The city of St. Louis / sketched & drawn on stone by Parsons & Atwater.

In the early years of the war many civilian ships were confiscated for military use, while both sides built new ships. The most popular ships were tinclads—mobile, small ships that actually contained no tin. These ships were former merchant ships, generally about 150 feet in length, with about two to six feet of draft, and about 200 tons. Shipbuilders would remove the deck and add an armored pilothouse as well as sheets of iron around the forward part of the casemate and the engines. Most of the tinclads had six guns: two or three twelve-pounder or twenty-four-pounder howitzers on each broadside, with two heavier guns, often thirty-two-pounder smoothbores or thirty-pounder rifles, in the bow. These ships proved faster than ironclads and, with such a shallow draft, worked well on the tributaries of the Mississippi.

The history of St. Louis, Missouri from 1866 was marked by rapid growth, and the population of St. Louis increased so that it became the fourth largest city in the United States after New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago. This collection includes "Pictorial St. Louis, the Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley, a Topographical Survey Drawn in Perspective, A.D. 1875, by Camille N. Dry, Designed and Edited by Richard J. Compton." During and shortly after the Civil War, St. Louis had suffered: cholera and typhoid in 1866. In the early 1870s, new industries began to grow in St. Louis. By 1880, St. Louis was the third largest raw cotton market in the United States with industries such as brewing, flour milling, slaughtering, machining, and tobacco processing, paint, bricks, bag, iron. Among the downsides to rapid industrialization was pollution. Brick firing produced particulate air pollution and paint making created lead dust, while beer and liquor brewing produced grain swill. During the 1880s, the city grew from 350,518 to 451,770, making it the country's fourth-largest. The Panic of 1893 and subsequent depression and the overproduction of grain hit flour milling and most industries suffered declines.