Craig, Missouri, A General's Railroad Town

Craig, in Holt County, was laid out in eighteen sixty-nine and named for General James Craig of Saint Joseph, a man who wore several hats in Missouri's nineteenth-century public life. Craig served in the state legislature in eighteen forty-six, then in the United States Congress from Missouri in the years eighteen fifty-six to eighteen sixty, and he was active in promoting the railroad that brought the town into existence.

Holt County itself had been settled by Germans near the Craig area as far back as eighteen thirty-nine, drawn to the Missouri River bottomlands. The county was created in eighteen forty-one and named for a Missouri state representative who died in office. Craig never grew large, but it has served as a small Holt County farm community for over a century and a half, holding on through the agricultural changes that emptied many of its neighbors.