Marshfield, Missouri

Marshfield, Missouri sits nearly fifteen hundred feet above sea level in the Ozark highlands, making it the highest county seat in the state. It was platted in eighteen fifty-five and named, along with its county, for Daniel Webster's estate in Marshfield, Massachusetts. But the town's greatest claim is astronomical.

Edwin Powell Hubble was born here on November twentieth, eighteen eighty-nine. He grew up in Marshfield before moving on to the University of Chicago, Oxford, and eventually Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where in the nineteen twenties he proved that faint smudges in the sky were entire galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and then demonstrated that the universe itself is expanding. NASA named its great orbiting telescope after him.

In front of the Webster County courthouse stands a one-quarter-scale replica of that telescope, twelve hundred pounds of tribute to the town's most famous son, dedicated on the Fourth of July, nineteen ninety-four.