Dearborn, Missouri, Named for a Revolutionary War General

Dearborn, sitting on the border of Buchanan and Platte counties in Missouri, was incorporated in eighteen eighty-two and named for Henry Dearborn, a veteran of the Revolutionary War who later served as Secretary of War under President Thomas Jefferson. Fort Dearborn in Chicago also carried his name, so the general was well remembered across the Midwest.

The town grew as a small agricultural and railroad-era community between Saint Joseph and the Kansas City metro. It remains a modest place today, a few hundred residents on the rolling Missouri River bluffs, but the name connects a quiet prairie stop to one of the early republic's most prominent military men, a figure whose influence reached from the battlefields of the Revolution to the frontier forts of the early nineteenth century.