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The county was officially organized by the Missouri legislature on January 23, 1829, and was named for [[William H. Crawford]] of [[Georgia]], a prominent American politician of the early 19th century. Its county seat is [[Steelville, Missouri|Steelville]], and [[Sullivan, Missouri|Sullivan]], partly located in neighboring Franklin County, is the largest city, while [[Cuba, Missouri|Cuba]] is the largest city entirely within the county.
The county was officially organized by the Missouri legislature on January 23, 1829, and was named for [[William H. Crawford]] of [[Georgia]], a prominent American politician of the early 19th century. Its county seat is [[Steelville, Missouri|Steelville]], and [[Sullivan, Missouri|Sullivan]], partly located in neighboring Franklin County, is the largest city, while [[Cuba, Missouri|Cuba]] is the largest city entirely within the county.
==History==
The area that became Crawford County was originally inhabited by a variety of Indian tribes, including the Cherokee, Delaware, Shawnee, and principally the Osage nations. Some French exploration and settlement occurred during the 18th and early 19th centuries, though this left little permanent impact, apart from the names of several local creeks and other landmarks. After the organization of Missouri as a distinct territory and later a state, the region was included first within Washington County, then within Gasconade County, which at that time included much of south-central Missouri.<ref>http://sites.rootsweb.com/~mocrawfo/origin.htm</ref>
The first permanent white settlement appears to have been by a family named Blair, who settled along Courtois Creek in the vicinity of modern Leasburg. The population steadily rose during the 1810s and 1820s, and in 1829 the region was detached from Gasconade County and organized as Crawford County, named to honor Senator William H. Crawford of Georgia, who had been [[Secretary of the Treasury]] under the [[James Monroe|Monroe]] administration and a [[Democratic]] candidate for President in the 1824 election.<ref>https://collections.shsmo.org/manuscripts/columbia/C2366/crawford-county</ref>
At its first census in 1830, the county had a population of 1,712, most of the early settlers coming from states of the Upper South, such as [[Virginia]], [[Kentucky]], and [[Tennessee]]. Farming was a major occupation during the first years, with the majority inhabiting the open and relatively fertile prairies in the north of the county; however, mining of such deposits as [[copper]], [[iron|iron ore]], and [[lead]] became increasingly significant in the mid- and late 19th century. A number of iron works in particular flourished along the Meramec River after the [[Civil War]], drawing waves of German and Slavic immigrants from the [[Austro-Hungarian Empire]]. The construction of the Pacific Railroad in the late 1850s and 1860s, linking St. Louis with southwestern Missouri, was an additional factor in the county's growth.<ref>http://files.usgwarchives.net/mo/crawford/history/zahorsky.txt</ref>
Crawford County's rate of growth, in its livelihood and its population, slowed after 1900 due to the exhaustion of most of the local mines and the railroad's eventual replacement by the highway system (though the latter included U.S. Route 66, which passed through Cuba and Sullivan and provided a boost to their economies). After several decades of fluctuation, the area surged again, thanks in part to tourism to the scenic Meramec region, and its population now stands at close to 25,000.
==Geography==
==Geography==