Editing Platte Purchase (section)

==Settlement==
The U.S. Government set up a [[United States General Land Office]] in [[Plattsburg, Missouri]] to handle the settlement. Much of the land was dispensed as [[Land grant|military land warrants]] to veterans of the [[War of 1812]] (and later [[Mexican–American War]]). Under the terms of the program, which was expanded in 1855, the 160-acre land grants could be given to military descendants and those grants could be sold.<ref>http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.haspx?dbid=1165 {{Dead link|date=February 2022}} {{User-generated source|certain=yes|date=March 2022}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/US_War_of_1812_Bounty_Land_Warrants|title=US War of 1812 Bounty Land Warrants Genealogy - FamilySearch Wiki|website=familysearch.org|access-date=2016-06-30}}</ref>

Initial settlement was concentrated in the [[Barry, Missouri|Town of Barry]] in south Platte County. Almost overnight, Platte County became the second-largest county in the state, and [[Weston, Missouri]] ("West Town") was second only to [[St. Louis, Missouri]] in the state. St. Joseph would subsequently become the second-largest city in the state in the early settlement days. Since the purchase opened up a new slave area, the area was settled primarily by slaveholders from the Upper South: Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. They brought enslaved African Americans with them or purchased them at slave markets, to work such Southern commodity crops as the labor-intensive [[hemp]] and [[tobacco]]. These were grown in the southern portion of the purchase, where farms and plantations had access to the Missouri River for shipping to market. The northern portion of the purchase attracted fewer Southerners and slaveholding was rare.<ref name="unl">{{cite web|url=http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=nebanthro|publisher=digitalcommons.unl.edu|title=digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=nebanthro|access-date=2017-01-08}}</ref>

Today the Platte Purchase area is among the most rural areas in Missouri. St. Joseph and [[Maryville, Missouri]] are the only communities totally within the purchase area that have populations greater than 10,000. [[Kansas City, Missouri]] has influenced the area, expanding its boundaries into southern Platte County.