Edina, the seat of Knox County, was laid out in the glacial plains of northeast Missouri in 1839 by W.J. Smallwood, and S.W.B. Carnegy, a Scotsman who surveyed the new town, gave it the poetic form of Edinburgh. Knox County, formed in 1843 and organized in 1845, was named for Revolutionary War General Henry Knox. The county lay in territory ceded by the Iowa, Sac, and Fox Indians in 1824, had rich soil and water resources, and has yielded about 70 Indian mounds. Its first settlement was made near Newark in 1833 by James Fresh, and early pioneers mainly from Ohio, Indiana, Maryland, and Kentucky were later joined by many Irish immigrants and some Germans in the late 1830s. One of the first Catholic parishes in northeast Missouri, St. Joseph’s, was formed here in 1837, and the present St. Joseph Church was built in 1873-75. Early schools included St. Joseph’s Academy, founded in 1865, Lyon Academy in 1866, Edina Seminary, also called Knox Collegiate Institute, in 1878, St. Joseph’s College for Boys in 1883, and Oaklawn College at Novelty, founded in 1876. Set amid the rolling prairie grain and livestock country of Knox County, Edina lies north of the South Fork of the Fabius, with the North and Middle Fabius and the Salt and North rivers also in the county. During the Civil War, Colonel M.E. Green and the pro-Southern State Guards occupied Edina on July 30, 1861, and at Newark Union troops under Capt. W.W. Lair surrendered to Confederates under Col. Joseph C. Porter on August 1, 1862, after a sharp skirmish. In the postwar railroad boom, Knox County subscribed $184,000 in bonds by 1870 to the unsuccessful Missouri and Mississippi Railroad, and the debt was paid by 1899; the Quincy, Missouri, and Pacific Railroad, later the C.B. and Q., reached Edina in 1872. Edina was the birthplace of jurist George Turner, Union General T.T. Taylor edited an Edina newspaper from 1868 to 1873, Confederate Capt. Griffin Frost, author of "Camp and Prison Journal," edited another from 1874 to 1905, and Henry E. Sever, born near Hurdland, bequeathed $100,000 to Knox County for a wildlife sanctuary in 1941.