Marienville, first called Blood's Settlement and later named for Marien Blood Hunt, daughter of founder Cyrus Blood, stands on the Big Level of the Allegheny Plateau, where Blood built a road and house in 1833 and helped grow the settlement through milling, mail service, teaching, surveying, tavern keeping, and public office. His home served as both tavern and schoolhouse, where Marien taught, and he laid out the town in an uncommon hub-and-spoke pattern. Blood, John Hunt, and James Gillis helped create Forest County on April 11, 1848, by joint resolution of the state legislature, making it the only Pennsylvania county formed that way. Marienville was the original county seat, with court first held in the Blood homestead and later in a white weatherboarded log courthouse built in 1857, but after Forest County was enlarged in 1866 by adding five townships from Venango County to the original four from Jefferson County, the county seat was moved to Tionesta, a change upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and long remembered in local rivalry. The town suffered repeated destructive fires in 1890, 1902, 1913, 1922, 1924, and 1930, yet its residents repeatedly rebuilt. Marienville also became tied to the Allegheny National Forest, created on September 24, 1923, and now spanning about 519,000 acres across four counties, with one of its two district ranger stations located there; the forest later included Civilian Conservation Corps camps, among them Camp Duhring and Blue Jay Camp, which became a Job Corps camp in 1965. The community developed tourism as the Snowmobile Capital of Pennsylvania and through excursion rail service, while industry included the Marienville Glass Bottle Factory, foundries, tanning, shingle milling, wagon hub factories, lumber, oil, small-scale coal mining, and railroad service. The railroad, built in 1882-1883, made Marienville a construction storage and servicing center, carried freight and passengers until 1937, and later supported tourism through the Knox-Kane-Kinzua Railroad until the 2003 tornado destroyed the Kinzua Bridge. Though never incorporated, Marienville remained a durable village within Jenks Township with a long-lived business community.