Maryville was laid out in 1845 on rolling prairie above the One Hundred and Two River as the seat of newly organized Nodaway County. It was named for Mary House Graham, the first white woman settler there and the wife of county official Amos Graham. Nodaway County, a northern border county and the largest of six formed from Platte Purchase territory acquired from the Indians in 1836, took its name from the Nodaway River, with Nodaway meaning snake or enemy in Algonquian. In a grain and livestock farming county famed for its hogs, Maryville developed as a marketing town and shipping point after the Kansas City, St. Joseph, and Council Bluffs Railroad reached it in 1869 and the Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific in 1879. Northwest Missouri State College is located there, founded by the state legislature in 1905 as the Fifth District Normal School after Maryville and Nodaway County secured the site with a bid of $58,672 and 86 acres including the building and grounds of Maryville Seminary, founded in 1889; the college maintains an early farm implements display and an art collection. Maryville lies in Missouri's Glacial Plains Region, in an area once home to Iowa, Sac, and Fox tribes and for a time to a band of Potawatomi Indians, and the first settlers in what is now Nodaway County, largely from the South, arrived in the late 1830s. Nearby settlements in the county included Conception, founded southeast of Maryville as a Catholic colony by Irish railroad workers from Reading, Pennsylvania, under Father James A. Power and others; later many Germans settled in the area. Benedictine Fathers established Conception Abbey in 1873 and New Engelberg College, now Conception Seminary, in 1883, the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception was built in the 1880s, and at nearby Clyde the Benedictine Convent of Perpetual Adoration was founded in 1875. Maryville was the birthplace of Dale Carnegie and Homer Croy, while Albert P. Morehouse lived there, Forrest C. Donnell was born in Quitman, and Merrill E. Otis was born near Hopkins.