Clinton County, once part of Missouri's western boundary, was organized in 1833 and named for New York Governor DeWitt Clinton. It lost its boundary status in 1837 when the Indian Platte Purchase extended the state border to the Missouri. Plattsburg, the county seat, was founded in 1833 on a site selected by commissioners David R. Atchison, Howard Everett, and John Long; first called Concord, then Springfield, it was named in 1835 for Plattsburg, Clinton County, New York. A U.S. Land Office operated there from 1843 to 1859 to handle sales in the Platte Purchase, and James H. Birch, later a Missouri Supreme Court judge, was the first register of public land. Plattsburg Methodist College opened there in 1855 and closed in 1897 under the private ownership of J.W. Ellis. Cameron, the county's second town, was laid out in 1855, and the Hannibal and St. Joseph reached it in 1859. Cameron Institute, or Missouri Wesleyan College, operated from 1883 to 1928. Near Cameron is Wallace State Park, founded in 1932 and named for a local family. Lathrop, known as a horse and mule market in the Boer War and World War I, dates from 1867. One of Missouri's leading cattle counties, Clinton County is also a producer of grain, dairy, and poultry. In territory ceded by the Iowa, Sac, and Fox tribes in 1824, the county was settled in the late 1820s by Southerners, New Englanders, and Missourians. During the war years of 1861 to 1865, guerrilla raiders halted growth. The 1870s brought the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific and Santa Fe railroads, and the Quincy, Omaha and Kansas City came in 1897; new towns were laid out along the routes, and Plattsburg, Cameron, and Lathrop developed as important shipping points. In Plattsburg stands the state's statue of David Rice Atchison, who lived from 1807 to 1886, served as a U.S. senator from 1843 to 1855, and was a proslavery leader in the Missouri-Kansas border trouble; he is buried in Plattsburg, and his home is in Gower. It is claimed that he was President for a Day because he was president pro tempore of the Senate when Zachary Taylor's inauguration was delayed from Sunday, March 4, 1849, to Monday. Plattsburg was also the birthplace of newspaper writer O.O. McIntyre, who lived from 1884 to 1938, and the home of novelist J. Breckenridge Ellis, who lived from 1870 to 1956. Musician Don Gillis was born in Cameron, and artist G.E. Burr lived there.