Callaway County, Missouri


Callaway County is a county located in the U.S. state of Missouri. As of the 2020 United States census, the county's population was 44,283. Its county seat is Fulton. With a border formed by the Missouri River, the county was organized November 25, 1820, and named for Captain James Callaway, grandson of Daniel Boone. The county has been historically referred to as "The Kingdom of Callaway" after an incident in which some residents confronted Union troops during the U.S. Civil War.
Callaway County is part of the Jefferson City, Missouri, Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Vineyards and wineries were first established in the area by German immigrants in the mid-19th century. Among the first mentioned in county histories are those around the southeastern Callaway settlement of Heilburn, a community neighboring Portland, on the Missouri River. Since the 1960s, there has been a revival of winemaking there and throughout Missouri.
The Callaway Nuclear Generating Station is located in Callaway County, near Fulton.

History

This area was historically occupied by the Osage and other Native American peoples, some of whom migrated from east of the Ohio River Valley. Others emerged as cultures in this area, following thousands of years of settlement by indigenous peoples.
The first settlement in the county was in 1809 at Cote Sans Dessein along the Missouri River. Early leaders considered siting the first Missouri state capital in the territory between Wainwright and Tebbetts. Callaway County was organized in 1820 and was named after Captain James Callaway, who was killed by Native Americans. Elizabeth became the first county seat. Many of the villages and towns in the county today represent places where railroad stations existed in early years.
The early European-American settlement of Callaway County was largely by migrants from the Upper South states of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, with an influx of German immigrants starting in the 1830s, as was the case with other counties along the Missouri River. Some of them brought black slaves and enslavement practices with them, and quickly started cultivating hemp and tobacco, the same crops as were grown in Middle Tennessee and Kentucky. Given their culture and traditions, this area became known as Little Dixie. By 1860, enslaved people made up at least 25 percent of the county's population, higher than in most parts of the state.
Some pioneer families from Callaway and Lewis County, Missouri, moved to the West and became influential early settlers of the nascent state of California. Callaway families helped settle areas of California near the Oregon border, as they entered the state via the Oregon Trail, then southward toward San Francisco. Lewis County relatives helped build Sacramento and develop viticulture in the California Central Valley and areas north of San Francisco Bay. Some of these Missouri families, later key U.S./Unionist advocates and military personnel during the U.S. Civil War, held early local and statewide political offices in California.
On October 27, 1860, a woman known as "Slave Teney" was lynched by whites near Fulton after she confessed to killing the daughter of her owner.
In 1861, word arrived that Union troops had advanced to a nearby county. Colonel Jefferson F. Jones, from eastern Callaway County, assembled troops to protect the county. Forces were limited as many were already defending the country, but Jones marched the troops eastward to meet the approaching companies. The successful defense was merely an illusion. Tree logs, erected by the troops, resembled artillery in the shadows of campfires and deterred Union troops. Talks continued several days and secured a mutual ceasefire agreement between the United States of America and Callaway County. Elated from the successful defense, citizens proclaimed their county The Kingdom of Callaway, a reference that remains today. This truce with U.S./Union forces effectively allowed Confederate advocates to continue to operate under surveillance, not far from the Missouri government offices in Jefferson City. There may have been more than twice as many Confederate as U.S./Union troops in Callaway.
The 1862 Battle of Moore's Mill was the only significant Civil War battle in Callaway County.
The minutes of the U.S. Congressional hearing on the legitimacy of U.S. Civil-war-era elections in Callaway County include reports of substantial election meddling and voter harassment and intimidation, summarized in the 1867-68 Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives. It described the Confederate support in the county, citing prominent citizens, but the report also demonstrated that there was substantial county support for Union/U.S. government among citizens who were often intimidated into silence. Historians therefore cannot ascertain exact percentages of Union or Confederate sympathies in the county.
According to A Short History of Callaway County by Ovid Bell, the publisher of the Fulton Daily Sun Gazette, "Fulton was occupied during the greater part of the war by Union soldiers and militia, and Southern sympathizers were in constant fear of imprisonment and death." U.S. forces loyal to the Union were raised by Captains William T Snell, Henry Thomas, and JJP Johnson. They were reinforced by troops under General John B. Henderson from the town of Louisiana in Pike County, Missouri.
After the late-1860s Reconstruction era, an element of white residents in the state and county worked to restore white supremacy. Violence against Black people reached a peak around the turn of the 20th century, when whites lynched a total of four African Americans in the county. The victims included Ham Peterson in May 1884, killed because his brother spoke disrespectfully to whites; an unnamed African-American man killed by a mob in October 1884, after being accused of raping a young girl; and Emmett Divens, lynched August 15, 1895.
Other settlers in the Missouri River valley included German immigrants from the mid-19th century after the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states; they established a strong wine industry in the area and built towns with German-influenced architecture, concentrated substantially in counties south of Callaway and across the Missouri River, celebrated annually in the Maifest events in the Gasconade county seat, Hermann. Missouri was the second-largest wine-producing state nationally until Prohibition. Since the 1960s, numerous vineyards and wineries have been established again in the river valley, including Summit Lake Winery in Holts Summit. One definition of the Missouri Rhineland can be found in a Chicago Tribune article of September 2018.
Callaway has remained largely agricultural, economically, with its rich farmlands, yet borders Missouri's capital city and Lincoln University in Cole County, to the south, and the main University of Missouri campus in Columbia, 40 miles or less from the most populous areas of the county. Callaway County has for years hosted William Woods University and Westminster College in the county seat, Fulton, while Osage county, to the south, hosts the State Technical College of Missouri in Linn.
Residents and former residents of Callaway County are sometimes called "Callawegians".

