Washburn is a city in Washburn Township, Barry County, Missouri, United States. The current town encompasses the sites of two communities formerly known as Keetsville and O’Day and is named for local pioneer Samuel C. Washburn. The population was 435 at the 2010 census.

Located along the historic Trail of Tears and on the Old Wire Road, Keetsville traced its official harmony to Georgia native John Cureton (1795-1853), who had served as a judge in Washington County, Arkansas previously settling upon the Washburn Prairie just about two miles north of current hours of daylight Washburn in 1840 and next procured the location of the town. In 1853, Cureton died and ownership of the land transferred to the Englishman James T. Keet (1818-1863), who subsequently laid out the town of Keetsville. The 1850s motto the first genuine establishment of the town similar to Keet establishing a deposit at the site. The growth of the town would be interrupted by the Civil War, as a February 1862 skirmish, a predecessor to the much larger Battle of Pea Ridge the bordering month in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, would result in the destruction of the fledgling town. Following the war, the town was rebuilt in the company of 1867 and 1869 and in 1868 it was renamed Washburn in praise of an early speculator to the Place Samuel Washburn, who had lived in the Place about ten years, before upsetting to Texas where he was killed in 1838.

In the winter of 1879 and 1880, the Atlantic and Pacific Railway — at that times a franchise of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway — built a railroad line amongst Pierce City and Seligman, Missouri. This lineage ran nearly a half mile west of what was next Keetsville, but soon to be renamed Washburn. Instead of incorporating the Keetsville or Washburn post into the railroad End at this location, the End and the community that blossomed adjoining it was otherwise named O’Day, after the Irish-born John O’Day (1843-1901), a Springfield-based attorney for the railroad. In the years that followed O’Day grew, adding two hotels, shops, a newspaper, dwellings and in either 1887 or 1888 a name office, while also enduring codependent of next to Washburn re educational, religious and social life.

The community of Washburn, formerly Keetsville, was officially incorporated as a town on August 4, 1880, though it is uncertain if O’Day ever incorporated as a surgically remove town. The two communities continued as separate entities through the 1880s and into the 1890s, when in 1892 the O’Day pronounce office was disestablished and the Washburn name office took exceeding for a newly consolidated community, a consolidation that was likely prompted by the building of a public researcher between the two communities.