Marker Erected by: State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission
Date Marker Erected: 1953, moved from original location to this park 2008
County of Marker: Adair County
Location of Marker: US-63 (Baltimore St.), city park, Kirksville
Marker Text:
Kirksville Kirksville, distinguished as the site of Missouri's first State teachers college and the world's first college of osteopathy, was settled by pioneers mainly from Kentucky and Tennessee about 1828. First known as Long Point, then as Hopkinsville, the town took the name of Kirksville in honor of early settler Jesse Kirk, when it became the seat of Adair County, 1841.
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Northeast Missouri State Teachers College was founded as the First District Normal School, 1870, when the legislature provided for normal schools north and south of the Missouri.2 Adair Co. and Kirksville won the north school with a bid including Joseph Baldwin's North Missouri Normal which he had opened, 1867, in the old Cumberland (Presbyterian) Academy, chartered, 1861.
Andrew Taylor Still (1828-1917), founder of osteopathy, opened the American School of Osteopathy, 1892. This school combined with the 1922 Andrew T. Still College of Osteopathy and Surgery, 1926, to form the Kirksville College of Osteopathy and Surgery.3 On the campus is Still's log cabin birthplace, moved here from Jonesboro, Va.
Kirksville, a city of the fertile prairies, founded on land that once belonged to the Sauk, Fox, and Iowa Indians, serves north central Missouri as an educational, hospital, and osteopathic center. This is a financial, wholesale, and manufacturing point for a poultry, livestock, and grain area.
Memorial Park here commemorates the Battle of Kirksville, a Civil War action of Aug.6, 1862. The Federals under Col. John McNeil routed the Confederates under Col. John C. Porter.4 Also in the park is the site of old Cumberland Academy, antecedent institution of the teachers college.
Memorials on the campus of the teachers college are a statue of Joseph Baldwin and the Kirk Memorial Building honoring John R. Kirk college president (1899-1925), leader in public school organization and teacher training. A memorial student loan fund honors Eugene Fair (president 1925-1937), for his state education leadership.
In Kirk Memorial is the noted Violette Museum, named for history professor E.M. Violette who began the collection.