According to at least one source I have seen on the internet, Elkland, located on Highway 38 about thirteen miles northwest of Marshfield, is supposedly the oldest community in Webster County, having been established in 1832. I have found absolutely no evidence that this is true and quite a bit of evidence that it is not true.
There was a church, Pleasant View Church, near present-day Elkland at least as early as 1860, and I have even seen a claim that the church dates from a much earlier time than that (as early as 1803 or 1804). This latter claim seems pretty far-fetched, since very few European Americans even lived in Missouri Territory at this early date, at least not in the western part of the territory, and those who did were very thinly scattered.
As far as I've been able to determine, construction on the first Pleasant View Church began in the fall of 1860 and was discontinued in the spring of 1861 when the Civil War broke out. Work on the church was resumed late in the war and was nearly complete by the time the war ended. An argument over whether the M. E. Church South or the M. E. Church North had a right to possess this church building, which was located about a mile (as the crow flies) southwest of present-day Elkland, resulted in the murder of the Rev. Samuel S. Headlee in the summer of 1866.
In 1870, Joshua L. Lee applied to the federal government for a post office to be established at Elkland, and the application was granted. However, even at this date, five years after the Civil War ended, no town of Elkland existed other than perhaps a general store in which the post office was to be housed. Lee estimated the population within a two-mile radius of his proposed post office at about 100 residents, but there was no actual village of Elkland.
In the mid-1880s, J. H. Davidson was a prominent merchant at Elkland, but his was virtually the only business in town. So, it was a few years later before Elkland began to take on the semblance of a town. By the mid-1890s, the community boasted a school with about 70 students. This was likely a school only for students in grades 1-8, but Elkland did have a high school in the early to mid 1900s, and it was a thriving little hamlet during those years.
In fact, I remember when Elkland lost its high school in the late 1950s, because some of its high school students came to Fair Grove, where I was a grade-school student at the time. (Others went to Marshfield, while still others went to Buffalo.) Elkland Elementary was consolidated into the Marshfield School District at this time or a little later, and it functioned as a satellite school of the Marshfield District until 1977, when Elkland's elementary school also closed and students were bused to Marshfield. As is often the case when a small community loses its school, Elkland began a period of decline after closure of its school, and nowadays it is once again not much more than a wide place in the road, although it does have a store, a church, and maybe one or two other businesses.
The Pleasant View Church, by the way, moved a mile or so southeast of its original location in about 1900. This "new" church building still stands on Highway 38 a couple of miles south of Elkland, but I think it has been pretty much abandoned for many years.
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