Harrison County lies in the undulating glacial plains of north central Missouri and is one of nine counties forming the state's border with Iowa. Twenty-sixth in size among Missouri's 114 counties and the second largest on the border, it was organized in 1845 and named for Missouri Congressman Albert G. Harrison. Now encompassing 720 square miles, it did not reach its present size until the U.S. Supreme Court established the Missouri-Iowa boundary in 1851. Bethany, the county seat, first called Dallas, was laid out in 1845 at the direction of county seat commissioner John Allen, later a member of the 1861 State Convention. Bethany became the prototype for the town in Edgar W. Howe's famed 1883 novel The Story of a Country Town; Howe, founder of the Atchison, Kansas, Globe, had lived there as a boy while his father Henry Howe was a minister and editor in Bethany. A Union county in the War Between the States, Harrison sent a number of Federal troops. The first railroad, a branch of the C. B. & Q., reached Bethany in 1880, and the town grew as a trading and shipping point, with fairgrounds dating from the early 1900s. In the fertile Grand River basin, Harrison became a grain and livestock farming area. The county lay in a region ceded by the Iowa, Sac, and Fox tribes in 1824 and was still roamed by Indians into the 1840s; the Great Indian Trail ran from east to northwest through the county. Surveyed land was opened for sale in 1842, and early settlers from Ohio, Illinois, other parts of Missouri, and the East arrived in the late 1830s, followed later by a number of Bohemians. Its towns include Eagleville and Ridgeway, once rivals for county seat, Cainsville, once a coal mining town, Mount Moriah, New Hampton, Martinsville, Gilman City, Blythedale, and Melbourne. Union General Benjamin N. Prentiss practiced law in Bethany, educator John R. Kirk lived there as a boy, and Kirk and Eugene Fair, who was born in Gilman City, both became presidents of Northeast Missouri State Teachers College. Joseph H. Burrows, who introduced the first bill in 1881 to reduce postage from three cents to two cents and named John J. Pershing for appointment to West Point, was a businessman and minister in Cainsville.