Our people here that first settled here, Native Americans, that tried to live here, basically.

Were coming from Ohio because they've been pushed out of their land.

It's mostly Shawnee people, the Missouria tribes, Otoe, Meskwaki, they all came in this direction.

And then, of course, European settlers come after that.

And that is getting us into about 1837.

There's very, very few roads.

The railroad isn't here yet.

And by 1859 things had stalled a little bit.

But leading into the Civil War, we basically became the part of northwest Missouri.

We were one of the largest towns at that time, and it led to a booming trade industry.

We had a lot of farmers here, of course, because that's what you do in the Midwest.

We have a lot of farmland.

So we needed to farm machinery.

We needed farm equipment farm grains and seeds, and those are the businesses that thrived basically.

In the late 1800s, we developed the Chillicothe Business College, which was internationally known.

It was a two year program, but you could do a full business degree.

It was called the full business package.

That would include stenography, finances, accounting, handwriting.

But you could also just take a one off program.

You could take penmanship or you could take stenography by itself.

Stay here for a few months.

Many people stayed on campus, but we had people...Germany, most of Asia, Mexico, South America, so many different places.

And their claim to fame was once you're done with the program, if you did well in your programing, they would find you a job either here or they would find you a job where you were from.

And that lasted until 1955.

One of our claims to fame is being the home of sliced bread.

Prior to that, 80% of all bread was baked in the homes and all commercially sold bread was not sliced.

You would slice it at home.

And there was a guy in Davenport, Iowa.

His name was Otto Rohwedder, and he teamed with a guy here in Chillicothe named Frank bench, who owned the Chillicothe Baking Company, and they were selling a product called Kleen Maid Bread.

Livingston County itself was founded in 1837 as well, just right before Chillicothe was founded, as it's basically central hub or main part of the county.

Some of our other towns, mostly farming communities, they lacked the train station, which was really what was bringing people to make the towns larger.

So Commerce shifted into a smaller town, into farmhouses and a very local community with very small town government.

And that is what makes up the rest of our county.

And that's why things like our Livingston County Fair are so exciting, because it brings in all of these other towns, and we get to witness what all of these other towns are doing.

We are who we are today because of everybody that came before us, starting with the Native Americans, starting with our forefathers that were here before us, creating a town, a county that was about the people that it was serving.

We were in a place that was not necessarily meant to thrive.

The the wilderness here was uninhabitable for some time.

And here we are thriving to this day.

Missouri's the show me state.

And I think in that...in that instance we said we'll show you, right?

And here we are.