Dispute Over Greene County Courthouse Location

   Last time I wrote about a dispute in Jasper County in the late 1890s over whether the county seat should remain in Carthage or be moved to Joplin or Webb City. Just a few years earlier, Greene County had a similar dispute, although the dispute wasn't between two different towns. It was between two different sections of the same town--Springfield.

   North Springfield sprang up as a separate town in 1870 when Springfield was trying to get a railroad and the depot was located north of town rather than in the heart of the city. The new town grew up around the depot, located on Commercial Street, and a rivalry quickly developed between Springfield and its upstart neighbor to the north. The two towns finally merged in the spring of 1887, when North Springfield became part of Springfield, but the rivalry wasn't quite over.

   Within months a controversy arose over the location of a proposed new jail. Some of Springfield's wealthy citizens and a number of county commissioners and county judges wanted to build it on Center Street (now Central Street), about halfway between the old town and North Springfield, and a lot of North Springfieldians, of course, favored this idea. However, most of Springfield's rank and file citizens and a majority of the people in outlying parts of the county thought the new jail should be built on or near the square, close to the courthouse. (Located at the northwest corner of College Street and the square, the old courthouse is pictured below.)

   To circumvent the argument that the jail should be near the courthouse, those favoring the Center Street location soon proposed that a new courthouse might also be built on Center Street. This caused the dispute to heat up even more.

   One argument put forth by those proposing to move the courthouse and jail was that Greene County did not own the land where the square was, because it was part of the original 50 acres donated to the City of Springfield by John P, Campbell in the 1830s. Moving the courthouse and jail to Center Street would place it outside the original 50 acres and, thus, on county land. Those opposed to the move countered that, if such a legal argument was correct, then nearly all the courthouses in southwest Missouri, such as the Christian County courthouse at Ozark, were not located on county property but on city property instead. Those who wanted to keep the courthouse and jail on the square said the plan to move them was just a scheme to line the pockets of some wealthy investors who had purchased lots on Center Street. "It is nothing but legal robbery," said one farmer from rural Greene County, "and the judges deserve hanging more than George Graham." (This was a reference to a wife-murderer who had been lynched near present-day Grant Beach Park about a year earlier. See my book Bigamy and Bloodshed: The Scandal of Emma Molloy and the Murder of Sarah Graham.)

   Those favoring the Center Street location soon won out on the question of where to build the new jail. It was constructed in 1889 in the northeast quadrant of Center and Boonville. The disagreement over building a new courthouse, though, continued for a quite a few years, before a new structure was finally built next to the jail between 1910 and 1912.

   

Jasper County Seat Dispute

   Carthage, Missouri, was named the county seat of Jasper County within a year or so after the county was formed in 1841. Joplin and Webb City did not come into existence until the 1870s, after lead and zinc were discovered in the western part of the county. However, Joplin and Webb City, especially Joplin, grew quickly, and a rivalry soon developed between the old town of Carthage and its upstart neighbors to the west. At the same time, Webb City, Carterville, and some of the other smaller towns of the mining district also resented the fact that Joplin, its larger neighbor, hogged all the publicity relative to the mining district. Often the region was even called the Joplin Mining District, and some folks especially resented this, because Webb City and Carterville, which were so close to each other as to be virtually the same town, and Galena, just across the state line in Kansas, had almost as much mining output as Joplin. Not to mention the fact that there was a plethora of other, smaller mining camps in western Jasper County, like Zincite. They preferred to call the region the Missouri-Kansas Mining District. (Lead had yet to be discovered in large quantities in northeast Oklahoma. After that happened, the region was usually known as the Tri-State Mining District.)
   The people of western Jasper County did not like having to travel to Carthage to file mining deeds and to transact other legal business, and as the area continued to grow, they began to push for a second county seat to be located in the western part of the county, or else to have the western half split off into a whole separate county. The citizens of Joplin petitioned to have a second county seat located in Joplin, which was by far the largest of the towns in the western section. Webb City and the other smaller mining communities opposed this, but the people of Carthage forged an unlikely partnership with Joplin to get the proposal passed in 1891. It called for a large new courthouse (the current building) to be constructed in Carthage and a smaller one in Joplin. In effect, Joplin became a satellite of the main county seat in Carthage, although it was sometimes referred to as a separate county seat.
   Webb City, though, did not give up on its efforts to have a county seat located there. In 1898, a movement formed to have the main county seat moved from Carthage to Webb City, and this time Joplin allied with Webb City. In fact, most observers said that Joplin was really the driving force behind the movement. A Carthage correspondent to a Springfield newspaper called the whole thing a "scheme...hatched at Joplin," because the citizens of western Jasper County were unhappy that the region wasn't getting as many bridges and other road improvements as they thought it should. "A deal seems to have been made between Joplin and Webb City," continued the correspondent, "whereby they will vote together and 'do' Carthage."
  Although I have not learned the exact outcome of any vote of the people or vote of the legislature that might have been taken on this 1898 proposal, the effort to move the county seat to Webb City obviously failed, since Carthage is still today the main county seat of Jasper County, with a satellite court building at Joplin. 

