Marble Hill stands on a hill at the junction of Crooked and Hurricane Creeks, where Thomas Hamilton laid out the town after Bollinger County was organized in March 1851. First called New California, it was later enlarged, renamed Dallas, and made the county seat, then in 1868 took the name Marble Hill because of marble-like limestone outcroppings nearby after confusion arose with Dallas County. The county's earliest pioneers included Swiss Germans from North Carolina who in 1800 took up Spanish land grants along the Whitewater and Castor rivers, and Bollinger County was named for their leader, George F. Bollinger, a pioneer legislator who operated a large mill near Burfordville covered bridge in adjacent Cape Girardeau County. Across Crooked Creek southwest of Marble Hill, Eli Lutes laid out Lutesville in 1869 and gave land to the St. Louis and Iron Mt. R.R. to secure the depot, helping Lutesville grow as a shipping and trading point while Marble Hill developed as the county seat and banking town for a grain and livestock farming county. In the Ozark Highland near Missouri's Lowland Region, the county also contains prehistoric Indian mounds, was used in modern times by Shawnee and Delaware Indians, and was claimed by the Osage until 1808; near Marble Hill, where an earth fracture exposed geologic layers, Missouri's first discovered dinosaur bones were found in 1942. During the Civil War, Maj. Jonas Rawalt and 100 Union troops captured 18 prisoners here in January 1862, Col. S. D. Kitchen and 120 Confederates raided the courthouse and town in April, and on nearby Crooked Creek about 300 Confederates under Col. W.L. Jeffers routed about 268 Union troops led by Maj. B.F. Lazear on August 24, 1862, while guerrilla bands ranged the area. The county's population increased from 4,481 in 1864 to 8,013 by 1870, and Marble Hill later became home to Will Mayfield Junior College, founded in 1879 as an academy by Doctors H.J. Smith and W.H. Mayfield and closed in 1934.