War, and Peace

The pretty town with the huge gothic courthouse is Carthage, Missouri  (Pronounced Missoura to anyone from Missouri). It  lies just northeast of the farming city of Joplin, which was struck so recently by a horrendous tornado,  and a half hour south of the home of President Harry S. Truman’s birth, Lamar. You’d never know that once this town was rent by something much more frightening than a tornado: sectarian hate.

 

Before the Civil War, in 1860, over 6,000 called Jasper County and Carthage home.  By war’s end, in 1965, less than 30 lived here.

 

The town, and much of the Kansas-Missouri borderland, was bloodied well before the war began as ‘free-staters’, who wanted no slaves to be allowed in the new state of Kansas, and ‘states-righters’, who wanted the federal government to keep its hands off a local state’s decisions, fought to the death in personal, and sometimes gang, warfare. By the time actual war was declared between north and south much of Missouri already looked like Syria looks today. And like the Syrian Muslims, these fighters all believed God was on their side.

We visited the site of the First Battle of Carthage today, where Union Troops from anti-slavery  St. Louis under a successful German immigrant commander, Franz Sigel were driven back through town by Confederates led by former Governor Jackson whom President Lincoln had had removed from office.

But the real destruction of the county occurred after the Union had won Missouri for the Union. It was then that President Jefferson of the Confederacy authorized certain officers of the former Missouri Confederate troops to create bands of guerillas to fight behind Union lines.  

If these bands had kept to strictly military targets perhaps they would have written just another chapter in America’s war, but these groups were often led and made up of neighbors of pro-Union families who they had personal reasons for hating as well as political. And so, in addition to destroying US Army materiel, they attacked, burned, and destroyed the lives of persons they felt had wronged them in the past.  Even Carthage itself was eventually burned to the ground.

So much for my civil War history lesson today.  The rest of my pics from the Carthage Civil War Museum, and the story of the lusty and rebellious Belle Starr, of Carthage, of course, will be on Facebook.

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Outside of Carthage, just a few miles north in the midst of fields and farms is a less well known but much newer historical byway & byline.  Red Oak II, created from the little dying town of Red Oak, about 20 miles away.

The Carthage area artist Lowell Davis, after making it big in the big time of alternative art forms decided to lift up the best parts of his childhood memory that were now empty and rotting in the Old Route 66 village of red Oak, Missouri, and move them, with some touches of creative and whimsical humor of his own, onto his own farm on Kafir Road. 

Today this free and wide open sort of museum (though folk live in some of the homes now) and lifesize artwork (sort of Davis’ own hundred acre wood) is just what he wanted it to be.  A pleasant jaunt back in time with a little of the movie Beetlejuice added in for fun.

Don’t miss it if you ever get to southwestern Missoura!

-Ken