Macon, the seat of justice for Macon County in Missouri, was laid out in 1856 on rolling upland prairie between the Middle Fork of the Salt and the East Fork of the Chariton rivers. Hudson, named for a railroad official, was laid out just west in 1857, and the two towns joined as Macon City in 1859. The Hannibal and St. Joseph railroad reached the town in 1858, and the North Missouri line in 1859, making Macon a railroad center, a Union troop concentration point during the Civil War, and the replacement for pro-Southern Bloomington as county seat in 1863. Macon County, organized in 1837 and named for Revolutionary War soldier and North Carolina statesman Nathaniel Macon, was the site where 11 military parole violators were executed by order of Union General Lewis Merrill on September 26, 1862. The county, crossed by the Great Divide between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, contains abundant bituminous coal deposits and ranked first in the state in coal production from 1891 to 1913; coal was first discovered at nearby Bevier, laid out in 1858 and named for Col. Robert S. Bevier. Macon lies in Missouri's Glacial Plains Region, in territory claimed by Sac, Fox, and Iowa Indians until 1824, and the area contains prehistoric Indian mounds and may have been crossed by the Great Indian Trail, while the Bee Trace ran north from here as a pioneer trail. The first settlers, largely from the South, arrived in the late 1820s, later joined by people from many states and countries, including Welsh settlers near New Cambria in the late 1860s and many Welsh and later Italians who came to mine coal. Early schools included Johnson College in 1866, St. James Academy in 1875, St. Agnes Hall in 1884, Blees Military Academy in 1899, and McGee College at College Mound in 1853; Blees Academy was sold in 1914 and became the Still-Hildreth Osteopathic Sanatorium. Much of Macon's development was shaped by Col. F.W.V. Blees, a Prussian-born educator, businessman, and philanthropist, and by Theodore Gary, a utilities magnate, first chairman of the Missouri State Highway Commission, and town benefactor.