Fulton's heritage as a small river town extends to 1835, when John Baker, traveling up the Mississippi River, noticed a stretch where the river narrowed amid flatlands and bluffs and saw it as a perfect site for a town and ferry service. He established Baker's Ferry and began ferry service to Iowa within a year. The town was later renamed Fulton in honor of inventor Robert Fulton, and it soon became an important transfer and warehouse port. In the 1850s, settlers, including many immigrants from Holland and other European countries, arrived in the area. Some became farmers and merchants, while others worked in sawmills producing lumber for rafts, boats, bridges, and buildings, and many also found employment with the railroad as it expanded west. In 1858, the town's first school for grades 1-12 opened. Afterward, a military college for Civil War soldiers was built and later became Northern Illinois College and Hansen's Military Academy, which closed in 1912. Several generations of President Ronald Reagan's family lived and worked in Fulton; his parents were born there and married at the rectory of the Fulton Catholic Church, whose cemetery contains the Reagan family plot, and the family's connections to the town continued well into the 20th century. Because the Mississippi narrows at Fulton, it became an ideal place to bridge the river, and for more than a century bridges have connected east and west there, while Lock and Dam 13 also spans the river at Fulton. Fulton has remained a vital community into the 21st century.