From the Whitewater to the state dinosaur

Dinosaur county

Missouri’s first dinosaur

In 1942 the Chronister family, digging a well near Glen Allen, struck bone. Dan Stewart of the Missouri Geological Survey reported the find, and the Smithsonian bought thirteen tail vertebrae for $50. They were the first dinosaur remains ever found in Missouri.

Scientists first took the animal for a long-necked sauropod and named it twice in 1945 before settling on Parrosaurus missouriensis. It was moved to the genus Hypsibema in 1979, and digs at the site in the 1980s showed it was a hadrosaur, a duck-billed plant eater some 30 to 35 feet long. In 2004 the General Assembly made Hypsibema missouriensis the state dinosaur.

The digging hasn’t stopped. Guy Darrough found a juvenile in 2011, and four more specimens came out in 2016 and 2017 with help from Chicago’s Field Museum, which took the adults. In Marble Hill, the Bollinger County Museum of Natural History showed off the county’s fossils until the pandemic closed it in 2022. Its collection was given away around the region, and its life-size Allosaurus, Elvis, now stands beside Highway 34.

Founding and early years

From the Dutch Settlement to Dallas

Bollinger County was organized on March 1, 1851, from parts of Cape Girardeau, Wayne, and Stoddard counties, and named for George Frederick Bollinger, who led the first party of settlers here from North Carolina. His families, mostly of German descent, settled along the Whitewater River in what was long called the Dutch Settlement.

The Civil War

Raids on the county seat

Bollinger County was ten years old when the war began, a county of small farms between the river towns of Cape Girardeau and the hills to the west. No major battle was fought here, but scouting parties from both armies rode through often, often to the county seat, then called Dallas.

According to Marble Hill’s historical marker, Union Maj. Jonas Rawalt’s 100 troops took 18 prisoners at Dallas in January 1862, and in April Col. S. D. Kitchen rode in with about 120 Confederates and raided the courthouse and town. An 1875 gazetteer also records an engagement near Patton in 1861 and one near Dallas in 1863. As across southeast Missouri, guerrilla raids, robberies, and murders did more lasting harm than the armies.

Since the railroad

A college town, a merger, and the land

The railroad made Lutesville the county’s busiest town, while Marble Hill, a mile away, kept the courthouse and, from 1880, Will Mayfield College. The college taught more than 200 students at its peak in the 1920s and closed in 1934; its Arts and Science Building and campus are now on the National Register, and the county library is there today. In 1985 the two towns finally merged under the county seat’s name.

The land itself is the other draw. The Missouri Department of Conservation bought Duck Creek in 1950 as a waterfowl area beside the Mingo refuge, and its Castor River Conservation Area protects Blue Pond, the deepest natural pond in the state. Storms have marked recent years: an F3 tornado in 2002 killed a teenager between Hahn and Marble Hill, and an EF2 in April 2023 killed five people around Glen Allen and Grassy.