Harry Truman Returns to Lamar Again

Last time, I wrote about Harry S Truman returning to Lamar, the town of his birth, on the occasion of his nomination for vice president under FDR in 1944. In 1959, Truman, who was now a 74-year-old ex-president, came back to Lamar again for the dedication of his birthplace as a Missouri state historic site.

Truman arrived in Lamar at mid-morning on April 19, 1959, for the festivities. The town was decked out in colorful bunting and signs welcoming the former president, and over 7,000 people turned out for the occasion. After driving around the town visiting old landmarks, Truman had lunch with a Lamar attorney. Later, he dropped in on a reception held in his honor at Memorial Hall by his old World World I outfit, Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery. Truman who had been captain of the battery, joked that he'd never had more than 250 men in the outfit but that, after he became president, the ranks had ballooned to 35,000 men who claimed service in the unit. 

From Memorial Hall, Truman and his old battery mates joined a parade to the little house where he was born about four blocks east of the public square in Lamar. The structure was built in 1867, and Truman's parents purchased it in 1882 for $915. Harry was born there in 1884, and his parents sold the house for $1600 and moved away in 1885. Truman admitted he had no recollection of the house, since he was just eleven months old when the family left Lamar. The home had been in the Earp family for years, but the United Auto Workers purchased it in 1957 with an eye toward developing it as a historic site. Now the UAW was gifting it to Missouri to operate as an official state historic site.

After an invocation and other preliminaries, Leonard Woodcock, vice-president of the UAW, officially presented the house to Missouri, with Governor James T. Blair accepting on behalf of the state. Seventeen-year-old Donald Braker, Lamar High School student body president, then presented Truman with a plaque on behalf of the city of Lamar honoring the former US president, which was to be permanently mounted in the room where he was born. Stuart Symington, US senator from Missouri, took the podium to give the official dedicatory address in which he praised Truman profusely. Harry responded briefly to both Braker's and Symington's speeches. Among his remarks, Truman said he greatly appreciated the honor that was being bestowed upon him. He said he felt as if he'd been buried and dug up while he was still alive. "They usually don't do this to former Presidents until they've been dead 50 years." He also said, after being lauded as a statesman, that he didn't consider himself a statesman because a statesman was nothing but a "dead politician." He said he was a politician and expected to stay one the rest of his life. The crowd roared its approval and shouted for him to "pour it on, Harry."

After the dedication ceremony was over, Truman and other dignitaries retired to the Traveler's Hotel for a dinner to close out the events of the day.

  

Lamar's Lynching of Lynch

One chapter in my Desperadoes book is about the murder of Barton County (Mo.) sheriff John Harlow by Jay Lynch in early March of 1919 and the subsequent lynching of Lynch in late May of 1919 on the grounds of the courthouse at Lamar. A career criminal, Lynch was arrested on March 2 in northern Barton County as a fugitive from St. Louis and taken to Lamar, where he was turned over to Sheriff Harlow. The sheriff, who had a reputation as being kind and indulgent toward prisoners, allowed Lynch's wife and mother to visit the jailbird in his cell the next day, and later that evening he allowed Lynch to make a phone call as he was getting ready to escort him to St. Louis. Suddenly, Lynch whipped out a pistol that his mother or wife had apparently slipped to him and fatally shot Harlow. He also shot and mortally wounded the sheriff's 18-year-old son when the lad promptly appeared on the scene.
Lynch made his escape but was recaptured in Colorado in late May and brought back to Lamar to stand trial for the murder of Sheriff Harlow. He was quickly convicted but sentenced only to life in prison because the Missouri legislature had recently passed a law banning the death penalty. Furious over Harlow's murder and the new law, a mob quickly gathered outside the courthouse where the sentence had been pronounced and soon broke in, took the prisoner from his guards, and strung him up to a tree on the courthouse grounds. Later in 1919, the law banning capital punishment was rescinded.
This incident had at least a couple of ironic twists to it. The obvious one was that the victim of the lynching was himself named Lynch. (The word "lynch," by the way, comes from a Revolutionary War colonel named Lynch who organized a group of vigilantes in Virginia after the war and went about the countryside meting out punishment to former Tories. At first, the term meant any extralegal punishment and only later came to refer specifically to vigilante execution, especially by hanging.) The other ironic twist to this episode was the fact that Lynch was hanged from a tree that his victim had planted on the courthouse grounds about twenty years earlier during his first term as sheriff.

Wyatt Earp

Many people, when they think of the Old West, automatically think of places farther west than Missouri--places like Dodge City, Kansas; Tombstone, Arizona; and Virginia City, Nevada. Actually, though, there was period of time immediately after the Civil War when the Ozarks region was the Old West.
For instance, Wild Bill Hickok's shootout with Davis Tutt immediately after the Civil War on the square in Springfield is widely considered the first gunfight of the Old West era. And, as I've mentioned in previous posts, the lead-mining town of Granby, Missouri, was one of the wildest and most lawless towns in America in the years leading up to and immediately following the Civil War. Then there was Baxter Springs, Kansas, at the edge of the Ozarks, which lays claim to the title of "First Cow Town in Kansas."
Another example is the fact that Wyatt Earp; who, of course, went on to Wild West fame as a lawman in places like Wichita, Dodge City, and especially Tombstone; got his start as as a lawman when he was hired as the constable of Lamar, Missouri, in the fall of 1869. Earp left Lamar, though, about a year later under a cloud of suspicion, and he was subsequently sued twice in Barton County, once over an allegation that he had failed to turn over public funds that he had collected while serving as constable and a second time over a charge that he had falsified court documents. In fact, although dime novels, movies, and TV made Wyatt Earp into a hero and a romantic legend of the Old West, a cloud of controversy or suspicion hovered over much of his whole career. The point at hand, though, is that it all started here in the Ozarks, America's first Wild West.

Quantrill's Lamar Attacks

There's one other episode pertaining to Quantrill's activities in the Ozarks that I want to mention, and then I'll move on to other topics besides Quantrill. Actually, though, the episode I'm talking about is two related episodes--the guerrilla leader's attacks on Lamar in the fall of 1862 and spring of 1864.
In early November of 1862, after a successful summer of raiding in the Kansas City area, Quantrill and his men were on the march south to spend the winter in Texas when they fell in with Colonel Warner Lewis of the Missouri State Guard. When Lewis proposed a coordinated attack on Lamar, Quantrill agreed and charged into the town, but Lewis failed to appear on schedule, leaving the guerrillas to blast away by themselves at the Federal troops ensconced in the Barton County courthouse. After a heated exchange in which each side lost only a handful of men in killed and injured, Quantrill set fire to the town and rode off in anger and frustration over Warner's failure to appear.
In the May of 1864, after spending the winter in Texas as they had the previous year, Quantrill and his men were headed back to northern Missouri. When they passed through Lamar, Quantrill decided to try to exact some revenge for the failed attack a year and a half earlier. The guerrillas charged the courthouse, which was now just a burned-out shell , but the small detachment of Union militia guarding the fortress repelled the assault with a well-aimed volley of fire. The guerrillas dropped back to regroup and then launched another attack. It, too, was turned away, but Quantrill and his men weren't easily dissuaded. In short order, they launched yet a third assault. When it, too, was repelled, the guerrillas finally gave up and continued their journey north, minus a few men that they had sacrified to their stubbornness.