View The Case Study View North Star Press

Client: Missouri City, Texas

Missouri City by any other name ...

By: Jim Parsons

Imagine you're a Missouri City leader and you've stood by and watched as Sugar Land attracted all the fancy business, got developed with huge, expensive houses and built itself a lovely fake downtown. Meanwhile, your own town has managed to stay on the edge of the spotlight, missing out on a lot of the exciting Fort Bend action. What do you do? Press for tax breaks to attract development? Launch a municipal beautification campaign? Advertise? If you're one city leader in particular — Mayor Allen Owen — you decide that what Missouri City really needs is a new name.

“Other cities have done it. Mobile is Mobile Bay. Meadows Place used to be Meadows,” said Missouri City Mayor, Allen Owen.

Right now that’s only an idea.

No new names are under consideration.

“We’re a town of over 70,000 people. What amazes me is we don’t even make the weather map,” said Owen.

Yeah, but changing the town's name isn't necessarily going to get it on the weather map — oh, unless it gets changed to Kansas City, which could confuse the weather map people for a while! But we guess that's not such a great idea after all.

Turns out there's a reason Missouri City is named Missouri City — something we'd always wondered about it. The info comes from The Handbook of Texas Online:

In 1890 R. M. Cash and L. E. Luckle, two Houston real estate investors, bought four square miles of land southwest of Houston. They advertised in St. Louis, Missouri, and surrounding areas and referred to the property as a "land of genial sunshine and eternal summer." In 1893 W. R. McElroy bought eighty acres in the same vicinity and began to promote the area. To tie his promotion into the advertising by Cash and Luckle and help sales in the St. Louis area, he called the new town Missouri City.

Name change or not, it looks like Missouri City will be getting some kind of image makeover: City leaders have hired a marketing firm to help the town re-brand itself. Maybe they'll go back to that whole "land of genial sunshine and eternal summer" thing — or at least change the city logo. Eeeeewwww.