Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Hamilton, MO

Hamilton is a city in northern Caldwell County, Missouri, that owes its existence to the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, the line that first crossed Missouri.

The town was almost named Prairie City, but town company member Albert Gallatin Davis chose Hamilton to honor both Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and War of 1812 officer Joseph Hamilton.

Davis built Hamilton's first house in the summer of 1855 and its first general store in 1857, and the first train reached town on February 14, 1859; Hamilton was incorporated in 1868.

By the mid-1880s Hamilton already had two newspapers, two banks, two hotels, flour mills, and grain elevators serving a population of about 1,800, roughly the size of the town today.

Hamilton is the hometown of James Cash Penney, born on a farm near town on September 16, 1875, who went on to found the J.C. Penney department store chain.

Penney opened his chain's 500th store in Hamilton in the same building where he had held his first retail job, and his boyhood home was moved into town and is now a museum.

The J.C. Penney Library and Museum on North Davis Street preserves Penney's story, and local students attend Penney High School, part of the Hamilton R-II School District.

In November 2008 Jenny Doan and her family founded the Missouri Star Quilt Company in Hamilton, which grew into a business reported at about $20 million a year, the largest employer in Caldwell County with some 450 employees.

Missouri Star's quilt shops draw as many as 8,000 visiting quilters to Hamilton in a single month, transforming the little town into a quilting destination.

In September 2019 Hamilton unveiled the World's Largest Spool of Thread, a 22-foot-tall spool wound with about one million yards of Aurifil thread, beside the Missouri Quilt Museum.