Nevada Then

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This page is intended to tell the early story of Nevada, Missouri and the surrounding Vernon County area.  It would not have been possible to attempt this without the input of Patrick Brophy, who I am told by Terry Ramsey, "knows more about Nevada than any man alive".  All of the information you will see here was furnished to us by Pat in his publication "NEVADA IN A NUTSHELL"  Pat, because of space limitations, I hope I can do it justice.   A more in depth look at Vernon County (THREE HUNDRED YEARS) can be purchased from the Vernon County Historical Society.

Nevada Then

   The area we now call Vernon County was originally in the middle of the Osage Indian homeland.   They lived in villages around the headwaters of the Osage River 10 miles Northeast of what is now known as Nevada, Missouri.  They were a warlike tribe and claimed all of the territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains and between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers.  In 1808 they gave up all their Missouri lands except a 24 mile strip on the West side, which included most of what is now, Vernon County.   This strip was off limits to white settlement.

    Though warlike, they realized that their survival depended on the friendship of white America and ask for missionaries to be sent to them.  In 1821, some 40 men, women and children, Protestant missionaries and their families and employees came from the East by riverboat and established the first white settlement anywhere in western Missouri, they called it Harmony Mission.  Though actually in modern day Bates County, just north of the Osage River, not far from Papinsville, Harmony Mission would lead directly to the settling of Vernon County.  In 1825 the Osages gave up possession of the rest of their Missouri lands and soon left the state for a Kansas reservation.  Some Mission families followed the Indians; others moved upstream on the Little Osage, seeking a higher, dryer location.

    Vernon County's first settlers were the Summers brothers. Moses, Jesse and Allen.  They were Kentuckians who came to the Little Osage River in 1829.  They were shortly joined by those from Harmony Mission and others.  Daniel H. Austin, the Mission's millwright, built a mill on the Little Osage in 1836 and a year or two later sold it to Cecil D. Ball, who enlarged and improved it.  It was both a saw and grist mill and became the center of settlement for the whole area.

    By 1850, the Bates-Vernon population was still only 3,669, including 350 slaves.  But the rate of settlement picked up in 1854.  Lead was discovered not far south, in Jasper and Newton counties and coal deposits were found throughout western Missouri, though at first they were mined only for local use.  Second, the Kansas-Nebraska Act officially opened Kansas territory to white settlement.  Many settlers, drawn west by the opening of Kansas, decided to settle in western Missouri instead because of disorder and even violence west of the line, over the issue of whether the new territory should permit or prohibit slavery.

    On August 5, 1855, a group of leading men met at Noah Caton's log cabin home, three miles north of present day Nevada, to organize the new county, named after a War of 1812 veteran Colonel Miles Standish Vernon, and named a commission to choose a site for a new county seat.  The commission chose the site of Nevada because of its central location and its beauty.  The neighborhood was already known as "Fair View", but when the name was proposed, DeWitt C. Hunter, the new circuit and county clerk, pointed out that there was already a post office by that name in Missouri.  "Well, then, Hunter", he was told, "you name it".  Hunter, like many others, had gone to California during the gold rush only six years before.  Though apparently he found no gold, he had happy memories of Nevada City, in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  He proposed that name and it was accepted.  "Nevada" is Spanish for "snowy".

    The antislavery forces turned to violence.  Even after winning political power by election, they continued to drive Southern settlers out of Kansas, or kill them and also began raiding into Missouri.  In December, 1858, John Brown led a midnight raid on three farms in northwest Vernon County, carrying off eleven slaves and much other property and leaving an elderly farmer slain.  A Vernon County grand jury indicted Brown and all his men, known and unknown, for grand larceny and murder, but the tense political climate of the day made arrests impossible.  Just a year later Brown made a similar but more famous raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia and was captured and hanged.  Descendants of some of the blacks taken from Vernon County still live in the Windsor, Ontario area.

