Gallatin, a Grand River town platted in 1837 as the seat of Daviess County, was named for Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury from 1801 to 1813. Settlers were in the area by 1830, and the county was formed in 1836. Adam-ondi-Ahman, five miles northwest, was settled by the Mormons in 1838 on the direction of Joseph Smith, who said the name meant "Adam's Consecrated Land" because Adam blessed all the patriarchs there before his death; at the place, also known as "Adam's Grave," Smith announced the discovery of an altar on a nearby hill where he said these ancients worshipped. Hostilities between the Mormons and anti-Mormons led to a sharp skirmish in Gallatin, and when the Mormons were expelled from Missouri in 1839, Adam-ondi-Ahman was abandoned. Gallatin later became home to the Daviess County Female Academy, chartered in 1849, the Daviess County Academy and Masonic Hall, chartered in 1855, and Grand River College, moved there in 1893 from Edinburg in Grundy County. The town stood on land ceded to the U.S. by the Osage in 1808 and by the Sauk, Fox, and Iowa tribes in 1824, and it served the fertile agricultural area of the Green Hills Region of North Missouri. Nearby Grand River was called Nischma-Honja by the Indians and Riviere Grande by early French writers; this chief river of north Missouri eroded a rock-walled valley paralleling another valley a few miles east that, before the glacial age, carried the Waters of the North, now the Missouri River, southward. Gallatin was also the scene of the 1882 trial of Frank James, elder brother of Jesse, after he voluntarily surrendered to Governor Thomas T. Crittenden on charges of participating in a train holdup near Winston; highlighted by the appearance of Confederate General Joseph O. Shelby as a defense witness, the trial ended in acquittal. Among those who lived here were A. M. Dockery, Governor of Missouri from 1901 to 1905, and Joshua W. Alexander, U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 1919 to 1921.