Cedar County, where the Ozark Highland borders Missouri’s Western Prairie region, was organized in 1845 and named for the trees along Cedar Creek. Stockton, the county seat, was platted in 1846 on land given by Zimri and Marian Crabtree and was first named Lancaster, then Fremont, before taking the name of Mexican War commander R.F. Stockton in 1859. Cedar County was torn by violence in the Civil War as it furnished troops to both sides; in August 1862 Union Majors Douglas Dade and Samuel Montgomery drove Confederate Colonel J.T. Coffee from Stockton, on July 11, 1863, Confederate Major T.R. Livingston and Union Lieutenant W.A. McMinn were killed in an affray there, and on October 5, 1863, General J.O. Shelby routed a Federal garrison and burned the courthouse. The first courthouse stood from 1855 to 1863, a second built in 1867 was torn down in 1940, and the present courthouse in Stockton, a monolithic concrete structure, was dedicated in 1940. Covering 317,440 acres of woodland and prairie, Cedar County became a livestock, grain, and dairy area. Osage tribes ceded the region in 1808, but Indians roamed there into the 1830s, and about 95 mounds and a village site remain. The first settlers, John Crisp, Robert Graham, Thomas English, and a Mr. Crump, arrived in 1832 and settled two miles east of Stockton, where a large hollow sycamore gave them partial shelter; many early settlers came from Tennessee. Cedar County also includes El Dorado Springs, where the Joshua Hightower family discovered mineral springs and N.H. and W.P. Cruce laid out a town in 1881, while Jerico Springs grew up to the south near another spring at about the same time, attracting a number of German and Bohemian settlers. A spring in Stockton’s City Park issues from a cave underlying the town, Stockton was the birthplace of veterinarian J.W. Connaway, and soldier, congressman, and Lieutenant Governor of Missouri Joseph J. Gravelly lived in Cedar County.