Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 3.djvu/490

  court settled the contest in favor of Marshalltown. The first newspaper in the county was established by T. J. Wilson in 1855 at La Fayette, now Albion, named the Iowa Central Journal. The paper was moved to Marshalltown in 1857 by E. N. Chapin and R. N. Barnhard who changed the name to the Marshall County Times. Wells Rice was the first postmaster when the office was established at Marshalltown in 1854. G. M. Woodbury was for many years one of the most enterprising citizens in securing railroads and promoting manufacturing in the growing city. In 1863 the Iowa and Nebraska Railroad was built through the county from east to west, passing through Marshalltown. MILLS COUNTY was created in 1851 and named for Major Frederick Mills, a gallant young Iowa officer who was killed at the Battle of Cherubusco in the Mexican War. Its western boundary is the Missouri River and it lies in the second tier north of the Missouri State line. The county is twenty-four miles in length from east to west and eighteen miles in width, containing four hundred forty-four square miles. The western portion of the county consists of level bottom land of the Missouri River valley, in places reaching a width of from three to seven miles, east of which rise the high bluffs which in remote ages formed the shore of the river.

The first white settler was Colonel Peter A. Sarpy who as early as 1836 established a trading house and was an agent of the American Fur Company. He laid out a town near the mouth of Mosquito Creek and named it St. Mary. For many years it was a thriving village but the Missouri River encroached upon it gradually undermining the buildings until most of them disappeared beneath the floods and the town was abandoned. Henry Alice, who came as a missionary to the Pawnee Indians in 1834, made his home near St. Mary. In 1846 thirty Mormons, who were among those driven out of Nauvoo,