Grove Hill, first inhabited by Choctaw Indians, was settled by pioneers in the early 1800s and was first called Magoffin's Store after James Magoffin, whose shop opened in 1815 two miles from the present courthouse. The community was also known as Smithville and Macon. Little activity occurred there before 1832, when the county seat moved from Clarksville to its present site and a one-story frame courthouse was built. During the 1830s, Grove Hill was one of the principal towns in the county. One of the earliest businesses in the county seat was a hotel operated by Tom Brown, a free man of color, and the Clarke County Democrat, the oldest continually operating business in Clarke County, began there in 1856; both were on the north side of Main Street in front of the courthouse. The first school, Macon Male and Female Academy, opened in September 1846, and in 1909 Clarke County High School was established in a two-story brick building on the school's present site. In the summer of 1853, a terrible Yellow Fever epidemic swept through the area, and many of those who died were buried in a cemetery near Church Hill Street and in Spinks Cemetery on Asbury Road. A second courthouse, an attractive two-story brick building constructed in 1899, was razed in 1955 to make way for the present courthouse, which was completed that same year.