Amity and the Liberty Military Trail

The original town of Amity grew up along the Liberty Council Bluffs Military Trail, built in eighteen twenty-four as the oldest road in DeKalb County. The trail connected the frontier garrison at Liberty, Missouri, to Council Bluffs on the Missouri River, cutting through land that was still deep wilderness by American settler standards.

By eighteen seventy-one, the small congregation here built a church south of the cemetery gate. The community chose its name carefully. Amity comes from the Latin word for friendship, and local tradition holds that people here dwelt in peace and amity with one another. The name stuck even as the town itself faded. The military road that gave it life was one of a web of early federal trails that opened the Missouri interior to migration, moving soldiers, mail, and eventually settlers through land that had been Native territory a generation before.