    In the fall of 1860 the election of Lincoln further emboldened the antislavery leaders in Kansas.  The threat alone set off a widespread panic.  The last Southern settlers fled into Missouri, among them the Federal District Judge, who warned that abolitionists would soon invade Missouri to "release every slave, hang every master".  The frightened people Vernon County petitioned the governor for state protection and the state's major military force was sent out, under Brigadier General D. M. Frost, to "repel invasions and restore peace".  This so-called "Southwest Expedition" saw no action and was soon withdrawn.  But before leaving, Frost authorized the raising of three local companies of rangers and one of artillery "to patrol and protect the frontier".  Vernon County's company numbered some 80 men under the acting captaincy of Lieutenant R. A. Boughan of Balltown.  It passed the winter on the Little Osage near the border.  The headquarter's company and the artillery battery (four brass six-pounders), stationed at Balltown, did a good deal of heavy drinking but no fighting at all.  They were still there when the Civil War itself broke out the following April.

    No votes were cast for Lincoln in Vernon County.  Lincoln was regarded by Southern sympathizers as a radical abolitionist.  Most sympathized with the South because of their Southern roots and their bitter experiences with fanatical Northerners in the Kansas Border Wars.  These sympathies were confirmed by the "Camp Jackson Massacre" in May, 1861, when Federal troops fired on a crowd of civilians in St. Louis, killing over 30 men, women and children.  After Camp Jackson, it was said 19 out of 20 from Vernon County supported the Southern cause.  Proportionate to population, the county sent more men to the rebel armies than any other in Missouri.  In the locally raised 7th Cavalry Regiment alone, there were reportedly 483 from Vernon County, as against some 50 in all Federal units.

    "Secession flags fluttered in the breezes" over Nevada. where "sentiment was practically unanimous" for secession.  The ladies took up the cause and were as zealous as their brothers.  They could not wield swords, but they could ply needles, and they made flags and uniforms and did what they could".  On June 12th the call to arms came to militia units already formed.  On July 4th they got their baptism of fire at Carthage.  At Cowskin Prairie in extreme southwest Missouri, they became part of the Independent Missouri army, being organized by General Sterling Price, becoming the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 8th Division.  DeWitt C. Hunter of Nevada was elected colonel (officers of volunteers then being elected).  On August 10th they played a prominent part in the bloody battle at Wilson's Creek, near Springfield, but miraculously suffered no casualties.

    The men were soon alarmed by reported raids on their homes by Jayhawkers.  On August 27th, part of jayhawking Jim Lane's private Kansas army, bluffed Missouri forces out of Balltown and shelled and burned the mill and the old covered bridge.  Soldiers with Price got his permission to return home to look after their families.  The whole army soon followed, camping near Nevada.  Price sent 75 local men to report on the 1800 jayhawkers and other Federals at Fort Scott and then brought up the rest of his force to face the enemy over Big Drywood Creek at Hogan's Ford, some three miles due south of Deerfield.  Early on September 2nd the armies skirmished, with minor casualties.  The Federals retreated.   Price moved on north to capture Lexington, following a fabled six-day siege.

    Despite this victory, Price lacked the strength to hold Missouri.  He withdrew back south of the Osage River.  Southern sympathizers became alarmed and began a mass exodus southward in the army's wake.  From this time on, Vernon County was more or less under Federal occupation.  After the Confederate defeat at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, the following spring, the same was true of the whole state.  The Missouri State Guard was disbanded and many of the officers and men entered the regular Confederate army and found themselves transferred to the east.

    Others slipped home, behind the Federal lines, some to try to sit out the war quietly, some to try to protect their families from rampaging Jayhawkers, still others to recruit men for the Confederate army.  Inevitably, they found themselves fighting "every jump in the road".   The occupying Federals regarded them as outlaws and soon were referring to them as "Bushwhackers", an old word originally meaning simply, backwoodsmen.  For the next three years, Vernon County would witness constant, small, but bitter skirmishes between the occupying Federals, stationed at Fort Scott, Springfield and elsewhere, and the Bushwhackers or guerrillas, officially known as Partisan Rangers:  local men, some whom lived in the wilds, while others lived as innocent civilians by day and by night, came together in small, informal bands, to attack vulnerable Federal wagon trains or outposts and to strike back at the marauding Jayhawkers.