Unable to Work but First Class at Kicking Up Rows

   I recently ran onto a few brief news items in Springfield newspapers during the fall of 1893 about a character named Tim Heath that I found interesting, not because the incidents were particularly important but mainly because of the colorful phraseology the reporters used in describing Heath and his misadventures.
   In early September 1893, Heath appeared before a Springfield judge on a charge of disturbing the peace of one of his neighbors, Mary E. Duke for "cussing her and threshing her son." Heath had only recently been released from jail for beating his wife, and now he was convicted on the new charge and sent back to the lockup for three days. Heath, according to the Springfield Leader, seemed disappointed that he got off with such a light sentence. Heath, who was described as "crippled," was "unable to work but (was) first class at kicking up rows and constituting himself the leader and star performer thereof."
   About the middle of September, Heath and his wife, Cordell, were arrested on complaint from another neighbor, Effie Mitchell. Ms. Mitchell, "being especially ornate in her objurgations," claimed the Heaths "exhausted their vocabulary of foul words upon her." The defendants pleaded guilty and were fined $1.00 each. Tim Heath was also sentenced to a unspecified jail term. The Leader observed at the time that Heath "breaks into jail with the regularity of clockwork and seems to prefer the retirement of the county hotel to that domestic felicity which he should find within the purview of his personal vine and fig tree." In this case, however, a stay of execution was granted so that Mr. Heath was "temporarily foiled in his attempt to force himself upon the hospitality of the people." While he was waiting for the sentence to be imposed, Heath had both Mary Duke and Effie Mitchell arrested on charges of "keeping a bawdy house and being guilty of lewd and lascivious conduct." The case against the women was continued, and, meanwhile, all parties were "getting hotter under the collar...boiling over with venom against one another."
   The final disposition of the two mid-September cases is not clear, but in mid-November Heath was once again arrested for beating his wife. He was released from jail on November 21 "to search for more trouble." Presumably he found it, but maybe not, since there seems to be no trace of him after this.

