Palmyra

Founded in 1819, Palmyra was for many years the northernmost town on the Salt River Trail from St. Charles to the Des Moines River. A Federal Land Office for the Salt River area was located here from 1824 to 1858 and led all others in the state in the sale of public land. In 1827 Palmyra became the seat of a newly organized county named for Revolutionary General Francis Marion. Near the Mississippi was the site of Marion City, laid out in 1835 by promoter William Muldrow, whose wide sale of lots in the East brought an immigration called the Eastern Run, though development was stopped by Mississippi floods. Muldrow also laid out Philadelphia, west of Palmyra, where Presbyterian minister David Nelson founded Marion College, the first Protestant college chartered in Missouri, in 1831; early eastern funds and teachers gave it fame, but it later closed for lack of money, was bought by the Masonic Grand Lodge of Missouri in 1842, renamed Masonic College, and moved to Lexington, Missouri, in 1847. In Palmyra, St. Paul’s Episcopal College opened in 1848. Called the Handsomest City in North Missouri by 1860, Palmyra was settled largely by Southerners on land ceded to the U.S. by Iowa, Sauk, and Fox tribes in 1824. The first white settler in the county area was Frenchman Maturin Bouvet in 1795; he shipped salt from his salines from a point southeast on the Mississippi until he was killed by Indians in 1800. In a noted trial here in 1841, the Illinois abolitionists George Thompson, James Burr, and Alanson Work were sent to prison for attempting to entice slaves to run away. A monument at the courthouse honors victims of the Palmyra Massacre of October 18, 1862, when by order of Union Col. John McNeil, 10 Confederate prisoners were shot after Confederate Col. John C. Porter could not return a captured pro-Union civilian. Palmyra was also home to pioneer lawyer T.B. Anderson, Jacob Sosey, founder of the Spectator in 1839, the oldest family-owned paper in Missouri, and World War I General W.P. Jackson, while local cemeteries hold W.H. Russell, founder of the Pony Express, and George Pegleg Shannon, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Palmyra, Missouri · United States