    Of course such an irregular way-of-life attracted wild, lawless men.  Most bushwhackers (especially in Vernon County) were decent and honorable, ordinary men, driven into their course by the cruelties of the Federal occupation and the killings and thievings of the Jayhawkers and fighting for what they saw as a just cause.  Such a man was William Henry Taylor, who had just been elected Vernon County sheriff; he resigned to take a commission as quartermaster captain of the 7th Cavalry (he would be reelected sheriff after the war).   Another was William Marchbanks, a former peace officer and the son of a judge, also commissioned captain in the Missouri State Guard.  Even Colonel Hunter, who came back home to recruit after Pea Ridge, was considered a Bushwhacker by some Federals, though he was still circuit and county clerk, carried the keys to the courthouse in his pocket and saved the public records from burning with the town by carrying them off in a Confederate army wagon.  These men were generally respected by the Federals who fought them.

    Vernon County also had its "Lady Bushwhackers";  Women who served as "scouts, spies, guides and couriers" for the Confederacy.  Most famous among them was Ella Mayfield, who shared many perilous adventures with her sisters and her in-laws, the Gabberts.

    The year 1863 was "the most woeful" in Vernon County's history.  "Back and forth into Missouri rode the Kansas Jayhawkers; back and forth into Kansas rode the Missouri guerrillas; back and forth into loyal Cedar rode the Vernon Bushwhackers; back and forth into rebel Vernon rode the Cedar militia."  Montevallo was burned by Iowa troops on April 14th, 1862.  Farms were burned and pillaged.  Men and boys were slain.   Normal life, schooling, churches and law courts, had become a dim memory.  The few families who hadn't fled south, struggling to carry on in a normal way, "had a hard time of it.  They were preyed upon by both sides".

    The climax came on May 26, 1863, when 100 Federal militiamen from Cedar and St. Clair counties, under Captain Anderson Morton, burned Nevada in revenge for a Bushwhacker ambush on a militia party on the Nevada square and the deaths of two militiamen.  The militiamen were convinced (erroneously) the Nevadans gave the Bushwhackers support and information.  They called the town "the Bushwhacker capitol".  Some 75 homes and all public buildings, save the schoolhouse and jail, were burned.  Only half-a-dozen small houses were spared.

    Two months later Colonel C. W. Blair, the Federal commander at Fort Scott, sent four companies of the 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry into Vernon County to "keep back the guerrillas".  Setting up "picket posts" at key river crossings, they remained till the end of the war, but saw little action, only occasional skirmishes with small Bushwhacker bands.   Reportedly they spent more time courting the Rebel girls than battling the Rebel boys!  Only one or two were killed in action, but nine or ten were "captured" by "Lady Bushwhackers".  Several settled down with their new wives in Vernon County after the war and still have descendants here.

    On August 25th, the Federals issued "Order No. 11", driving all rural western Missourians (pro-southern or otherwise) from their homes.  The homes were then pillaged and burned, along with all grain and hay stocks.  The order covered only northern Vernon County, even there the effect was slight.  "By that time there was nothing left to burn".

    When the war ended in the spring of 1865, all Vernon County lay devastated.  Hardly a hundred families remained and all the towns, with the partial exception of Balltown, had been destroyed.  Few farms were left untouched.  Kansas Jayhawkers had stolen even the fence rails!   Public business, untended for four years, were in hopeless disorder.

    Ex-Confederate soldiers drifted home through the summer, shortly joined by Union veterans seeking new homes.   As a rule they cooperated to rebuild the ruined country, which began to wear the look of the real pioneer times, thirty years before.  Buildings went up in Nevada and by early 1867, business had revived.  The county government first operated from Balltown, but in 1868 a new brick courthouse was built.  On March 3, 1869, the town was incorporated and the word "City" dropped from its name.  The new city fathers hired a marshal to keep the peace, laid down some board sidewalks and started Deepwood Cemetery.

