Maryville's campus is also Missouri's official arboretum

Maryville’s Northwest campus is more than a college landmark. The Missouri State Legislature designated the campus as the official Missouri Arboretum in 1993. That means one of Nodaway County’s best local walks is also a state-recognized tree collection.

The numbers help, but the story is better than the numbers. The campus has more than 1,700 trees, more than 160 species, and 452 maintainable acres. Thomas Gaunt started an 85-acre tree farm and nursery there in 1857, long before the university was founded. About 85 acres of the modern campus came from that Gaunt tree farm, and the Gaunt home has served as the university president’s residence since the school’s founding.

That gives Maryville a different kind of college-town color. A visitor can come for a game, a campus tour, or a county errand and still notice the older tree-farm layer under the school. Northwest has also been adding tree-walk signs and a virtual tour, so this is not a sealed-off campus fact. It is something a resident or visitor can actually use.

If you go, use Northwest’s arboretum page for the current walking tour and map. The best version of this note is not “Maryville has trees.” It is that Maryville has a university campus where the trees are part of the town’s public identity.