Pasco, Dallas County

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Elixir Springs, a mineral-water resort in northern Dallas County that spawned the adjacent village of Elixir in the 1880s. The resort petered out within two or three years, and little, if any, trace of the village now remains. Let's look this week at another defunct community of Dallas County: Pasco.

Little is known about Pasco. Moser's Directory of Missouri Places says only that it was located in southern Jackson Township slightly southwest of Elkland (which is in Webster County). In other words, it was located in the panhandle of Dallas County, the little square or rectangle of land at the southwest edge of the county that extends farther south than the rest of the county.  

In her master thesis on Place Names of Five Central Southern Counties of Missouri Counties, which was completed in 1939 for the University of Missouri-Columbia, Anna O'Brien said that no one she talked to had any recollection of Pasco. So, the place had obviously been gone for a long time in 1939. 

In addition, I have found no mention of Pasco in early-day Missouri newspapers. However, I did do some digging and was able to come up with a little more information about the place.

First off, by studying Campbell's 1873 atlas of Missouri, one can pinpoint more precisely where Pasco was. It was about five miles approximately due north of Fair Grove, just slightly west of due north. It was on or very near present-day Garden Road or about a mile south of current-day Highway 215.  

Pasco was an early settlement. Postal records tell us that Pasco applied for and received a post office in February of 1850. It was located on the main road that ran from Springfield to Tuscumbia (in Miller County). To be more precise, the proposed location of the new post office was forty rods west of the main road. The mail already ran on this main road twice a week, so the proposed new post office would be out of the way almost not at all. The nearest already-existing post offices on the main road were Hickory Barren eight miles to the south and Shady Grove four miles to the north. One can get a general idea of the size of Pasco by the fact that its application for a post office stated that the proposed office would service 22 families. The application was filled out by H. L. Trantham (not sure of the initials), who, one would assume, was the would-be postmaster. 

During the Civil War, the area in and around Pasco was a Southern-sympathizing region. In May of 1863, W. R. Martin, who was then postmaster at Pasco, turned in a list to Union authorities of men in the neighborhood whom he knew to be subscribers to a Rebel newspaper. Earlier in the war, noted guerrilla hunter John R. Kelso, a Union officer, had led a raid through the Pasco territory and arrested a number of Southern sympathizers. 

In 1864, Pasco lost its post office. The closure might have had something to do with the prevailing disloyal sentiment of its citizens. At any rate, the community went downhill fast after that, and within ten years or so it was virtually a ghost town, or maybe I should say a "ghost village," because it was never much of a town to begin with.