Tarkio: Walnut Country and a Presbyterian College

Tarkio, Missouri takes its name from a Native American word meaning place where walnuts grow, a fitting description of the timbered creek bottoms that drew settlers to this corner of Atchison County. The town was platted in eighteen eighty by Charles Perkins and incorporated the following year. Within three years, the United Presbyterian Church founded Tarkio College here, with pivotal backing from a local philanthropist named David Rankin.

The college operated for over a century, from eighteen eighty-three until nineteen ninety-two, when financial pressures finally closed it. At its peak Tarkio was a regional college town in the heart of northwest Missouri farmland, its economy rooted equally in agriculture and education.