Laclede, Missouri: Pershing's Hometown on Locust Creek

Bayfield was a brief railroad town in DeKalb County, Missouri, established around eighteen eighty when the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway extended its line through the area. A post office opened in eighteen eighty-six and closed in nineteen seventeen. Like hundreds of small Missouri settlements that grew up alongside the rails in the Gilded Age, Bayfield faded when the railroad economy shifted and larger towns absorbed the trade.

The site is now farmland in a corner of DeKalb County where Buchanan County meets the rolling prairie landscape of northwest Missouri. It stands as one more data point in the pattern of towns that the railroad both created and eventually abandoned.