Downing, Missouri: Schuyler County's Railroad Town

Downing sits in Schuyler County in northeast Missouri, a small city founded in eighteen seventy-two when the railroad pushed through this corner of the state. The town is named for H. H.

Downing, president of the Missouri Town Company that platted it. Schuyler County itself was organized in eighteen forty-five and named for Philip Schuyler, the Revolutionary War general and New York senator. Like many small Missouri railroad towns of the eighteen seventies, Downing grew quickly into an agricultural service center, handling grain, livestock, and farm supplies for the surrounding countryside.

The town also sits near the South Fabius River, in a county whose rolling terrain was shaped by generations of Missouri family farming. Today Downing is home to about three hundred people and serves as one of the small steady nodes of the county's rural economy.