A Courtroom Killing: One Lawyer Attacks Another

    On March 18, 1922, attorney Robert Stemmons appeared in court at Mount Vernon to seek a parole for one of his clients, Lavanus Jackson, who'd recently been sentenced to jail on an illegal liquor charge. J. B. Tillman, another Lawrence County attorney, had played a part in Jackson's arrest, and he was present in court as well. During arguments, Stemmons strongly criticized Tillman for the part he had taken in Jackson's arrest.
    After hearing the arguments, the judge denied Jackson's request for a parole. Tillman then asked for and was granted permission to explain his part in Jackson's arrest. After some preliminary remarks, the sixty-year-old Tillman remarked in reference to the thirty-year-old Stemmons that "young lawyers sometimes let their ambition get away with them and say too much" and that it was "a good thing for young lawyers to be called down."
    Strongly resenting the remarks, Stemmons, who was seated across the courtroom from Tillman, sprang from his chair, ran across the room, and struck Tillman. The two men went into a clinch and fell to the floor. While they were still struggling, Jackson came over and started kicking Tillman in the head. A deputy sheriff, aided by several other men, quickly separated the combatants, but Tillman did not rise after the fight had been broken up. Seriously injured, he was rushed to a local hospital, where he died the next day.
    Even before Tillman died, Stemmons, Jackson, and the latter's brother, who had taken some small part in the assault, were arrested. After Tillman died, all three were charged with first-degree murder. The cases against the three men were subsequently severed, and Stemmons was ultimately tried in January 1923 on a reduced charge of manslaughter. He was convicted and fined $500. However, Stemmons appealed the verdict, and the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in his favor in June 1924. The justices found that Tillman had died as a direct consequence of Jackson kicking him in the head and that Stemmons had not conspired with his client nor said anything whatsoever to encourage Jackson in the attack. Therefore, he could not be found guilty of any level of intentional homicide.
    Meanwhile, Lavanus Jackson was also found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was paroled after serving slightly over half of his sentence. Apparently all charges were dropped against his brother, or else he got off with a very light sentence.
    I want to thank my friend Tom Carver for calling this incident to my attention and for providing much of the information on which the story above is based.

