Fayette, named for the Marquis de Lafayette, was laid out in 1823 to replace Franklin as the seat of Howard County when Franklin had to be abandoned to the encroaching Missouri River. Howard County, named for Benjamin Howard, first governor of Missouri Territory, was organized in 1816 as the first county in the Boon's Lick Country and was so large that some 29 Missouri counties and parts of 9 others were later formed from it. Southwest in the county, Daniel Boone's sons worked a salt lick about 1807, and Benjamin Cooper made the county's first permanent settlement in 1810; two years later he had one of several defensive forts against Indians in the War of 1812. Iowa, Sac, and Fox tribes ceded their claims to the area in 1824. Rapid growth and early wealth made Fayette a cultural and political center in a fertile Missouri River county surrounded by grain and livestock farms. Central College traces its beginning to the pioneer coeducational Howard High School of 1844; later developments included Methodist Central College, authorized in 1853 and chartered in 1855, and Howard Female College, chartered in 1859, and under Bishop W. F. McMurry four church schools united with Central in 1925 to make it the only Methodist college in Missouri. Settled largely by Southerners, Howard County and Fayette became part of Missouri's Little Dixie Region. The Civil War brought little fighting in Fayette but halted progress, and renewed growth did not come until the arrival of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad in 1873. In the pre-Civil War period Fayette was the center of a powerful political clique, and for a time governors John Miller, Thomas Reynolds, Sterling Price, and Claiborne F. Jackson lived there, along with pioneer lawyers John B. Clark and Abiel Leonard, while Episcopal Bishops Ethelbert Talbot and Abiel Leonard Jr., Methodist Bishop E. R. Hendrix, and astronomer Henry S. Pritchett were born there.