How these towns came to be

Marshall County was carved out of four older counties in 1836. The legislature pulled land from Giles, Bedford, Lincoln, and Maury, drew a new boundary, and named the place for John Marshall, the chief justice of the Supreme Court. The county seat took its own name from Meriwether Lewis, the explorer, who died not far from here on the Natchez Trace.

For most of its life this was farm country, and good farm country at that. By the late 1930s the county raised more Jersey dairy cattle than anywhere else in the nation. The walking horse registry started in Lewisburg around the same time. People here still measure the year by planting, foaling, and the county fair.