Cairo had it all. Even now, with many of its elegant buildings collapsing or falling into slow ruin and the population at just a 10th of what it was in its rambunctious heyday, the place is a marvel.
Cairo was built on the extreme southern tip of Illinois, on the narrow intersection of land where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet. It was the town Huckleberry Finn and Jim set out to reach on their imperishable raft.
Advertisements in the archives of its several daily newspapers – the Delta, the Sun and the Monitor – contain proof of opulent hotels, jazz and blues clubs, restaurants and thriving local businesses and of coming prosperity.
Now, on a teeming hot day in July, Dollar General is one of the few open businesses on the main street. A lone customer holds his plastic bag of groceries as he steers his motorised cart down the deserted main street. Otherwise, all is still.
RM Block
Everything – the fire station, the churches, the old custom house, makeshift shops – lacks people. In YouTube land, Cairo has been repackaged as a ghost-town, with dozens of auteur films featuring intrepid “investigators” rifling through the detritus of offices and abandoned homes.
It’s punishingly hot. The port on the Ohio side of the water is quiet also. A car containing a group of youngsters comes out of the gate, windows open, stereo at full volume, and vanishes down the street. A thick midday silence and torpor dominates the hot noontime atmosphere.
From a peak of 15,000 residents a century ago, the last census had just 1,700 people living in Cairo, a fate the original dreamers could not have foreseen. Cairo was famous from the get-go, and visitors – apart from Charles Dickens, who was not charmed – forecast greatness.
“This tiny village gives itself an anticipatory air of a great city,” recorded French traveller Jules Rouby, visiting in the mid-1800s.
“The time is sure to come when Cairo will be the largest city in the world,” declared one of the Cairo elders. That was at a time when speculators were mapping out a strategic future, plotted around its unique position at the confluence of the US’s holy rivers, which would see the upcoming city eclipse places such as Cincinnati and St Louis, even mighty Chicago, as the beacon of Midwest commercial and cultural might.
“We’s safe, Huck, we’s safe. Jump up and crak yo’ heels! Dat’s de good ole Cairo at las’,” Jim tells his companion in Mark Twain’s classic novel, set in the 1840s. But, of course, they had drifted past Cairo in a fog and were carried by the Mississippi into the treacheries of slave country.
The chapter stands like a warning to Cairo itself, whose local history contains multitudes about the great themes of the United States – ambition, industrial expansion, good times, war, folly, bigotry and racial tension.
Something went wrong. Last year the town’s most significant achievement was the opening of the Cairo Community Food Market, a local initiative that meant Dollar General was no longer the only option for groceries. Locals celebrated with a placard reading: “No longer a food desert.” In the US of 2024, that was a modest achievement.
Driving through Cairo now is a disorienting experience. The breathtaking scope and the location make it easy to understand why Lewis and Clark spent time here to practise their skills in determining longitude and latitude; why, during the civil war, Ulysses S Grant set up a military camp at Fort Defiance, where soldiers bathed right at the tip where the imperious rivers mingle.
A narrow metal bridge transports cars across the Ohio river from Kentucky into Illinois. Take a sharp right and drive for five minutes and you are on the equally narrow, unadorned Mississippi bridge, ferrying cars across that river into Missouri.
Crossing three states and two mythical rivers in just 10 minutes: it’s unique. The bridges are a reminder of why Cairo failed: the town was bypassed by progress.
Cairo itself is a sprawling catechism of empty residential streets, gorgeous postbellum-era grand houses such as Riverlore and Magnolia Manor on Washington Avenue, a garage with a pizza stand and a bar that opened a few years ago.
Some people were trying to hold on so tight to what they had that they lost it
— Toya Wilson
Haughty abandoned gems stand everywhere, including the Gem Theatre, not far from the riverfront and shuttered for longer than most living residents remember. Cairo is a mixed-up dream of a place, a card-pack shuffling 19th-century grandiosity with the Formica-era low-builds of the 1970s. And if it feels like thousands quit the place in a hurry, that’s because they did.
Cairo demands an answer to the question that screams through the mind of any visitor: what happened here?
“I think Cairo could have prospered, personally,” says Toya Wilson quietly when I call in to the local library.
“Mistakes were made, at all levels. I think some people were trying to hold on so tight to what they had that they lost it. And in years past we had mayors who weren’t trying to help the town succeed, but to help themselves. Growing up here in the ’80s and ’90s, we had grocery stores and gas stores. We had four schools – two elementary, a junior high and a high school. It was a nice place to live. But it just continued to deteriorate because people continued to not put the interests of the city first.”
