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The Boonslick took its name from the salt works begun in 1804 by Daniel Morgan Boone and his brother Nathan Boone, sons of famed frontiersman Daniel Boone. The older Boone had come to Missouri in 1799 at the invitation of the Spanish government and he settled in what is now St. Charles County. The Boone brothers worked at a salt spring in what is now western Howard County and began manufacturing salt, an essential commodity for preserving meat. The trail that developed from St. Charles to the salt lick became known as the Boonslick Road. The eastern edge of the Boonslick began at Thrall’s Prairie, named for tavern owner Agustus Thrall, who ran a tavern in Lexington, the first town within the boundaries of future Boone County. “Standing on a high ridge along the eastern edge of the area referred to as Boonslick, Thrall’s Tavern provided a gateway, the link between the trail and the area of settlement,” Weil wrote in her thesis. “Thrall’s Tavern welcomed thousands of travelers into the western section of Missouri. Especially in these early years, the tavern played a crucial role in the young community.” Weil, a teacher of history and psychology at Columbia Independent School, often brings her students on a field trip to the farm. “We try to get them to imagine what it was like, you are cold, you are hungry, it is October, you have to harvest your crops from the farm and move,” she said. “You have to walk and everything is damp or wet or cold.” Legal title to land on Thrall’s Prairie could not be obtained until 1818, when the federal land office opened in Franklin. Taylor Berry, a land speculator, likely used “New Madrid certificates” – claims for land to replace property destroyed in the 1811-12 earthquakes – to claim land that housed squatters, including Thrall. Thrall purchased 160 acres of land in 1820 for $2,000. Boone County was created by an act of the Territorial Legislature on Nov. 16, 1820. The thrust of development soon passed Lexington by. It was not suited geographically to be the county seat because it was on the
This lunette depicts the April 2, 1821, meeting of the first Boone County Circuit Court. It was painted by Walter Ufer in 1927 as a decoration for the Missouri State Capitol Building. [IMAGE COURTESY MUSEUM OF ART & ARCHAEOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI]
western edge of the county. That honor went to Columbia, founded originally in 1818 as Smithton and moved moved a half-mile east to the banks of Flat Branch Creek in 1821. It was in Columbia where David Todd — uncle of future first lady Mary Todd Lincoln — would preside over the first circuit court session in April 1821. The post office opened in Lexington in 1821 was closed by 1837. The place lives on in the names of the people who settled on Thrall’s Prairie as place and street names. Anderson Woods was an original settler and John Woods Harris, his nephew, was a child of one when his parents arrived. He would later marry into the family that owned the Weil’s farm in the 1850s and improve it to become the Model Farm. Harris gave his name to Harrisburg and Woods to Woodlandville. The prosperity those early European inhabitants brought was evident in the 1830 census. The individual pages of the 1820 census for Missouri do not exist. Sixteen early settlers on Thrall’s Prairie who could be found in the 1830 count for Boone County owned 53 slaves, accounting for 32 percent of their households. In 1839, that prosperity was enough to secure the University of Missouri for Columbia. The land remains in production,
and on a recent visit golden wheat was being harvested. The Heffernans have worked to preserve the property and learn about it. An excavation in 2005 identified the site of the well and blacksmith shop, and artifacts they own range include hundreds of square nails and shards of glass. The town well was found and today it is enclosed in a chain link fence, overgrown but still full of water. From the farm's more recent past, the Heffernans have a grist mill stone and steps from Harris’ plantation home, remnants of the Model Farm. They have a duty to the past, Lisa Weil said, and they got that message loud and clear when the previous owner’s farm goods were sold after the family bought the land in 1991. Floy McQuitty, born in 1894, was there, related to an early settler David McQuitty, was there. “She stood 4-foot-10, maybe, on a good day,” Bill Heffernan recalled. “I could have just picked her up and carried her.” Weil remembers her message for her father. “She got right in Dad's face,” Weil said. “She came up at this event and said this is really important. There is a lot of history here and you need to take care of it.”
