Troy

Richard Burton saw Troy from the overland mail coach. Leaving St. Joseph on Tuesday, August 7, 1860, bound for Salt Lake City, his party passed what he called "a few wretched shanties called Troy," a name he took as a last insult to the memory of hapless Pergamus. He filed it, with Syracuse, under the classic stage of American place naming. At 3 p.m. the coach reached Cold Springs, the junction of the Leavenworth route, about two hours behind time, then Valley Home at six and Kennekuk for supper. He told the trip in The City of the Saints.

What the plaque says

Troy Two miles west is Troy, named for the famous city of Greek antiquity. Following the organization of Doniphan county in 1855 Troy was named the county seat and business began there in 1856. Initially it played a secondary role to such Missouri river towns as Elwood, Iowa Point and White Cloud, but the coming of the railroad in 1869 made it more important than those communities which depended on the river for their economic life. Presidential aspirant Abraham Lincoln provided a noteworthy day for Troy early in December, 1859, when he spoke on issues of national politics and the slavery question. In 1860-1861 the city was a station on an alternate route of the Pony Express which began at St. Joseph. In 1872 Sol Miller, one of Kansas' most outspoken newspaper editors, moved his Kansas Chief, founded at White Cloud in 1857, to Troy. Miller's writing, uninhibited even for that day, frequently left his friends chortling and his victims fuming. Among nationally prominent persons once a part of this community were C.J. "Buffalo" Jones, who in the 1880's helped save the buffalo from extinction, and Charles E. Whittaker, justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1957-1962, whose birthplace was seven miles southwest of this marker. Erected by State Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Iowa and Sac & Fox Mission Museum — 11 mi
  The surviving part of an 1846 Presbyterian mission school near Highland, built largely with the tribes' own annuity money and returned to the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska in 2021. Closed during remodeling.
• Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum — 17 mi
  A hangar at Atchison's airport built around Muriel, a 1935 Lockheed Electra 10-E of the model Earhart vanished in, saved from scrap, restored over three decades and brought to her birthplace in 2016.

More markers nearby

• Elwood — 10 mi
• Atchison — 17 mi
• Mormon Grove: The City That Disappeared — 18 mi
• Point of Beginning of the Public Land Surveys of Sixth Principal Meridian — 21 mi