Kennett, in Missouri's Southeast Lowland Region on the site of a Delaware and Shawnee village, was laid out as the seat of Dunklin County in 1846. First called Chilletecaux for a Delaware Indian living there, and later known as Butler, it was renamed for St. Louis Mayor L.M. Kennett in 1851, while the county was named for Gov. Daniel Dunklin. Kennett grew as a trade and legal center as Dunklin County developed into a noted cotton, soybean, and livestock farming area. When the county was organized in 1845, it was an isolated region of forest, overflowed land, and swamp still bearing the marks of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12; hunters and trappers were followed by settlers who came to harvest the forests. Land reclamation advanced after 1893 through county drainage districts and levees on the St. Francis River, and Dunklin County became part of the Little River Drainage District, one of the largest drainage systems in the U.S., organized in 1905. Drainage districts covered about 300,000 of the county's 347,524 acres. Kennett is the seat of the first Bootheel county formed after Missouri became a state, and Dunklin, Pemiscot, and part of New Madrid are said to have remained in Missouri through the efforts of pioneer planter J. Hardeman Walker. During the Civil War, Dunklin County became known as the Independent State of Dunklin after a resolution adopted at Clarkton in 1862 declared that it would secede from the Union; Union troops were briefly in Kennett and Clarkton in 1863, and guerrilla raiders roamed the area constantly. Recovery began with the arrival of the Little River Valley and Ark. R.R. to Malden in 1878 and a branch line to Kennett in 1890, while reclamation in the 1890s helped raise the population from 21,706 in 1900 to 45,329 in 1950. Near Cardwell on the St. Francis River, Dunklin County contains Missouri's lowest point at 230 feet altitude, and eight copper, eagle-embossed Indian ceremonial plates later placed in the Wulfing Collection at Washington University in St. Louis were found north of there near Malden in 1906.