Settled in 1834, Trenton became the seat of Grundy County in 1841 when James S. Lomax gave 80 acres for a townsite. Grundy County was named for Felix Grundy, United States Attorney General from 1838 to 1839, and the town took its name from Trenton, N.J. Important in the county's history was Grand River College, founded in nearby Edinburg in 1850 and chartered in 1851, where women and men were offered college work on an equal footing at the notably early date of 1850; a grade school now stands on the old college site. Among its distinguished alumni was Gen. Enoch H. Crowder, born in Edinburg, author of the Selective Service Act of 1917, for whom nearby Crowder State Park was established in memory. In Grundy County's "Heatherly War" of 1836, Missouri's top military leaders, a regiment, and two companies turned out to fight Indians falsely reported on the warpath by the Heatherly family to cover their own misdeeds, and the army soon disbanded when no Indians were found. Trenton serves a rich agricultural area where grain and livestock farming predominate across productive prairies, stream-fed valleys, and green-wooded hills. In the 1870s the city became a railroad division, and in its first 100 years three colleges were established there. Avalon College, founded by United Brethren at Avalon, Mo., from 1869 to 1873, moved to Trenton in 1890. In 1900 the founders of Ruskin College bought Avalon to establish a branch of an English socialistic movement, and although this group formed The Multitude Incorporated to care for cooperative businesses and the school, the whole venture failed in 1905. Trenton Junior College, a pioneer in the public school junior college movement, was established in 1925. Arthur M. Hyde, Governor of Missouri from 1921 to 1925 and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1925 to 1933, lived here. J.R. Atkinson, one of the co-founders of the Braille Institute of America, was born in nearby Galt. Early resident Jewett Norris gave 50,000 dollars for the library in 1890, and the nearby Gen. W.P. Thompson House is the oldest in the county.