McBaine’s story began with nearby Nashville, founded after Ira Nash received a Spanish land grant in 1800 before the United States owned the Louisiana Territory. Nash, a Virginian and one of the first American settlers in central Missouri, laid out Nashville in 1819, and lots went on sale on Jan. 1, 1820. The town grew as a river town for two decades, but the great flood of 1844 destroyed it, though the Nashville Baptist church, built around 1834 of pecan logs, survived. Nashville residents soon founded Providence one and a half miles north on the edge of the river bluffs, and lots began selling there on July 13, 1844. Providence later prospered as Columbia’s port, but as Columbia gained better transportation connections and the Missouri River shifted course in the late 1800s, Providence declined and became landlocked. The McBaine family, which moved from Kentucky to Boone County in 1822, built extensive farming operations. Turner McBaine and his son James T. McBaine expanded their property, and James later inherited land and slaves, became a Union Army captain at the start of the Civil War, and by 1881 was Boone County’s second-largest taxpayer. A later Turner McBaine, born near Providence in 1853, managed the family’s vast river lands, where wheat, cattle, and hogs were produced on a large scale. Railroad development reshaped the area when the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway built its line along the Missouri River in 1892–93 and a branch to Columbia was completed in 1899. The rail stop, first called Kennard after Samuel M. Kennard, was renamed McBaine after Turner McBaine platted the town and began selling lots on Sept. 20, 1899; the town was incorporated in 1911. Like other bottomland settlements, McBaine faced repeated Missouri River floods, beginning in 1903, with especially severe floods in 1993 and 1995 that forced residents to higher ground, damaged the Katy Trail and nearby wetlands, and threatened Columbia’s water treatment plant.