Dallas County, organized in 1841, was first called Niangua for the river flowing within its borders, but the name was changed in 1844 to honor U.S. Vice President George M. Dallas. Settled in the early 1830s by pioneers from Tennessee, Indiana, and Ohio, the county lies in territory ceded by the Osage Indians in 1808. Buffalo, the county seat, was laid out in 1841 on Buffalo Head Prairie, an extensive plain named for a buffalo skull landmark erected in 1833 by first settler Mark Reynolds. During the Civil War, Dallas County was pro-Union and suffered numerous guerrilla raids; in October 1863 General Joseph O. Shelby's Confederates burned the courthouse, and in July 1864 raiders burned the Methodist Church, then being used as a courthouse. In an unsuccessful effort to obtain a railroad, the county issued $235,000 in bonds from 1869 to 1871 and contracted with the Laclede and Fort Scott R.R. Co. for roadbed and bridges; although the contract was fulfilled, the railroad was rerouted to bypass the county, which then refused payment, and the debt with interest rose into the millions before a compromise at $300,000 was finally paid off in 1940. With timbered Ozark hills on the east and rolling prairies on the west, the county became a livestock, dairy, and grain farming area. From the late 1860s to the 1890s, lead and zinc were mined, and in 1882 a vein of fuller's earth, one of the first discovered in the U.S., was found near Buffalo and worked briefly. Urbana to the northwest dates from the mid-1860s, and other communities that developed after the Civil War included Charity, Celt, Plad, Redtop, Tunas, Louisburg, Windyville, and Long Lane. Near Buffalo in the 1870s was Friendship, a communal colony founded by Alexander Longley, and the mutualistic Home Employment Co-op Co. at Long Lane was founded in 1901. Bennett Springs State Park, in Dallas and Laclede counties, dates from 1924; James A. Brice was the first settler at the spring in 1837, where an average of 71 million gallons wells up daily in a gravelly basin. The area appears in Harold Bell Wright's The Calling of Dan Matthews. Dallas County was the birthplace of Philip A. Bennett, Missouri lieutenant governor from 1925 to 1929 and a congressman from 1941 to 1942, and of Marion T. Bennett, a congressman from 1943 to 1949. Near Buffalo is the site of the noted pioneer Reynolds Nursery.