Kirksville was settled about 1828 by pioneers mainly from Kentucky and Tennessee on land that once belonged to the Sauk, Fox, and Iowa Indians. First known as Long Point, then Hopkinsville, it took the name Kirksville in honor of early settler Jesse Kirk when it became the seat of Adair County in 1841. The city became distinguished as the site of Missouri's first state teachers college and the world's first college of osteopathy. Northeast Missouri State Teachers College was founded in 1870 as the First District Normal School after the legislature provided for normal schools north and south of the Missouri, and Adair County and Kirksville secured the northern school with a bid that included Joseph Baldwin's North Missouri Normal, which he had opened in 1867 in the old Cumberland Presbyterian Academy, chartered in 1861. Andrew Taylor Still, founder of osteopathy, opened the American School of Osteopathy in 1892, and that school combined with the 1922 Andrew T. Still College of Osteopathy and Surgery in 1926 to form the Kirksville College of Osteopathy and Surgery; on the campus is Still's log cabin birthplace, moved from Jonesboro, Virginia. Kirksville serves north central Missouri as an educational, hospital, and osteopathic center and is also a financial, wholesale, and manufacturing point for a poultry, livestock, and grain crop area. Memorial Park marks the Battle of Kirksville, a Civil War action of August 6, 1862, in which Federals under Colonel John McNeil routed Confederates under Colonel John C. Porter, and also contains the site of old Cumberland Academy, antecedent institution of the teachers college. On the teachers college campus, memorials include a statue of Joseph Baldwin, the Kirk Memorial Building honoring president John R. Kirk for his leadership in public school organization and teacher training from 1899 to 1925, a memorial student loan fund honoring president Eugene Fair for his state educational leadership from 1925 to 1937, and the Violette Museum in Kirk Memorial, named for history professor E. M. Violette, who began the collection.