Deep in the Missouri Ozarks, Christian County was organized in 1859 as one of the last three of the state's 114 counties to be formed. At the request of pioneer Mrs. Thomas Neaves, it was named for her native Kentucky county honoring Revolutionary War Col. William Christian. Ozark, platted in 1843 by J.C. and A.N. Farmer near a mill on spring-fed Finley Creek, became the county seat, and J.C. Inman laid out an addition. A thriving town in the 1850s with a fine academy, Ozark High School, Ozark was a Union post in the Civil War; an attack was repulsed in August 1862, and in January 1863 the town was evacuated as General Joseph O. Shelby approached and burned a blockhouse there. During the war, guerrilla bands and troops raided the countryside. To combat postwar lawlessness, the Bald Knobbers were organized as a law and order group in adjacent Taney County in 1885, first meeting on a bald knobbed hill, but in time some were themselves accused of lawlessness; a number of trials were held in Ozark, and three members were executed there in May 1889. Among Christian County's hills, valleys, and plains are many earth mounds and rock cairns from prehistoric days. In modern times, Osage tribes ceded claims to the region in 1808, and Delaware Indians held a land grant in the area from 1818 to 1829, with their trading post near Ozark. Ohioans settled in the county in the early 1820s, and pioneers from Tennessee and Kentucky came in the 1830s. The town of Ozark, whose name derives from the French Aux Arcs, meaning in the country of the Arkansas, serves a tomato, fruit, livestock, dairy, and poultry farming county. In 1883 the Chadwick branch of the Frisco Railroad reached Ozark. North of Ozark, Smallin's Cave, visited in 1818 by explorer Henry B. Schoolcraft, has one of the largest openings in Missouri; he called it Winoca. At Billings, Ashmore's Relay Station was a Butterfield Overland Mail stop from 1858 to 1861. Part of southeast Christian County lies in Mark Twain National Forest, and nearby in Greene County is Wilson's Creek Battlefield.