Sarcoxie, Missouri: Oldest Town in Jasper County

Sarcoxie is the oldest town in Jasper County, platted along Center Creek in the early eighteen thirties under the name Centerville. When a post office was needed, a naming conflict with another Missouri town forced a change. The community chose to honor Chief Sarcoxie, a Delaware leader of the Turtle Band who had settled near a spring within the present town limits.

His name, which translates roughly as Rising Sun, became the town's permanent identity when the official plat was recorded in eighteen forty-nine. Sarcoxie later earned two unlikely agricultural titles: first the Strawberry Capital of the World, then the Peony Capital of the World, riding successive waves of specialty farming in the Ozark foothills. Today it is a quiet Jasper County community of around fourteen hundred, one of the oldest places in its county.