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Clay County Seat
Settled in 1820 and named county seat in 1822. After the Saints were driven out of Jackson County in 1833, many of them found refuge here in Clay County.

The Prisoners
Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Lyman Wight, Caleb Baldwin and Alexander McRae, sent from the Richmond hearing to wait for trial on treason. They were held from December 1, 1838, to April 6, 1839, a little over four months.

In Joseph's Words
From a letter of March 22, 1839: "We are kept under a strong guard, night and day, … our food is scant, uniform, and coarse; we have not the privilege of cooking for ourselves, we have been compelled to sleep on the floor with straw, and not blankets sufficient to keep us warm; and when we have a fire, we are obliged to have almost a constant smoke."

• December 1, 1838: After a day in a wagon from Richmond, the six men were taken north past the courthouse to the small stone jail. A crowd pressed in to watch. Joseph was the last one off the wagon, and at the door he raised his hat to the crowd before going down into the lower room.
• February 1839: Hyrum's wife, Mary Fielding Smith, came with their baby, Joseph F. Smith, born the November before. It was the first time Hyrum had seen his son. That same month Sidney Rigdon, gravely ill, was released on bail. Emma Smith came three times over the winter, once bringing young Joseph III.
• March 20, 1839: The day after letters came from Emma, Don Carlos Smith and Bishop Edward Partridge, Joseph began dictating two long letters to the Church. The second followed around March 22. Parts of them are now Doctrine and Covenants 121, 122 and 123, and section 121 opens with Joseph's prayer, "O God, where art thou?" The first letter runs seventeen pages, in the handwriting of Alexander McRae and Caleb Baldwin.
• April 6, 1839: An armed guard took the prisoners out of the jail to face a grand jury in Gallatin. They won a change of venue to Boone County, and on the way there the guards let them escape. They made it to Illinois.

1. South of town on Campbell Drive, on what was Michael Arthur's farm, a granite monument to the Eight Witnesses stands near the graves of two of them, Christian Whitmer and Peter Whitmer Jr. In the mid-1830s the farm served as a gathering place for Church leaders, and Joseph Smith organized the first Missouri presidency there in July 1834. The monument was dedicated on November 19, 2011.
2. The Historic Liberty Jail is on North Main Street. The old jail fell into disrepair after 1856, and on June 19, 1939, Wilford C. Wood bought the site and passed it to the Church. Today a visitors' center there holds a full-scale reconstruction of the jail, with stairs down from the rotunda for a closer look. Joseph Fielding Smith dedicated the site on September 15, 1963. A few hundred feet south is the site of Alexander W. Doniphan's 1830s home, marked in 2002. Doniphan, a Liberty lawyer, defended Joseph and the others in court.

• Wilford Wood paid $4,000 for the jail site in 1939 and sold it to the Church for exactly what he paid.
• The jail was 14 by 14½ feet and two stories high. Its walls had three layers: rough limestone two feet thick outside, oak inside, and a one-foot gap between them packed with loose rock to discourage escapes. The only way into the lower room was a trapdoor from the upper floor, and its two barred windows were each 2 feet wide and 6 inches high.