Boonesborough, Missouri

There is nothing left of Boonesborough, Missouri, which is part of what makes it interesting. Platted in eighteen thirty-six in Boone County, named in honor of the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone, the town received a post office in eighteen thirty-nine and seemed ready to grow. Then it did not. The post office closed in eighteen fifty, and the town faded back into farmland.

Boone County itself was named for Daniel Boone, whose family had moved to Missouri in the early eighteen hundreds. Several of Daniel Boone's children and grandchildren settled in the region, making it genuinely Boone country. The short-lived town of Boonesborough was one of dozens of frontier platted communities in Missouri that were laid out optimistically in the era of westward expansion and then quietly absorbed when the next town with a better location captured the traffic instead.