page_title: Keytesville, Missouri
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Keytesville, Missouri / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration of the second Chariton County Courthouse, Keytesville, Missouri. The courthouse served the county from the late 1860s until destroyed by fire in 1973. Illustration first published in 1896.
context_page_description: Keytesville is a small town in, and the county seat of, Chariton County, Missouri, United States. The population was 471 as of the 2010 census. Keytesville is the hometown of two notable American generals, Maxwell D. Taylor and Sterling Price.
context_section_description: The town is named for Englishman James Keyte, the town founder. Keyte, a Methodist preacher, purchased a large parcel of land in 1830 and, two years later, donated fifty acres of it to Chariton County for the purpose of establishing a centralized seat of county government. Prior to that time, the county business had been conducted from "Old Chariton," a small village near the confluence of the Chariton and Missouri Rivers. However, incessant disease-spreading mosquitoes and repeated river flooding necessitated a new location.
  The first courthouse was constructed in Keytesville between 1833 and 1834. As a two-story, four-room brick building, it survived until September 20, 1864, when it was burned down by the Confederate raiders during the American Civil War. James Keyte constructed the first home in Keytesville, and the first business as well. Both were log structures, with the second doubling as a post office. Keyte is also responsible for the town's first industry of any sort, when he constructed a mill near his home on Mussel Fork Creek. Isaac Redding added Keytesville's first hotel in August 1842. Keytesville was incorporated on February 3, 1868, by the state of Missouri, and incorporated as a Missouri 4th class city in March 1883.
caption: Chariton County's second courthouse. It replaced one destroyed by Confederate raiders during the Civil War.
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