24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Osceola, MO

Osceola is a city on the Osage River and the county seat of St. Clair County, Missouri, named for the famous Seminole chief Osceola, leader of the Seminole resistance in Florida.

The town grew from the mid-1830s on land long inhabited by the Osage people — the Niukonska, 'Little Ones of the Middle Waters' — who gave the Osage River its name, and Osceola became the St. Clair County seat in 1841.

By 1860 Osceola was a prosperous river port at the head of steamboat navigation on the Osage River, with 2,077 residents, a bank, several churches, a newspaper office and more than a dozen stores.

On September 23, 1861, Kansas Jayhawkers under U.S. Senator James H. Lane sacked Osceola in one of the Civil War's most notorious border raids — looting the town, burning all but three of its roughly 800 buildings, freeing 200 enslaved people, and executing nine local men after drumhead court-martials.

The Sacking of Osceola helped inspire Clint Eastwood's 1976 film The Outlaw Josey Wales, and by 1865 the town's population had collapsed from 2,077 to just 183 people.

Osceola never regained its pre-war size — its 2020 census population of 909 is still less than half of what it was in 1860.

At the 2010 census, Osceola had 947 residents living in 394 households, with a median age of 39.7 years.

Construction of the Harry S. Truman Dam on the Osage River in the 1960s and 1970s permanently flooded land around Osceola, and most of the bridges crossing the river near town were demolished.

On the 150th anniversary of the sacking in September 2011, Osceola's Board of Aldermen passed a resolution asking the University of Kansas to stop using 'Jayhawk' as its mascot and nickname.

Osceola is the birthplace of Rooster Cogburn, the fictional U.S. marshal of Charles Portis's 1968 novel True Grit.