Silas Atchison recorded the plat for the town of Jacksonville, later Versailles, on August 28, 1819. The village’s name changed from Jacksonville, used from 1819 to 1837, to Versailles, used from 1837 to 1854; North Jacksonville was added from 1842 to 1854, and the incorporated Village of Versailles dates from 1855 to the present. Born in Virginia in 1787 to Henry and Mary Atchison, Silas moved around 1790 with the John Craig and Zachariah Hole families to Hole’s Station near Miamisburg, Ohio. On April 19, 1809, he married Mary Craig in Montgomery County, Ohio; she was the daughter of John and Elizabeth Hole Craig. After Darke County was formed in 1809 but remained under Miami County’s control until after the signing of the Greenville Treaty in 1814, Atchison bought 160 acres in Wayne Township on November 30, 1815. He served the next year on a Board of Commissioners preparing a governing body for Darke County and in March 1817 became one of the county’s three original commissioners for a one-year term. Afterward he focused on his Wayne Township land and laid out Jacksonville. Silas and Mary Atchison had four children—John Henry, Silas Monroe, Samuel Scott, and Elizabeth. Around 1830 the family sold its Darke County land and moved to Cass County, Indiana, where Silas was among the early settlers of Georgetown on the Wabash River and kept the township’s first tavern before later leaving for California. By 1848 the family was in California Territory at Foster Bar on the Yuba River, a center of the Gold Rush, where the Eldorado hotel was operated by the Atchison brothers. Silas Atchison’s sons John Henry, Silas Monroe, and Samuel Scott also worked as contractors building roads and bridges in Yuba County, including the Yuba turnpike from Marysville to Comptonville, spanning the Yuba River and connecting Foster Bar and Atchison Bar. Silas Atchison, who laid out the village later known as Versailles, died in Parks Bar Township, Yuba County, California, in May 1860 at age 72.