom approximately 5,000 were African American. That figure, roughly 38 percent of the city, was an unusually high proportion for a northern Illinois town at that time. Five percent of all Black residents in the entire state of Illinois lived in Cairo.

  On the night of the 11th of November 1909, two men were lynched. William James, a Black man accused of the rape and murder of Anna Pelly, was the first. Henry Salzner, a white man accused of murdering his wife the previous August, was the second. A group of civil rights activists in Chicago hired the journalist Ida B. Wells to investigate. Governor Deneen enforced the state's 1905 anti-lynching law by dismissing Sheriff Davis for failing to protect either man.

  On the 16th of July 1967, Robert Hunt, a 19-year-old Black soldier home on leave, was allegedly found hanged in the Cairo police station. Police reported a suicide; the Black community accused the police of murder. The following day, a large portion of Black residents began rioting. Three stores and a warehouse were burned to the ground, and the National Guard was called in. On the 20th of July, a spokesman for approximately one hundred residents of the Pyramid Court housing project warned that Cairo would look like Rome burning if their demands for jobs, recreation programs, and an end to police brutality were not met by the 23rd.

  In early 1969, activists formed the Cairo United Front, bringing together the local NAACP, a cooperative association, and two Black street gangs. The United Front presented seven demands to the city, including the appointment of a Black police chief, a Black assistant fire chief, and an equal Black-white ratio across all city jobs. That summer, Illinois Governor Richard Ogilvie deployed National Guardsmen to restore order. The United Front simultaneously launched a decade-long boycott of white-owned businesses. In December 1969, residents of the Pyramid Courts opened fire on firemen and the Chief of Police responding to a fire. The Chief of Police resigned the following month, saying Cairo lacked the means to deal with what he called "guerrilla warfare tactics".

• 7. Bridges That Bypassed a City

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  Cairo's economic unraveling can be tracked bridge by bridge. In 1889, the Illinois Central Railroad bridge across the Ohio River was completed. Ferry business began to shrink immediately. In 1905, a second bridge was built across the Mississippi at Thebes, Illinois, cutting rail traffic through Cairo further still and ending railroad ferry operations entirely.

  In 1929, the Cairo Mississippi River Bridge was completed, linking Missouri with Illinois just south of the city. The Cairo Ohio River Bridge followed in 1937. With those two crossings in place, the ferry industry that had employed so many Cairo residents was finished. Motorists traveling between Missouri and Kentucky now crossed the southern tip of Illinois at the new bridges, completely bypassing Cairo.

  In 1978, the Cairo I-57 Bridge across the Mississippi opened, routing interstate traffic north of the city. What little was left of the hospitality industry was crippled. Cairo's hospital closed in December 1986, citing high debt and too few patients. By the time of the 2020 census, the population had fallen to 1,733, an 89 percent loss from the 1920 peak over the span of a century. The city had declined in every single U.S. census report from 1950 through 2020, eight consecutive counts heading in one direction.

• 8. What Remains

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  The 2020 census found that the median income for a household in Cairo was $27,661, and that 36.2 percent of the population lived below the poverty line. Among residents under the age of 18, that figure was 72.1 percent. The median age had climbed to 49.4 years, a city increasingly composed of older residents without the economic options to leave.

  In 2017, the federal government announced the closure of the Elmwood and McBride housing projects. Ben Carson, then the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, visited in August of that year. Ten families had found new housing at the time of his visit; an estimated 400 people were expected to be affected. Demolition of the complexes began on the 3rd of May 2019.

  In 2023, the first grocery store since 2015 opened in Cairo. It closed in 2025 after sales came in below expectations. Cairo's Head Start preschool program shut down in 2024. Shawnee Community College had opened an extension center in the city in January 2019, and a community clinic continues to offer medical and dental care. Local media still includes the Cairo Citizen, a weekly newspaper, and radio station WKRO.

  The landmarks that survived the decades are still there: the Custom House and Post Office, Magnolia Manor, the A. B. Safford Memorial Library with its stained glass windows and ornate woodwork, Fort Defiance Park, and the 1902 public sculpture The Hewer by George Gray Barnard. Plans for heritage tourism built around the city's rivers and history remain in discussion. The Big Subway Gate, all 80 tons of it, still stands ready to seal the northern levee if the Ohio rises again.