Lancaster

The inventor the plaque names in passing made his mark in Texas oil. Howard R. Hughes Sr. was born in Lancaster on September 9, 1869, attended Missouri Military Academy at Mexico, and entered Harvard in 1893, leaving the next year. Drawn to oil after the Spindletop strike, he and Walter Benona Sharp developed a two-cone rotary drill bit nicknamed the rock eater. He filed the basic patents on November 20, 1908, the bit was first tested at the Goose Creek field in 1909, and that year the two founded the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company. He died in Houston in 1924.

What the plaque says

Lancaster Capital of one of the foremost livestock farming counties in Missouri, Lancaster was laid out as the seat of the newly organized Schuyler County, 1845. Named for Rev. War Gen. Philip J. Schuyler, the county was a part of territory ceded by Iowa, Sac, and Fox tribes in 1824. Pioneer legislator John Lusk named the town for Lancaster, Pa. In the Civil War, troops of both sides and guerrilla bands overran the county. Union forces occupied Lancaster at times. Sharp skirmishes occurred here on Nov. 24, 1861 and on Sept. 7, 1862. With the close of the war, prosperity returned. In 1868 the North Missouri R. R. (Wabash) reached the county and in 1872 the Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska (C. B. and Q.) came to Lancaster. Here William P. (Diamond Billy) Hall had his internationally known horse and mule market. Sometimes called "Horse King of the World," he supplied thousands of horses and mules to the British in the Boer War and to the Allies in World War I. Following a brief career as a circus operator, he also maintained a circus equipment and a wild animal brokerage business here. (See other side) Erected by State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission, 1957 Lancaster (Continued from other side) Lancaster, here in the Glacial Plains of north Missouri, serves as seat of justice for a leading sheep raising county of the State. The county, first permanently settled by Moses Stice, 1834, was long familiar to explorers, bee hunters, and surveyors. Its first town, Tippecanoe, settled in the late 1830's, once stood some two miles southeast. Through Schuyler County, following the Great Divide separating tributaries of the Missouri and Mississippi, ran the Bee Trace, noted pioneer trail. The northern limits of the county were not known until the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1851, made the boundary between Missouri and Iowa the 1824 Iowa, Sac, and Fox Indian purchase line. Historic Salt River and several forks and divisions of the Fabius rise in Schuyler County. Lancaster is the birthplace of novelist Rupert Hughes; inventor Howard R. Hughes (father of motion picture producer Howard R. Hughes); and agriculturist John R. Rippey, the first secretary of the Missouri State Fair. Financier Tom K. Smith was born in nearby Glenwood; and educator and editor Glenn Frank in Queen City to the south. Erected by State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission, 1957

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of Osteopathic Medicine — 23 mi
  Kirksville's museum of Andrew Taylor Still, the frontier doctor who gave up drugs after losing his children and founded the first school of osteopathy here in 1892.
• Thousand Hills State Park — 24 mi
  Kirksville's reservoir park: Forest Lake, dammed in 1951 and 1952 on land given by the Laughlin heirs, in glacier-cut hills with petroglyphs under an interpretive shelter.

More markers nearby

• Kirksville — 22 mi
• Unionville — 24 mi
• Edina — 32 mi