Feature Article

Don Corrigan, columnist for the Kirkwood-Webster Times and the South County Times, has a front page story this week (September 3) in both papers.  See the Kirkwood-Webster Times article by following this link:  http://www.websterkirkwoodtimes.com/Articles-i-2010-09-03-170651.113118_Missouris_Civil_War.html.
The Times newspapers cover a large territory in St. Louis County.  As Corrigan writes, it is time for the St. Louis area [...]

Continue Reading...

What about Francis M. Lear?

Lear is a name that is known to Marion County, Missouri.  It is a name known to much of the world, in fact, because a man born in Hannibal in 1902 gave us first the car radio, the 8-track, and then the Lear Jet.  He held over 150 U.S. Patents.  His name was William Powell [...]

Continue Reading...

Hiram T. Smith – Victim 3

Drive west from Palmyra for 13 miles, to the town of Philadelphia, which is on State Highway 168.  At Philadelphia take a turn north on State Route D, which you will follow for about 12 miles.  There is a bend in the road here where you will find the graveyard of an old Baptist Church, [...]

Continue Reading...

Palmyra – John M. Wade

The town of Perry, Missouri, bills itself as the gateway to Mark Twain Lake, and it is in southwest Ralls County.  Perry is just west of the intersection of Missouri Routes 19 and 154.  It is the home of the Ralls County Historicial Society.
South from the intersection of 19 and 154, about 2.2 miles (on [...]

Continue Reading...

July 4, 1865

A July sun, in torrid clime, gleamed on exile band, who in suits of gray
Stood in mute array On the banks of the Rio Grande.
They were dusty and faint with their long, drear ride, And they paused when they
came to the river side;
For its wavelets divide
With their glowing tide
Their own [...]

Continue Reading...

Same Year, Same Facts?

Grant’s Memoirs contain a very famous passage, when he talks about his first near-encounter with a Civil War enemy.  The enemy was Brig. Gen. Thomas Harris of the Missouri State Guard.  The place was near Samuel Clemens’ birthplace, the town of Florida in Monroe County.
Here is what Grant said:  “As we approached the brow of [...]

Continue Reading...

John Yager McPheeters, R.I.P.

There is a cemetery in Lewis County, Missouri, once called the Liberty Methodist Cemetery (a map follows, courtesy Google Maps), and it is here we believe that Palmyra victim John McPheeters is buried.  Someone in or around Quincy Illinois or LaGrange Missouri please see if this is true.  Report of grave condition please!

Continue Reading...

Where are the Palmyra 10?

Palmyra is a beautiful historic town in Marion County, Missouri.  It is a bit northwest of Hannibal, and about the same distance southwest of Quincy, Illinois.  In October 1862 a Union colonel charged with keeping order in northeast Missouri had 10 citizens shot by firing squad.  The news raced around the world.  The New York [...]

Continue Reading...

Grant and Twain – The Later Years

Ulysses Grant died in 1885.  He labored through the end stages of throat cancer while he completed his great Memoirs, and one of the people at his side (some of the time) was his publisher.  Mark Twain had become acquainted with Grant somehow – when Grant was President these were two of the most famous [...]

Continue Reading...

More Connections

We won’t detour too far from Piedras Negras, but speaking of Shelby’s connections -
JO Shelby’s great-grandfather was a man by the name of Nathaniel Gist.  Nathaniel Gist had two families, one of them Cherokee, and his son by his Cherokee marriage was Sequoyah, the man who invented the Cherokee alphabet.  And how many men have [...]

Continue Reading...