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of, of which is land and is water.
The northern part of the county is relatively flat and devoid of large tracts of forests. The southern border of the county is the Missouri River, and the area is heavily forested over large hills and valleys. Cedar Creek makes up the bulk of the county's western border. Jefferson City lies across the Missouri River from the southwestern corner of the county.

Adjacent counties

Demographics

2020 census

As of the 2020 census, the county had a population of 44,283 and a median age of 39.5 years, with 21.6% of residents under the age of 18 and 16.9% aged 65 or older; for every 100 females there were 105.9 males, and for every 100 females age 18 and over there were 104.9 males. Thirty-nine point nine percent of residents lived in urban areas, while 60.1% lived in rural areas.
There were 16,596 households in the county, of which 30.1% had children under the age of 18 living with them and 23.4% had a female householder with no spouse or partner present; about 27.1% of all households were made up of individuals and 11.0% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. There were 18,538 housing units, of which 10.5% were vacant; among occupied housing units, 72.8% were owner-occupied and 27.2% were renter-occupied, with a homeowner vacancy rate of 1.6% and a rental vacancy rate of 9.9%.
The racial and ethnic composition of the county reported in the 2020 census is summarized in the table below.
Race / Ethnicity Pop 1980Pop 1990Pop 2000Pop 2010Pop 2020% 1980% 1990% 2000% 2010% 2020
White alone 30,15830,83237,19140,35038,45393.51%93.97%91.23%91.02%86.83%
Black or African American alone 1,6861,5792,3032,0061,9435.23%4.81%5.65%4.52%4.39%
Native American or Alaska Native alone 94992002041410.29%0.30%0.49%0.46%0.32%
Asian alone 901192072362220.28%0.36%0.51%0.53%0.50%
Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander alone xx31530xx0.01%0.03%0.07%
Other race alone 46929391620.14%0.03%0.07%0.09%0.37%
Mixed race or Multiracial xx4567752,367xx1.12%1.75%5.35%
Hispanic or Latino 1781713777079650.55%0.52%0.92%1.59%2.18%
Total32,25232,80940,76644,33244,283 100.00%100.00%100.00%100.00%100.00%