Troy, two miles west, was named for the famous city of Greek antiquity. After Doniphan County was organized in 1855, Troy was chosen as the county seat, and business began there in 1856. At first it played a secondary role to the Missouri River towns of Elwood, Iowa Point, and White Cloud, but the arrival of the railroad in 1869 made it more important than communities that depended on the river for their economic life. Early in December 1859, Abraham Lincoln spoke there on national politics and the slavery question. In 1860-1861, the city was a station on an alternate route of the Pony Express that began at St. Joseph. In 1872, Sol Miller, one of Kansas's most outspoken newspaper editors, moved his Kansas Chief, founded at White Cloud in 1857, to Troy, where his uninhibited writing often left his friends chortling and his victims fuming. Nationally prominent people connected with the community included C.J. "Buffalo" Jones, who in the 1880s helped save the buffalo from extinction, and Charles E. Whittaker, justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1957 to 1962, whose birthplace was seven miles southwest.