    The overriding issue of the day was railroads.  Several lines were projected, which never became realities.   In October, 1870, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas (Katy) Railroad ran its first train through Nevada.  But then the Panic of 1873 brought on a nationwide depression, more than canceling out the new railroad's positive benefits.  Growth remained sluggish.  In 1880 Nevada's population was still less than 2,000.

    The building of the Lexington and Southern (shortly absorbed by the Missouri Pacific) in 1879-81 had a tremendous effect.  Town and county grew rapidly.  Most of Nevada's landmark institutions and notable older homes date from this period.  At the end of the railroad era, 22 passenger trains a day came and went at the big brick Union Depot, which replaced a smaller, earlier station at the end of East Cherry in 1892.

    Other railroad lines reached into every corner of Vernon County and towns sprang up along them.  The railroads made it possible to mine the area's coal on a commercial scale.  In 1886 a group of Nevada men conceived the idea of building a railroad to haul lead-zinc ore from southwest Missouri to Nevada, where coal was plentiful, for smelting-zinc was much in demand for the new plumbing appliances industry.  As a result, the Nevada and Minden Railroad (shortly absorbed by the Missouri Pacific) was built through Moundville and Bronaugh.  By the turn of the century, two Nevada smelting firms, on what's still called Smelter Hill, employed some 500 men.  Metz and Richards came into being with the Missouri Pacific branch line between Rich Hill and Ft. Scott, built in 1894.   The Kansas City Southern created Stotesbury and made Richards the only Vernon County town outside Nevada to be served by two railroads.  The earlier Katy had created Schell City, Harwood and Walker, much as the Missouri Pacific had made Arthur, Horton, Milo and Sheldon.  The last local line, finished in 1901, linked Nevada and El Dorado Springs, via Walker, with two "mixed" (passenger and freight) trains a day.

    The late 1880's also saw the arrival of State Hospital No. 3 (first known as a "lunatic asylum").   For almost a century it was Vernon County's largest employer and an important part of the local economy.

   Likewise, Cottey College first opened its doors on September 8, 1884.  The Sisters of St. Francis opened their convent in 1893 and soon added an orphanage.  In 1887 well-drillers working in a ravine southwest of town, struck a vein of sulfur water so powerful it shot ten feet in the air.  Within a year, a lake had formed and development began on the park ultimately to be known as Radio Springs (on the notion that the water was beneficially radioactive).  Harry C. Moore, the park's key early developer, built his "opera house" in 1885.  In 1888 Dr. I. W. Amerman built his "Medical and Surgical Infirmary", Vernon County's first hospital.  In 1887 a streetcar line was laid out between the railroad depot and the park and the State Hospital.  Until the late 1890's the cars were horse or mule-drawn.  Telephones were beginning to arrive by 1880.  Gas lights came in 1882, electric lights in 1888 and natural gas in 1911.   In the decade, Nevada grew from 1,500 to 6,000; the county from 19,000 to over 30,000.

    Nevada and the Vernon County area have a very interesting, to say the least, place in the history of our nation.  Pat Brophy and the Vernon County Historical Society have done an excellent job preserving our history for Vernon County's residents and  the rest of the world.

    Having only been a resident of Nevada for a short time (seven years), I have often ask myself what it is about Nevada that causes me to love it so.  Other than my wife, Vickey, I now know that it is the determination, friendliness and undying loyalty the people of Vernon County have to their neighbors.  These three factors have been evident since the beginning of the 1800's and obviously has been instilled in Vernon County's "Family" for generation after generation.  It is the way they accept a "newcomer".  The way that everyone speaks when you meet them on the street.  After they have met you only once, they call you by your first name.   When someone has a problem, they come together as a family to see what can be done to help.

    What Nevada lacks in size, it makes up for in spirit, determination and compassion.  I guess they just come by it honestly, they inherited it!