[5] The city used to be the world's largest producer of vienna sausages (at its biggest employer, the ConAgra Grocery Foods plant, now owned by Nestlé).

[6] The Crowder State Park Vehicle Bridge, Jewett Norris Library, Plaza Hotel, St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Trenton High School, and WPA Stock Barn and Pavilion are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[citation needed] In 1900 George McAnelly Miller started to turn the school around.

He was soon joined by Walter Vrooman who had just returned from Oxford, England where he established Ruskin Hall, a university called the "College for the People" based on the Utopian Socialist writings of John Ruskin.

The New York Times on April 14, 1902, headlined its article on the development "Buying a Town Outright."

According to the cooperative arrangement, members of the coop who spent at least $300 in one of its stores would receive a dividend at the end of the year.

The Ruskin experiment collapsed in 1903 when town residents resisted the Utopian business model and Vrooman's wife divorced him saying that he had squandered $250,000 of her money.

Friction quickly arose there also and the main school burned after being struck by lightning.

Many of the Florida campus buildings burned in 1918 and when Miller died in 1919, the college ceased to exist.

Through expansion projects and support from numerous people, North Central Missouri College (NCMC) has developed into a major agricultural and nursing educational institution for the state of Missouri.

Plus directly south of Trenton, a project completed in 2011 established a satellite agricultural location known as the Barton Farm Campus.

Modine has produced a variety of acid, lead, and copper-bearing waste products which in previous decades were buried on site and also at a public dump a mile north east of the plant.