Oak Grove got its name from post office

With the opening of western Missouri for settlement
by the Americans came the pioneers in droves
looking for new horizons and new hope in the
wilderness.
They were a strange mixture of people, moving
along shadowy trails still haunted by figures of Indians
and fur trappers. With their long rifles and covered
wagons, they came looking for a homestead. There
were a few New England Yankees with their nasal
twang, but mostly they spoke with a Southern drawl,
people from Kentucky, Tennessee and the Virginias.
These early pioneers were a hardy bunch, strong,
willing and determined to conquer the wilderness.
They settled for the most part along the rivers and
wooded country. They needed the timber for construction
material as they cleared it away for cultivation.
A few tried their luck upon the prairies, but the
grass was very thick and taller than a man’s head in
most areas.
The Big Blue River, Little Blue and Sni Creek in Snia-
Bar Township had up until this time been known as
having some of the best beaver streams in the
Louisiana Territory. Now it was time for those areas to
become the best farmland in the new state of
Missouri.
It has been said the original name of “Sni Abar”
township was “Slue Abar” which came from a mistaken
early French explorer, named Abar, on the
Missouri River. When he found the mouth of the
creek he thought it to be a slough.
Some early records show the name as “Shnee-a-
Bar, shnee being another way of saying the same
thing, a channel of water leaving the river and returning
to it at another point. You have to remember
those early pioneers had a language all of their own,
very peculiar to what we know today. They spoke of
things like corn pones and fatback. Kansas City was
almost named Possum Trot, and Oak Grove was
called Lick Skillet for many years.
At any rate, the Township was organized as Sni-a-
Bar on May 5, 1834.
Hard telling who the first settler was on the Sni,
but James Welch and William Cox came up from
Tennessee in 1828 and set up camp on a branch of
the Sni. Others followed, building a log cabin, and
then another built a double log cabin. Somebody
started a store, and a new town was born.
For reasons we’re not quite sure of, it was called
“Lickskillet.”
One version of the story goes like this. A stranger
arrived on horseback at the double log cabin looking
for a bite to eat. A little boy asked for a piece of meat
before mealtime, because he was afraid the stranger
would eat it all before he got any.
He was promised if that happened he could “lick
the skillet.”
Another story has it that two men after fixing
breakfast on the trail set their frying pan aside for the
dog to “Lick the Skillet.”
Who knows. Anyway the town carried that handle
up until the Civil War.
A couple of miles south and east of Lickskillet,
another berg arose in a grove of scrub oak trees
along Horse Shoe Creek. It was there, a Methodist
preacher named John McKinney became the first
postmaster in Sni-a-Bar Township.
McKinney decided to move on to Oregon though,
and William Philpott was appointed postmaster. He
moved it a half a mile north and kept the post office
for several years. Dr. William E. Frick was appointed
postmaster April 9, 1861, and moved the post office
into the town of Lickskillet where he practiced medicine
from a log cabin.
There was one little problem though: The rules
said you could move the post office, but you could
not change the name of it. So they simply changed
the name of the town to Oak Grove.