Lathrop: Mule Capital of the World

Lathrop was platted in eighteen sixty-seven as a stop on the Cameron Cutoff Branch of the Hannibal and Saint Joseph Railroad, named for John L. Lathrop, the railroad's treasurer. But the town earned its true identity a generation later when cousins J.

D. Guyton and W. R.

Harrington established a mule dealership on four thousand seven hundred acres nearby. By nineteen eighteen, their operation included three barns, each able to stable a thousand mules at a time. During World War One they sold one hundred eighty thousand mules and one hundred seventy thousand horses to the British Army alone.

Lathrop became known worldwide as the Mule Capital of the World. The mules are gone, but the school mascot and local business names still carry the title.