Boone County and the Booneslick Country

The county that contains Columbia takes its name from Daniel Boone, the Kentucky frontiersman whose final decades were spent in Missouri. Boone himself did not settle here, but his sons Nathan and Daniel Morgan Boone did, and the region they helped open to American settlement in the early eighteen hundreds was known as the Booneslick country, named for the salt lick that the Boone family discovered and worked along a stretch of the Missouri River to the west. The Booneslick Road was the main overland route from St.

Louis into central Missouri, and it passed through what would become Boone County. Settlers poured in from Kentucky and Virginia and Tennessee, bringing with them the social structures of the Upper South, including the institution of slavery. Missouri entered the union as a slave state in eighteen twenty-one under the Missouri Compromise, and Boone County had a large enslaved population, about a quarter of its people, by the time of the Civil War.

The town of Columbia itself was platted in eighteen twenty-one, the same year Missouri achieved statehood. Its founders built around the intersection of what are now Broadway and Eighth Street, a grid that still anchors the downtown. The university arrived eighteen years later, and the three colleges that would define the city's character, Mizzou, Stephens, and Christian College, were all established before the Civil War.

The name Boone County is a reminder that American westward expansion was never abstract. It moved through specific places, on specific roads, carried by specific families, and it transformed every landscape it passed through, including the lands of the Missouri people and the Osage, who had lived and governed this river country for generations before any Boone arrived.