DeKalb County, comprising 270,720 acres of rolling prairie, was organized in February 1845 as one of nineteen Missouri counties and was named for German-born Johann Kalb, a member of the French army and a general in the American Revolution known as Baron de Kalb. In May 1845, Maysville was laid out near the center of the nearly square county as the county seat and was named either for the month of May or for Maysville, Kentucky. The county courthouse, built in 1939, is the fourth courthouse, and west of it stands Maysville's oldest house, a brick home built by Dr. John Black in 1854; in one of the county's few Civil War incidents, Union troops vandalized the house because Black sympathized with the Confederacy. Missouri's first permanent Chautauqua was founded in Maysville in 1896 by Thomas J. Williamson, and its opening lecture, "Last Days of the Confederacy," was given by Gen. J. B. Gordon. James T. Blair, Jr., who became Governor of Missouri in 1957 after serving as Lt. Gov. from 1949 to 1957, was born in Maysville, and his father had been a Missouri Supreme Court judge from 1915 to 1924. The first white settler in DeKalb County was Samuel Vesser, a Canadian Frenchman who made a temporary home near Stewartsville in 1824, the year the Iowa, Sac, and Fox tribes ceded their claims to the area, and permanent settlers, largely from Kentucky and Tennessee, arrived in the late 1820s. In northwest Missouri's Glacial Plains Region, DeKalb developed as a livestock and grain farming county. Maysville, the seat of justice, was the county's only town until Stewartsville was laid out to the south in 1858 on the route chosen by the Hannibal and St. Joseph, later the C. B. and Q.; Stewartsville Academy, later a college, operated there from 1860 to 1885. Osborn was laid out on the same route in 1854, Union Star was founded to the north on the C. B. and Q. in 1879, and after the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific reached Maysville in 1886, Weatherby, Amity, and Clarksdale were founded on that route in 1885. The old Council Bluffs Trace, a post road opened by the U.S. Army in 1823 from Liberty, Missouri, to Fort Atkinson, Nebraska, ran through the county, and Lost Creek near Maysville took its name after several soldiers, lost in the snow, were rescued near the stream.