Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 3.djvu/483

  the county. In September, 1849, the commissioners chosen to locate the county-seat reported a site on the Chariton River which they named Polk. The citizens of the county at a public meeting held in November changed the name to Chariton and a town was platted and a public sale of lots ordered in December. In April, 1850, a contract was let for the building of a log courthouse in which the first term of court was held in May, 1851, over which Judge McKay presided. A mill was built by Isaac C. Cain and Pleasant Williams on Whitebreast creek. In the winter of 1852-3 Crawford Sellers taught the first school in the court-house.

The first newspaper in the county was the Little Giant, established in 1856 by George M. Binckley. The Chariton Patriot was a weekly journal started by John Edwards in 1857. The Burlington Railroad runs through the county from east to west passing through the towns of Russell, Chariton and Lucas. LYON COUNTY lies in the extreme northwest corner of the State and when first created in 1851 was named Buncombe. By act of the legislature of September 11, 1862, the name was changed to Lyon in honor of General Nathaniel Lyon who was killed at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek while in command of the Union army in 1861. The county is about thirty-five miles in length east and west and about seventeen miles wide, containing five hundred eighty-seven square miles.

The first white man who built a cabin within its limits was Daniel McLaren a hunter and trapper who lived several years near the Big Sioux River at the mouth of a creek which bears his name. In the summer of 1862 Roy McGregor, George Clark and Thomas Lockhart, three adventurous young men from Massachusetts settled on the Iowa side of the Big Sioux River and built a cabin. McGregor was killed by the Sioux Indians, Clark was drowned in March, 1863, and Lockhart, after many