The story of the growth of Fulton, Missouri from a lonely homestead in the wilderness to a thriving small city is captured in rare old photographs from the archives of the Kingdom of Callaway Historical Society and transcribed articles from local newspapers and other contemporary sources. Articles and stories arranged chronologically carry the reader through the lawlessness of a frontier town where every store had a whiskey barrel for customers and the town doctor could walk into a hardware store and shoot the school teacher without any apparent regrets or repercussions. The book covers the upheaval and discord of the Civil War era, including the well-known story of Celia, a Slave, the fast paced changes of the industrial revolution and the Great War that took so many Callaway boys far away from the mule trading capital of the world and introduced them to tanks and flying machines.