Troy was laid out in 1819 on the site of Woods' Fort at an old Sac and Fox Indian campsite where first settlers Joseph Cottle and Zadock Woods built cabins in 1801. Outraged by their 1804 land cession, which included this region, the Sac and Fox tribes carried the War of 1812 west of the Mississippi into north Missouri. To defend their homes in what is now Lincoln County, pioneers aided by Rangers under Nathan Boone built Woods, Howard, Stout, Clark, and Cap au Gris forts as a first line of defense. At Fort Cap au Gris, Maj. Zachary Taylor's command rendezvoused in September 1814, and at Fort Howard on May 24, 1815, five months after the war, Black Hawk's band skirmished with settlers and Rangers in the Battle of the Sink Hole. The Sac and Fox finally gave up all claim to the region in 1824. The Lincoln County seat, earlier at Old Monroe and Alexandria, was located at Troy in 1829. Organized in 1818, the county was named by its first settler, Christopher Clark, for Lincoln counties in North Carolina and Kentucky, which honor Revolutionary Gen. Benjamin Lincoln. As early as the 1790's, roving hunters and trappers took up Spanish land grants in the fertile Cuivre River Valley. During the Civil War, fighting missed pro-Southern Lincoln County, though Union troops occupied Troy almost continually. The area prospered when the St. Louis and Hannibal R.R. reached Troy in 1882. Early schools included Lincoln Academy, later Troy Christian Institute, chartered in 1835, and Buchanan College, founded in 1894. Troy was the birthplace of Frederick G. Bonfils, noted co-editor of the Denver Post, while Elliot W. Major, thirty-third governor of Missouri, was a native of the county, and Congressman Clarence Cannon was born in Elsberry. Troy serves as a trade and legal center for a Mississippi River county in Missouri's Glacial Plains region, an area of livestock, grain, and poultry farming, and nearby are Cuivre River State Park, the 1870 courthouse, and the 1859 Christian and 1868 Presbyterian churches.