Wilson graduated from college in 1991, and taught school in Cairo for three years. She remembers being able to buy her furniture in a local bespoke store, now long closed. Two years ago she returned from Michigan and took up her role as director of the Cairo library, which stands as another symbol of the town’s lost splendour. The red-bricked house was built in 1884 by Ana Safford, one of the local eminences, as a memorial to her husband.
Inside it is immaculately maintained as both a treasure trove and an active library. Toya’s colleague, Ruth Morrison, shows me around. There’s a chest of drawers from 18th-century France on the mezzanine level of the staircase.
Neat rows of padded chairs are arranged in the meeting room, enhanced by stained-glass windows. In the corner is a writing desk belonging to former president Andrew Jackson.
Across the way, the Ladies’ Meeting Room. Downstairs, the Reading Room, the preserve of gentlemen of the day, contains among its artefacts a polished card table from a river boat.
It’s a stunning public building: welcoming because of its staff but overwhelming in its ghostliness too. Out-of-town visitors call in seeking old newspaper stories or information about grandparents who owned a home or business in the town.
The quick version of Cairo’s rise and fall is that it was a briefly prosperous river town that tried to convert into a railroad hub.
It experienced the US’s racial tensions in reverse: archives depict early signs of integration but by the late-1960s, Cairo was in the midst of prolonged and sometimes violent civil rights protests between the prevailing white merchant class and black residents whom they refused to employ. It ultimately led to the closure of many thriving businesses and the relocation to nearby communities like Paducah and Cape Girardeau. The Gem Theatre’s fate is typical of the racial fallout.
“Some parts of Cairo were integrated early on,” says Wilson. “And other parts were not. It was weird that way. I found books that showed black students at Cairo High in the 1950s. They were marching [in the civil rights era] because they weren’t hiring black people in the stores. But there were black police officers as early as 1910.
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“The Gem Theatre... it was whites only. And there was a theatre across the street for black people that was torn down. So when integration came, the Gem closed. They just shut it down.
“When they held demonstrations outside the all-white swimming pool in Cairo, somebody purchased it and they filled it in. I think it was owned by the Rotary Club before that. The new owners were draining it and figured it would cost too much to maintain. It was a different story to what we all heard, which was that they filled it in because of integration. But that seemed to be the solution here. Tear it down. Close it up. They did not try and repair anything. So, there was a lot of old, beautiful buildings in Cairo that they just tore town.”
One of the rare new businesses in Cairo is CosmicCreations – Wings & More, a drive-through restaurant set up by Romello Orr four years ago. Now, he has a sister restaurant in nearby Mound City, where I find him navigating the grill and friers. Sauced wings, breaded mushrooms, corned nuggets, fried okra, chicken and waffles and grilled salad are among the most popular items.
After graduating from college, Orr was a state employee as a mental health technician but a serious assault from a patient forced him out of work for a prolonged period. Encouraged by his family, he invested his dwindling savings in cooking equipment and flipped a passion into a business.
Now he is one of the few people from Cairo who can employ others and has followed his late father in getting elected to the city council.
“When I first got elected as councilman, I figured maybe the older generation just didn’t know how to go about doing things,” he says, raising his voice to be heard over the kitchen fan.
“But there are so many areas of red tapes and barriers keeping you from doing anything. For instance, if you walk through Cairo today you have so many buildings falling in on themselves, burnt down buildings with overgrown lots.
“We have the ordinance but we don’t have the enforcement to go after the owners to clean them up. And the city has gone through corruption – officials stealing money and things. So, we don’t have the funds and capital that we should have.”
To those of Orr’s generation – the father of three is 27 years old – the civil rights protests of the late-1960s, and an infamous lynching of a black man, 50 years earlier, are unforgettable incidents on which the fate of Cairo turned. But Orr still believes in his home city.
“It was fun here as a kid. We had more things than we do now,” he says. “We used to have kids’ clubs, summer camps, places to eat and go get ice-cream and candy.
“As a kid it doesn’t take a lot for you to step out and have fun. There were so many people and so much interaction. You would meet friends at the park and have the whole day with them. There is a lot of pride in Cairo. It’s a friendly place. Yeah, you go on YouTube and search for Cairo, you get ‘ghost town’ and all that. It’s really nothing like that. You can walk up to a stranger and talk to them here.”
