urer; and Soloman Staley, sheriff. The first county seat was located by the Commissioners about two miles north of Hampton. On the 7th of April, 1856, the citizens at an election voted to move it to the new town of Benjamin which had been laid out in June, 1856. The name was soon after changed to Hampton which became the permanent county-seat. The first settler in the new town was James Thompson who moved from Vinton early in 1856. Job Gardner and George Ryan donated to the county the undivided half of eighty acres of land upon which Hampton was located in order to secure the county-seat. The first newspaper was the Franklin Record which was established by Stephen M. Jones and M. S. Bowman at Hampton in 1859. The Illinois Central Railroad touches the county on the south while the Iowa Central runs through from south to north.
FREMONT COUNTY lies in the extreme southwest corner of the State and is bounded on the south by Missouri and on the west by the Missouri River. It contains an area of five hundred nine square miles. The county was created in 1847 and named for Colonel John C. Fremont, a famous explorer of the Rocky Mountain region and an officer in the Mexican War.
The first settlements were made within its limits as early as 1840 when the southern townships were claimed by Missouri. James Cornelius, Daniel McKissick, Thomas Farmer, David M. English and others settled in that part of the county at McKissick’s Grove prior to 1842. A. M. Hitchock was one of the early settlers near Sidney where he kept a public house. Major Stephen Cooper was one of the pioneers in the vicinity of Bartlett and at one time a member of the Missouri Legislature. In 1848 several families from Oberlin, Ohio, settled on the east bank of the Missouri River five miles above Nebraska City with the intention of founding a college; but the floods overflowed their lands and they moved to where
