Well, Chariton County became a county November 16th, 1820, before Missouri was even a state.

We were originally a part of Howard County, which is called the mother of all counties.

And so we split off from them and we went all the way to the Iowa border.

We've just become smaller through the years.

But to what we are today, we've gotten several different stories, but the one that's always told is that there was a French fur trader on the river here, which and his name was Chariton spelled differently than we spelled Chariton County.

But, the Chariton River was named after him.

And then the county was named after the river.

We have several towns that are here now are Salisbury, Brunswick, Keytesville, Triplett, Mendon and Dalton.

We have lots of little towns that have disappeared over the years.

The historical society here was formed November 16th, 1956, and we started in a small church.

Well, agriculture was the basically the foundation of Chariton County and the main source of income.

Of course, at that time, everyone had this small family farm.

And so most people here were farmers, whether it was tobacco or pecans or other crops.

So tobacco was the major crop produced in Sheridan County, the, Brunswick, pecan production pecans were produced there.

They call themselves the Pecan Capital of Missouri and we have a Brunswick native that has several U.S.

patents for different pecan equipment and breeds of pecan, I guess you would say that he created.

So W. R. Sweeney was a druggist here in Salisbury, and his wife was tired of having mice and rats.

And so she told him, you're a chemist, you should develop something.

And so he added strychnine to wheat to create what was called poison wheat.

The Dalton Vocational School, which was an African-American school in Dalton.

It was started by Nathaniel Bruce, who studied under Booker T. Washington, and it became known as the Little Tuskegee of the Midwest.

And it was actually started as the Bartlett Agriculture Institute.

And then it became the Dalton Vocational School.

And so they taught the agricultural and homemaking vocations to African-American students.

They had their own basketball team, track team.

They raised their own cattle, hogs, learned to butcher, raised corn.

They actually competed in several state contests for their crop production and won several awards for that kind of thing.

It became a famous school until it was, the students were integrated into the public schools here.

Agriculture's really what sustains Chariton County and still does.

I mean, the county today, it's still very agricultural based.

Of course, it's larger farms now, but the slogan of Salisbury is From Prairie to Prosperity.

And so that kind of sums up the agricultural side of things.