Editing Saline County, Missouri (section)

==History==
Saline County was occupied for thousands of years by succeeding cultures of [[Missouria|Missouri Native Americans]]. Saline County was organized by European-American settlers on November 25, 1820, and was named from the [[salinity]] of the springs found in the region.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RfAuAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA361 | title=How Missouri Counties, Towns and Streams Were Named | publisher=The State Historical Society of Missouri | author=Eaton, David Wolfe | year=1918 | pages=361}}</ref> After periods of conflict as settlers competed for resources and encroached on their territory, the local Native Americans, including the [[Osage nation]], were forced by the U.S. government to move to reservations in Indian Territory, first in Kansas and then in Oklahoma.

Saline County was among several along the Missouri River that were settled primarily by migrants from the [[Upper South]] states of [[Kentucky]], [[Tennessee]] and [[Virginia]]. The settlers quickly started cultivating crops similar to those in [[Middle Tennessee]] and Kentucky: [[hemp]] and [[tobacco]]; they had brought enslaved people with them to central Missouri, or purchased them from slave traders. These counties settled by southerners became known as "[[Little Dixie (Missouri)|Little Dixie]]." By the time of the Civil War, one-third of the county population was [[African American]]; most of them were [[slavery|enslaved]] laborers on major [[plantations in the American South|plantations]], particularly for labor-intensive tobacco cultivation. In 1847 the state legislature had prohibited any African Americans from being educated.

After the war, [[freedmen]] and other residents had a hunger for education. The state's new constitution established public education for all citizens for the first time.<ref>Robert Brigham, ''The Education of the Negro in Missouri,'' Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Missouri- Columbia, 1946, p. 83</ref> It was segregated, in keeping with local custom. Each township with 20 or more African-American students were supposed to establish a school for them, but rural areas lagged in the number of schools and jurisdictions underfunded those for blacks. By the early 20th century, Saline County had eighteen schools for black students.<ref name="rural">[http://dnr.mo.gov/shpo/survey/SWAS024-R.pdf ''Rural and Small Town Schools in Missouri''], Dept. of Natural Resources, State Historic Preservation Officer, 2002, p. 10, accessed March 15, 2015</ref> The remaining black schools from the [[Jim Crow]] era have been studied by the State Historic Preservation Office and many are being nominated to the [[National Register of Historic Places]].