Fair Grove Paddling Controversy

    During the school year 1960-1961, an incident happened at Fair Grove High School, where I was a freshman, that, in the words of school superintendent John Ewing "put Fair Grove on the map, but not in a good way." As I'm sure any of my classmates who might read this (or any of my schoolmates slightly older than me) can probably guess, I'm talking about the time that 27 high school boys were paddled (some said beaten) for disobeying a school rule en masse.
    Prior to the 60-61 school year, Fair Grove had an open campus policy for high school students, meaning they could leave the school at noon and go to the stores and cafes in downtown Fair Grove, a quarter-mile away, to buy snacks and lunch items. At the beginning of the new year, the school administration instituted a new rule closing the campus with the exception that we were still allowed to go to the service station at the foot of the hill directly across the street from campus. There was considerable grumbling about this new change when it was first announced, but few, if any, students chose to defy the rule at that time.
    However, it was one of those things that more or less built up over time. There was a lot of dissatisfaction among certain students and a lot of friction between them and teachers over a number of occurrences throughout the school year. Fair Grove had a poor basketball team, partly because a couple of its star players had been declared scholastically ineligible. Certain other players, along with their parents, thought they should be getting to play more than they were. Then in late January or early February, two cheerleaders got kicked off the cheerleading squad for riding home from an away game with their boyfriends instead of riding the bus as they were supposed to do.
    After a stretch of cold, winter weather, Wednesday, February 15, 1961, dawned clear and fair. A perfect day to skip school! Or at least to ditch school during the noon hour and go to Fair Grove. And that's exactly what about 40 students, among a student body of less than 200, did. They were mostly boys, although rumor has it that at least a couple of girls also skipped out. Only 27 boys were caught, and later that day, the 27 were given spankings by four teachers: principal Elbert Proctor, agriculture teacher Glen Cochran, shop teacher Gilbert Barclay, and Adren McKinley, who taught various subjects. The boys were taken one at a time into a room, with the teachers presumably alternating on which one administered the paddling. The paddles used were about one-half inch thick, four inches wide, and 24 inches long, and each boy received six licks. Some of the spankings were administered so hard that at least one of the paddles broke in two. The offending students were also suspended from school for three days.
    The punishments caused an immediate uproar, because they were viewed as overly harsh by many school patrons, mainly by the parents of the boys who received the spankings but also by good number of parents who had no children in high school or whose children were not spanked. For instance, Mrs. R. D. Talmadge, who had two kids who went to school at Fair Grove but were not involved in the spanking incident, spoke out against the severity of the discipline. "The boys were whipped pretty hard," she said. "It was not what I would call a 'spanking.' I do not think this is the proper way to correct our teenagers." Some of the parents whose sons had been spanked threatened to sue the school, and at least one or two took the initial step of contacting a lawyer.
    The controversy made front-page headlines in Springfield newspapers for the next two days. The school board called a special meeting Wednesday evening to meet with a handful of parents whose boys had been spanked. Apparently some sort of tentative understanding was reached, but this meeting involved only a few parents. On Thursday morning, the day after the spankings, superintendent Ewing, who was not at school the previous day, called an all-school assembly and addressed the student body. With the county superintendent of schools present as well, Ewing defended the paddlings as "proper, legal and necessary." He told the students that most of their fellow students supported the teachers and the administration. He complimented those who had abided by the rules on Wednesday and especially those few who had tried to talk their friends out of going to town. Van Ricketts, student body president, also addressed the assembly, saying that the student council supported the teachers.
    But neither the hastily called board meeting nor the school assembly did much to calm the storm that was still brewing at Fair Grove, and the school faculty requested an emergency meeting with the school board and school patrons for the purpose of receiving their assurances that they, the teachers, would be supported in meting out future discipline or else they were prepared to walk off the job. A few teachers had received anonymous, threatening calls. Superintendent Ewing didn't help matters when he told reporters that several of the boys involved in the spanking incident were "constant troublemakers" and that the school would be fine if the parents didn't "interfere." It was this bad publicity that many parents objected to almost as much as the spankings themselves. "It makes the students appear to be juvenile delinquents," said Mrs. Talmadge, "and this is not the truth."
    On Friday morning, a carload of boys who had been suspended drove to the school and parked on the grounds. School officials called Greene County deputies, but the boys were gone by the time the lawmen arrived. School was dismissed early Friday afternoon so that the faculty could meet in private before the special board meeting they had requested was scheduled to take place at 3:30 p.m.
    At the 3:30 meeting, all but two of the parents of the boys who had been spanked showed up, and those two had previously sent word that they did, indeed, support the board and the teachers. About 300 people in total attended the meeting, held in the elementary auditorium. Board president Boyd Holladay and his freshman son, Steve, who was one of the boys spanked, were the first to "parade' before the teachers and other board members and offer their assurances that they would support the school administration and teachers. Another board member, Burnie Huff, and his son Howard, another of the truants, also assured the assembly that "it wouldn't happen again." Emory Moore and his son, Jerry, also appeared before the group. Moore, who had been one of the parents most angered by the harsh punishments, admitted that he'd been "somewhat agitated" earlier. He wasn't upset by the fact that the boys had been disciplined, Moore said, but by the way they were punished. "We agree with the teachers and the school board that the boys needed to be punished, but not beat. The boys took their punishment and were more men than the teachers to take a whipping like that." Moore displayed a broken paddle and indicated that others had been found hidden in a bin near the room where the spankings took place. By the time the meeting was over, though, Moore said he and his son were ready to support the board and the teachers. "Maybe there'll be better harmony than we had before."
    Toward the end of the meeting, the school board unanimously passed a resolution expressing support for the administration and teachers and specifying that any student whose parents did not support the resolution would be expelled for the rest of the school year. Any student involved in the recent spanking episode who got into serious trouble again during the current school year would also be expelled.
    For those of you who are wondering, no, I was not one of the students who was spanked, because I didn't leave campus on that fateful day. I guess it was partly because I had never had the privilege of an open campus prior to that year anyway. At least I'd never taken advantage of the privilege. So, I didn't miss not having it. But Steve Holladay wasn't the only one of my classmates who did get in trouble. I think there were at least a couple of other freshmen besides Steve, but it was mostly upperclassmen.
    The photo below from a Springfield newspaper shows Mrs. Wade Kepley, Emory Moore, Mrs. Kepley's son Adrian, and George Shaffer III examining a paddle that broke into pieces as it was being used to administer spankings to 27 Fair Grove students.

