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Troy, laid out on the site of Woods' Fort in 1819, lies on an old Sac and Fox Indian campsite where first settlers Joseph Cottle and Zadock Woods built their cabins, 1801. It was the Sac and Fox tribes, outraged by their 1804 land cession which included this region, who carried the War of 1812 west of the Mississippi into north Missouri.
To defend their homes, pioneers in this area, which is now Lincoln County, aided by Rangers under Nathan Boone built Woods, Howard, Stout, Clark, and Cap au Gris forts as a first line of defense. At Fort Cap au Gris, Maj. (later U.S. Pres.) Zachary Taylor's command rendezvoused, Sept. 1814, and five months after the war, at Fort Howard, May 24, 1815, Black Hawk's band skirmished with settlers and Rangers in the Battle of the Sink Hole. In 1824 the Sac and Fox finally gave up all claim to the region.
The Lincoln County seat, earlier at Old Monroe and Alexandria, was located here 1829. The county, organized, 1818, was named by its first settler, Christopher Clark, for Lincoln counties, N.C., and Ky., which honor Revolutionary Gen. Benjamin Lincoln.
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Troy serves as a trade and legal center for a Mississippi River county in Missouri's Glacial
Plains region, an area of livestock, grain, and poultry farming. As early as the 1790's, roving hunters and trappers took up Spanish land grants in the country's fertile Cuivre (Fr. copper) River Valley.
During the Civil War, the fighting missed pro-Southern Lincoln County, though Union troops occupied Troy almost continually. The area prospered when the St. Louis and Hannibal R.R. reached Troy in 1882. Early schools here were Lincoln Academy (later Troy Christian Institute) chartered in 1835 and Buchanan College founded in 1894.
Troy was the birthplace of Frederick G. Bonfils (1860-1933) noted co-editor of the "Denver Post," Elliot W. Major, thirty-third governor of Missouri, was a native of this county, and Congressman Clarence Cannon, noted parliamentarian, was born in Elsberry. Among points of interest in Troy are the Woods' Fort marker near the town spring; the 1870 courthouse; and the 1859 Christian and 1868 Presbyterian Churches. Just east of Troy is Cuivre River State Park.
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