What Missouri Has to Brag About

Facts that make MO famous...and other random ones that you might not have heard about:

• New York may have stolen the title to our beloved Kansas City Strip Steak, but who can blame them.  When here in good ole KC, we boast of more miles of boulevards than Paris, and only Rome can claim more fountains!
• The Californians may get the headliners when it comes to earthquakes today, but the most powerful earthquake to strike the United States occurred here in Missouri in 1811.  It shook the area of a million square miles and was powerful enough to crack sidewalks in Washington D.C. and ring church bells in Boston.
• The very first Olympic Games held on US soil were held in St. Louis in 1904.  
• The city of Branson is located within a day’s drive from fifty percent of the entire population of the country. 
• In 1865, Missouri became the first slave state to free their slaves.
• The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is the tallest monument in the United States.
• Dr. Pepper was introduced to the world at the World’s Fair in 1904 in St. Louis.
• The first successful parachute jump to be made from a moving airplane was made by Captain Berry at St. Louis, in 1912.  
• At the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, the ice cream cone was invented. An ice cream vendor ran out of cups and asked a waffle vendor to help by rolling up waffles to hold ice cream. 
• Kansas City has more miles of freeway per capita than any metro area with more than 1 million residents.  
• Saint Louis University received a formal charter from the state of Missouri in 1832, making it the oldest University west of the Mississippi.
• In 1889, Aunt Jemima pancake flour, invented at St. Joseph, Missouri, was the first self-rising flour for pancakes and the first ready-mix food ever to be introduced commercially. 
• During Abraham Lincoln's campaign for the presidency, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat named Valentine Tapley from Pike County, Missouri, swore that he would never shave again if Abe were elected. Tapley kept his word and his chin whiskers went unshorn from November 1860 until he died in 1910, attaining a length of twelve feet six inches. 

         http://www.50states.com/facts/mo.htm