Webster County was organized on March 3, 1855, and encompasses 590 square miles of the highest extensive upland area of Missouri’s Ozarks. Its judicial seat, Marshfield, lies 1490 feet above sea level, the highest county seat in Missouri. Pioneer legislator John F. McMahan named the county and county seat for Daniel Webster and his home of Marshfield, Massachusetts. Marshfield was laid out in 1856 by R.H. Pitts on land given by C.F. Dryden and W.T. and B.F.T. Burford. Before a courthouse was built, county business was conducted at Hazelwood, where Joseph W. McClurg, later governor of Missouri, operated a general store. The county’s third courthouse, built of Carthage marble in 1939-41, stands today. During the Civil War, a small force of pro-Southern state troops was driven out of Marshfield in February 1862, and ten months later a body of Confederates was routed east of town. On January 9, 1863, Gen. Joseph O. Shelby’s troops burned the stoutly built Union fortifications at Marshfield and at Sand Springs after they had been evacuated. By 1862, the telegraph passed near Marshfield on a route later called the Old Wire Road. In Webster County, which straddles the divide between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers, rise the headwaters of the James, Niangua, Gasconade, and Pomme de Terre rivers. Part of the 1808 Osage Indian land cession, the county was settled in the early 1830’s by pioneers from Kentucky and Tennessee. An Indian trail crossed southern Webster County, and many prehistoric mounds are in the area. Railroad building after the Civil War stimulated county growth as a dairy, poultry, and livestock producer. The Atlantic and Pacific, later Frisco, was built through Marshfield in 1872, and by 1883 the Kansas City, Springfield, and Memphis, also Frisco, crossed the county. Seymour, Rogersville, Fordland, and Niangua grew up along the rail routes. Early schools were Marshfield Academy, chartered in 1860; Mount Dale Academy, opened in 1873; and Henderson Academy in 1879. Astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, born in Marshfield in 1889, was from the county. The composition “Marshfield Tornado” by the Negro musician John W. Blind Boone gave wide publicity to the April 18, 1880 tornado that struck town, killing 65 and causing $1,000,000 in damage.