History

Randolph County was organized on January 22, 1829 and named for John Randolph of Roanoke. The courthouse has stood at Huntsville ever since.

What made the county was the railroad and what was under the ground. Moberly grew from nothing into the Magic City in a decade of railroad boom, while coal came up out of drift mines and, later, strip pits across the countryside. The county sent Omar Bradley to West Point and the world, opened one of Missouri’s early junior colleges, and has farmed this ground the whole time.

A county in dates

1829 Randolph County is organized on January 22 and named for John Randolph of Roanoke, the Virginia congressman and senator. Huntsville becomes the county seat.
1830s Settlers arrive from Kentucky and Tennessee, bringing slavery with them and planting hemp and tobacco. The county sits at the heart of the region Missourians came to call Little Dixie.
1866 Moberly is platted by the North Missouri Railroad and named for Colonel William E. Moberly, the first president of the Chariton and Randolph County railroads.
1872 The railroad opens huge repair shops at Moberly — among the earliest railroad plants west of the Mississippi. The town grows so fast it earns the name the Magic City.
1880 Moberly counts 6,070 residents. Coal is the county's other pillar: drift mines worked since mid-century, and strip mining by the 1920s.
1893 Omar Nelson Bradley is born near Clark on February 12. He will become the last of the nine five-star generals in American history.
1927 Moberly Junior College opens as part of the Moberly public schools. It is now Moberly Area Community College.
Today The 2020 census counts 24,716 residents across 488 square miles — half of us in town, half of us out on the land.

From the county’s albums

Photographs kept by the county and lent by residents. If you can name a face, a place, or a year we have wrong, the County Clerk would like to hear from you. For the fuller record — the museum, the genealogical archives, and the railroad museum — see the Randolph County Historical Society in Moberly.

The football team, 1931.
Moberly from the air, 1932. Recorded as a St. Louis Post-Dispatch photograph.
A “Recipe for Victory” float on a brick street during the Second World War.
An early football squad, in the leather helmets of the day. Date unrecorded.
The Junior College building, with the cars of the 1940s parked out front.
The football team, about 1936–37.
The Junior College campus and its running track from the air. Date unrecorded.
On the staircase, 1928 — recorded in the county's albums as the Piggly Wiggly.
A newspaper clipping naming the whole squad of the Moberly Junior College team — every player, row by row.

The county today

Randolph County covers 488 square miles and is divided into twelve townships. Its cities are Huntsville (the county seat), Moberly (the largest), Clark, Clifton Hill, and Higbee, with the villages of Cairo, Jacksonville, and Renick. We border Macon, Monroe, Shelby, Audrain, Boone, Howard, and Chariton counties.