Fulton, Missouri: Churchill's Stage and the Kingdom of Callaway

Fulton, the county seat of Callaway County, was laid out in eighteen twenty-five and named for steamboat inventor Robert Fulton. It carries a local nickname, the Kingdom of Callaway, rooted in an eighteen sixty-one incident when county leaders bluffed a Union advance and negotiated a truce rather than submit to occupation, an act of Confederate-leaning bravado that passed into local legend. Westminster College was founded here by Presbyterians in eighteen fifty-one.

On March fifth, nineteen forty-six, Winston Churchill stood in the college gymnasium, introduced by President Harry Truman, and delivered the Iron Curtain speech that helped define the Cold War. A rebuilt seventeenth-century London church now stands on campus as a memorial to that moment. Fulton is also home to one of the oldest state psychiatric institutions west of the Mississippi, established by the Missouri legislature in eighteen forty-seven.