Callaway County Agri-Facts
CALLAWAY COUNTY is in the central
part the State. It is bounded on
the north by Audrain county; east by
Montgomery county; south by the
Missouri River, which courses its
border for about forty miles and
divides it from Osage and Cole
counties; the west by Boone county.
It has a land area of 539,000 acres.
French-Canadian hunters and trappers
established the first settlement in
the area in 1808, a trading post and
village they called Cote Sans
Dessein, on the Missouri River
bottom opposite the mouth of the
Osage River. In the fall of 1815,
Jonathan Crow and John Ham settled
on land about ten miles southeast of
the present site of Fulton, the
county seat, on Big Aux Vasse Creek,
so named by Frenchmen, who while
crossing it with a wagon train
became mired.
Subsequent settlers generally came
from Virginia, Tennessee and
Kentucky, and so, at the outbreak of
the Civil War, Callaway citizens
strongly favored the Southern Cause.
An episode in 1861 provided the
legend of the "Kingdom of Callaway",
after which the county was occupied
by Federal troops for the remainder
of the war.
Mule breeding was important in the
county, and McCredie, eight miles
north of Fulton, was a principal
mule shipping center through World
War I.
Fulton is the home of the Fulton
State Hospital and the Missouri
School for Deaf, both institutions
the first of their kind west of the
Mississippi, and of Westminster and
William Woods Colleges. It was at
Westminster that Sir Winston
Churchill made his famous "Iron
Curtain" speech in March 1946, which
has been memorialized by the
reconstruction of the bombed out
Church of St. Mary Aldermanbury,
removed from the city of London as a
gift from the British Parliament.
The Fulton nuclear power plant,
located ten miles southeast of
Fulton, is one of only two nuclear
power plants in the State of Missouri.
It was put on line in 1984 by
Union Electric Company.
Source: Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri
Missouri Agricultural Statistics Service
Missouri Agri-Facts
Callaway County Agri-Facts