The Murder of John Weathers

    On June 4, 1864, a young white man named Mason Brockman went fishing near Liberty Landing in Clay County with some acquaintances, and after a while, Brockman left the group and went to a nearby store to get some whiskey. While he was there, according to Brockman's later story, a slave named John Weathers passed by driving "a nifty ox team," and Brockman followed. Weathers stopped and offered Brockman a ride, which he accepted. After the two had gone a little ways further, two men jumped out from some brush and ordered Weathers to stop. When he didn't promptly obey, they started shooting. Brockman jumped out of the wagon and escaped to the brush, but Weathers was shot and killed.
    The next day a cousin of the black man's owner reported the murder to Union authorities at Liberty, and a detachment of soldiers went out and arrested several suspects in the case, including Brockman, Perry Mitchell, and Jack Pryor. Brockman gave a statement saying that Mitchell and Pryor, who were two of the men he'd gone fishing with, were the men who'd jumped out of the brush and ordered Weathers to stop. He saw Mitchell fire one shot at Weathers before he (Mitchell) jumped out of the wagon and escaped to the brush. He heard three or four more shots after that but wasn't sure whether Mitchell fired them all or Pryor also fired a weapon.
    A few days later, the case was turned over to civil authorities, but despite the eyewitness testimony, little, if anything else was apparently done to prosecute Mitchell and Pryor. The death of Weathers was apparently not deemed important enough to vigorously prosecute.

The Murder of William Humes

    Joplin, as many readers probably know, was a wild and wooly place during its early days. In fact, local historians have referred to its very earliest couple of years, when it was really just a booming mining camp, as the "reign of terror" because of the lawlessness that characterized the place. However, it is often hard to find information about the first few years of Joplin's history, because few local newspapers from the era survive. Although Joplin got its start as a mining camp in the late summer of 1870 and, within two or three years after that, one or more newspapers were publishing, only scattered dates survive prior to about 1879 or 1880. So, even someone like me, who has written fairly extensively about Joplin's history, may not know much about a lot of events that happened during the town's earliest days. An example of an event I had seen mentioned before but did not know much at all about until just recently is the murder of  William Humes by Lee Goodwin at the Joplin post office on the evening of May 1, 1878.

    Goodwin, a prominent Joplin grocer, was in the post office about 6 p.m. when William H. Humes, an engineer employed by Porter and Dorsey Mining and Surveying, walked in to pick up his mail. Goodwin immediately accosted Humes before he could call for his mail. "Defend yourself!" he exclaimed as he simultaneously drew a revolver and shot Humes in the left side. The victim collapsed and died within an hour, while Humes gave himself up to the police.

    This wasn't the first time Goodwin had tried to kill Humes. He'd made an attempt on Humes's life just a few days earlier and been arrested, but he was released on $500 bond after a preliminary hearing and was still out on bond at the time of the murder. "There seems to have been woman at the bottom of the trouble" between the two men, said a correspondent to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. A contrary report in a Springfield newspaper said the difficulty grew out of a game of cards, and it made no mention of a previous attempt on Humes's life.  

    At his preliminary examination on the murder charge held in Joplin on May 6, Goodwin was bound over for trial in the circuit court during the June term, and he was taken to Carthage that evening and lodged in the county jail. Upon examining the prisoner, a Carthage newspaper reporter described him as about 30 years old, with light hair, a very light mustache, a sharp, thin nose, and a noticeably receding hairline. "Altogether his physiognomy is bad." 

    Goodwin's trial for first degree murder at the June term ended in a hung jury, and he was again released on bond to await the new trial. In early November, he sold his interest in the grocery business and made arrangements with a young Joplin woman to meet him in Kansas City, The woman left for Kansas City on the morning of November 5, but before departing, she told a friend about the arrangements. The friend reported the matter to police, who promptly re-arrested Goodwin as he was preparing to leave for Kansas City as well.

    On December 21, 1878, Goodwin's second trial ended with a not guilty verdict after jury deliberations that lasted 24 hours. "The verdict will create astonishment," opined a correspondent to the Globe-Democrat, "for it was generally believed that he would hang." The correspondent explained the unexpected verdict by suggesting that the defense presented extenuating circumstances while the judge's instructions to the jury made no allowance for conviction on a lesser charge than first-degree murder.