Fulton

Fulton was founded in 1825 in Missouri's Little Dixie region to replace poorly located Elizabeth as the seat of Callaway County, which had been organized in 1820 and named for Capt. James Callaway, a grandson of Daniel Boone and a War of 1812 ranger, while the town itself honors Robert Fulton. Callaway County became popularly known as the Kingdom of Callaway after an 1861 War Between the States incident in which "Col." Jefferson Franklin Jones, leading a civilian army of Callaway men, negotiated with Union Gen. John B. Henderson for an agreement that Callaway would not be invaded if Jones disbanded his men, though Fulton was later often occupied by Union troops. Fulton became home to the Missouri School for the Deaf, founded in 1851 as the first such school west of the Mississippi; Westminster College for men, founded in 1851 and chartered in 1853; William Woods, a Christian Church junior college for women, founded in 1869 at Camden Point and moved here in 1890; and State Hospital No. 1 for the mentally ill, chartered in 1847 and opened here in 1851 as one of the first three such hospitals west of the Mississippi. As the capital of the Kingdom of Callaway, the county was early noted for fine horses and for pioneering the development of the famous Missouri mule. South on the Missouri River lay Cote sans Dessein, a French trading post founded in 1808 and the county's first settlement, which was the scene of an Indian attack during the War of 1812 and in 1821 was the first place considered for the Missouri state capital before faulty land titles blocked it. At Westminster College, the phrase "Iron Curtain" was first used in a 1946 speech by Winston Churchill, and Fulton was also associated with a museum collection at William Woods College, a statue of Capt. James Callaway, the School for the Deaf's first head William D. Kerr, Hospital No. 1's Dr. Turner R.H. Smith, and the novelists Nathan C. Kouns, G.W. Hamilton, Caroline A. Stanley, and Henry Bellamann.

Fulton, Missouri · United States