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Bollinger County, Missouri (view source)
Revision as of 00:58, January 25, 2020
, 00:58, January 25, 2020Added to page
'''Bollinger County''' is a county in the southeastern part of the state of [[Missouri]]. It had a population of 12,363 at the 2010 census. The county was organized in 1851 and named for George Frederick Bollinger, a prominent early settler. [[Marble Hill, Missouri|Marble Hill]] is the county seat and only city.
'''Bollinger County''' is a county in the southeastern part of the state of [[Missouri]]. It had a population of 12,363 at the 2010 census. The county was organized in 1851 and named for George Frederick Bollinger, a prominent early settler. [[Marble Hill, Missouri|Marble Hill]] is the county seat and only city.
==History==
Though their history is not well documented, the Bollinger County area was at one time inhabited by various Indian tribes, including mound-builders of the Mississippian culture. According to one estimate, some three thousand artificial mounds existed within the county, being perhaps more numerous toward the south.<ref>Robert Sidney Douglass, ''History of Southeast Missouri'' (1912), p. 4-5.</ref> Certainly by the 18th century, it was vaguely within the territory of the Osage tribe, which included it among their hunting-grounds.
Though French traders may have been active in the area earlier, the first and most prominent settler was George Frederick Bollinger, a North Carolinian of Swiss-German parentage. Bollinger first came to Southeast Missouri in 1796-97 and persuaded Louis Lorimier, the Spanish colonial commandant at [[Cape Girardeau, Missouri|Cape Girardeau]], to grant him a tract of land along Whitewater Creek and induce other settlers to the area. Bollinger returned to [[North Carolina]] and returned in January 1800 with some 20 other families, mostly Germans like himself. (Though officially only [[Roman Catholics]] were allowed to settle in the Louisiana Territory, and Bollinger and his fellow settlers were all [[Protestants]] of the German Reformed Church, Lorimier bent the rules for them, perhaps on the theory that expanding the white population would strengthen the Spanish hold on the territory.) Bollinger flourished in the Whitewater Creek area, building a mill and becoming a colonel in the militia; later he would serve in the territorial and state legislatures. His sons would be prominent as well in the next wave of settlement, and the Bollinger family today is a very large one scattered across Southeast Missouri.<ref>Ibid., p. 79-80.</ref>
Another community was established in 1800 farther southwest along the Castor River, near what today is the village of Zalma, and others followed throughout the antebellum era. For some time after the organization of the Missouri Territory in 1812, the area was attached to [[Cape Girardeau County, Missouri|Cape Girardeau County]]; eventually, Bollinger County, named for Colonel Bollinger, was organized by the state legislature on March 1, 1851. The new town of Marble Hill (originally named New California), located near the geographic center of the county, was selected as the county seat that same year.
By the [[Civil War]], the county had a population of around 7,500. It saw some minor actions during the conflict, including a [[Confederate]] raid of Marble Hill in April 1862 and a small battle on nearby Crooked Creek that August, but otherwise suffered less than some parts of the state. The first railroad to pass through, a branch of the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad, was opened in 1869, followed by a branch of the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad in the 1880s. The first county courthouse burned in 1866, followed by another which burned in 1884, and the current structure, completed in 1885.<ref>https://shsmo.org/collections/manuscripts/ramsay/bollinger</ref> After peaking at near 15,000 at the beginning of the 20th century, the population steadily declined, due to the closure or relocation of some local manufacturing businesses, until the 1970s, when it began a gradual increase that has continued to the present day.
The Bollinger County Museum of Natural History, located in the former Will Mayfield College building, opened in 1998. Among its exhibits are fossils of the Missouri hadrosaur, excavated near Glen Allen in 1942 and the first known discovery of [[dinosaur]] bones in the state.<ref>https://www.bcmnh.org/exhibits/dinosaurs/</ref>
==References==
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Missouri]]
[[Category:Missouri]]
[[Category:Counties]]
[[Category:Counties]]