Hardin, MO

Hardin is a Ray County city in the Kansas City metropolitan area, with 571 people at the 2020 census. It was laid out in 1868 and named for Charles Henry Hardin, Missouri's 22nd governor; its post office dates to 1858. The city sits in a farming landscape near the Missouri River, and its main-street history includes the businesses that served a larger working community: dealerships, groceries, restaurants, banks, salons, gas stations, baseball, and skating. The city now points to farming, school, and community programs as the parts of local life that continue.

Hardin's defining memory is the Great Flood of 1993. On July 12, a levee broke, flooding the city and cemetery. Water washed out more than 700 graves; local accounts record 793 or more burials displaced, 645 remains recovered, 120 identified and reburied, and 525 placed individually with numbered markers. The cemetery was rededicated in 1995. That history gives Hardin a place on the Missouri River flood map as well as the farming map. The local scoop is a city where an ordinary main-street past and one of Missouri's most difficult cemetery recoveries sit side by side.