Macon, the seat of justice of one of Missouri's richest coal-bearing counties, 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, laid out just west in 1857 and named for a railroad official, joined with it as Macon City in 1859. The Hannibal and St. Joseph reached the town in 1858 and the North Missouri in 1859, helping make it a railroad center, a Union troop concentration point during the Civil War, and the county seat after it replaced pro-Southern Bloomington 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 Sept. 26, 1862. Through the county passes the Great Divide between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and its abundant bituminous coal deposits made it a prime coal producer and the state's leading county 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, where pre-historic Indian mounds remain and the Great Indian Trail is believed to have crossed near the town, while the Bee Trace later ran north from here. First settlers from the South arrived in the late 1820s, followed by people from many states and countries; in the late 1860s Welsh settlers established nearby New Cambria, and many Welsh and later Italians 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 owed to Col. F.W.V. Blees, a Prussian-born educator, businessman, and philanthropist, and to Theodore Gary, a utilities magnate, first chairman of the Missouri State Highway Commission, and town benefactor.