If you could go back in time to visit Middle Grove before 1900 you'd find a busy, bustling community with a college, post office, justice of the peace, churches, four physicians, a hotel, drug store, dry goods store, flour mill, broom factory, wagon maker, boot and shoe maker, blacksmith, etc.

If you went back even further, to the 1830s and 1840s, you'd learn that Middle Grove got it's name from being the site of a trading post located in a grove of trees midway (the "middle grove") between the riverboat landing at Hannibal, Missouri on the Mississippi river, and Glasgow, Missouri on the Missouri river. John Milligan owned and ran the trading post, which was a welcome source of supplies and provisions for wagon trains and settlers as they traveled across Missouri between those two great rivers on their way west—and also for local Indian tribes. (Milligan Creek was named for John Milligan.)

Middle Grove had other claims to fame along the way, like Harris Springs, a mineral springs resort active from 1886 to the 1920's. In an era when the healing properties of spring water were a popular fad, people would travel considerable distances to spend days or weeks at the resort, which had guest cabins, an open-air dance hall, and more—and an unlimited supply of mineral water. Harris Springs even shipped bottled spring water across the nation, by rail from a railroad stop three miles to the north.

But being located off of the path the railroads took as they were laid across Missouri eventually stifled the community's growth. Railroad travel and freight became supremely important in the 1900s, and the nearest railroad was four miles away, accessible only by dirt roads, which led to a gradual decline in Middle Grove's population and business activity. Today, it is a quiet place—a farming community with a public school, a church, and a handful of houses—but it is "the good kind of quiet", where people know their neighbors.