Orr’s business model is a clever, attractive proposition that balances the treat of eating out with the income limitations of an economically repressed community. His ambition is to encourage other young people to have faith to set up businesses in Cairo – and to attract more people to move there.
An exodus that began in the 1950s has never really stopped. An enforced evacuation when the Mississippi threatened to flood in 2011 prompted a good number of families to make lives elsewhere. Within the past decade, two housing projects were demolished after the buildings were condemned after financial malfeasance. Just like that, Cairo lost 400 families.
“I’ll never forget when I was hearing in New York about how they were bustin’ all those immigrants,” says Orr.
“I was like, send them out to us! We want them! If we have just 500 more people moving here, that’s a game changer. And that might attract another 500. That’s how you grow again.
“I know a lot of Mexican people and they are some of the hardest working people anywhere. They come in and they work harder than anyone on the job. So, if they are able to fight for their citizenship and get their papers and move to areas like Cairo, that would be great. Our cities are dying because people are moving away to bigger cities.
“Just 30 minutes in any direction from us are cities that are growing. They are adding more franchise and factories and jobs. And that brings more people to live.”
I have a lot of Latino customers and they were diehard Trump supporters. And now they’ve taken all the Trump flags and signs down
— Romello Orr
He notes that in the midst of rocketing property costs throughout the US, Cairo dwellings cost next to nothing, relatively speaking. Commercial lots in nearby towns start at $150,000. In Cairo, they are $5,000. A private residential property can be bought for $9,000. One February listing on Mark Twain Real Estate offered a five-bedroom period house on Park Place, in immaculate condition, complete with original chandelier, beamed ceilings, oak floors, and an enclosed front porch for $85,000.
It’s not impossible to imagine Orr’s reversal of fortune. But it would take courage and reverse-integration. Cairo gets modest state funding. Grand plans to reimagine the riverfront as a tourist destination delivered a fraction of the required grants: official belief in Cairo is stymied by past failures. If it is to turn things around, it will be down to the locals.
Recently, the city of Cairo sold the prestige mansion Riverlore to a young couple who intend to turn it into a luxury bed and breakfast. It’s another small but vital promise.
And somewhere in the mess of Cairo’s predicament is the siren sound of contemporary America: the nasally, seductive voice of Donald Trump. He has, of course, never stood on the confluence point at Fort Defiance, nor, one can bet, has he wondered what it is like to live in an American city that, a century ago, had the Cairo Coca-Cola minor league baseball teams and its own opera house but is now a “food desert”.
Trump has never been here – but then, neither has Joe Biden, nor Bill Clinton, nor George Bush, nor Barack Obama. Why would they?
Cairo, like countless other river towns, was a faller in the relentless, furious drive for expansion, for more. And the US is pitiless about fallers. Trump’s message and voice travelled across the interior. All but one southern Illinois county voted heavily Republican. Cairo City, 67 per cent black now, still voted Democrat in the Republican county of Alexander, but Orr knows plenty of people who were persuaded by Trump.
“I believe they were just tired of inflation. A lot of good things did come out of the Biden administration. Gas was up. Things like that. Where are we now and has it changed – or is it getting worse?
“I have a lot of Latino customers in Cairo and they were diehard Trump supporters. And now they’ve taken all the Trump flags and signs down because they did not believe he was going to do the mass deportations; ICE picking people up.
“So now it is more anger for the man than, Oh, we love it. But he promised he was going to do it and he fulfilled it. You can’t be mad at him for that. People thought he was going to bring all the changes that he promised.”
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One of the more prominent books in the display case in the library is Herman Lantz’s 1972 study A Community in Search of Itself: A Case History of Cairo, Illinois.
It charts the early cocksure optimism of speculators through to the dual-edged blessing of the rivers, the abject failure of local government and “the development of an economy greatly dependent on liquor, gambling and prostitution, which lent the town an atmosphere of lawlessness and impermanence and the development of attitudes of pessimism, apathy and resignation on the part of a populace whose community had a continual record of failure.”
But 50 years after that bleak obituary, Cairo is still alive. In September it will host its 12th Heritage Blues and Gospel Festival, a free event that draws thousands of day-trippers.
Orr says first-timers can never quite get over Cairo when they see it. It is its own place, a world removed from the bland uniformity of suburban America. And it has a stunning story.
“It is always that number one question,” he says, standing in the hot sun outside his restaurant on Cairo’s central boulevard, designed when the future possibilities seem limitless.
“Why is Cairo not doing what it should be doing? But I feel like, sometimes it just takes someone to think different to change people’s minds about a place.”
