Chalybeate Springs

I've written on this blog several times in the past about communities throughout Missouri and the Ozarks that sprang up as mineral water resorts during the late 1800s. One such place that I was not familiar with until recently, however, was Chalybeate Springs, in northeastern Lawrence County, Missouri. 

Located about four miles west of Halltown and about a half-mile north of Old Route 66, the place was originally called Johnson's Mill after a mill that was built on nearby Clover Creek (now Turnback Creek) about 1855. The name was soon changed to Chalybeate Springs after the supposed healing properties of a spring just east of the creek were discovered. The name derived from the fact that the water contained and was flavored with iron salts.

Chalybeate Springs was established as a resort by D. C. Allen about 1867, making it one of the earliest mineral-water resorts in the Ozarks. The fame of the springs, however, predated establishment of the resort, as the place was known for its supposed healing waters even before the Civil War. 

The resort became even more popular in 1872, when E. G. Paris opened a large hotel at the site. A post office called Chalybeate Springs was established at the site about the same time that the hotel was completed. The name of the post office and the community was changed to Paris Springs in 1874, although the springs themselves were still often referred to as the Chalybeate Springs. The springs were advertised in the newspapers of Springfield and other regional towns, and the place thrived throughout the late 1800s and into the early 1900s under Paris's promoting hand. In addition to the hotel, Paris Springs also boasted a general store, a wagon-maker, a shoemaker, a blacksmith, a livery stable, a livestock dealer, and an attorney-at-law. 

Advertisement from a 1870s Springfield newspaper.

Paris Springs reached a peak in popularity as a mineral-water resort about 1906, but it soon began to decline after that. The hotel closed around 1914 or shortly afterwards, and the abandoned hotel burned in 1917. The final death knell for the community sounded when its post office was discontinued in 1920.

When Route 66 was constructed in 1926, it bypassed Paris Springs by a half-mile or so to the south, and a new community called Paris Springs Junction sprang up at the Route 66 turnoff in order to cater to passing motorists. Among the businesses erected at the turnoff was a Sinclair service station. In 1961, Route 66 was realigned, bypassing both Paris Springs and Paris Springs Junction. Then, when I-44 was built in the mid-1960s, it bypassed the entire section of Route 66 from Halltown to Joplin by several miles.  

The service station at Paris Springs Junction burned in 1955. However, a replica of the station was built across the road many years later, and it is now about the only thing that remains at Paris Springs Junction. As for Paris Springs, nothing remains there to suggest the place was ever a booming resort. 

Avola, Missouri

Continuing with the theme of my recent posts, let's look at another small community that once thrived but no longer exists: Avola, Missouri, located in south-central Vernon County.

The first white people in Drywood Township settled near what became Avola around 1840, but the area remained very sparsely populated until shortly before the Civil War. The Avola schoolhouse was built in 1859, and C. Correll taught the first school. He also held religious services at the schoolhouse on Sundays, since there were no churches in the area. The school district was quite large at this time, encompassing much or all of the present-day Sheldon School District.

The village of Avola was laid out in 1869, but the plat was never recorded. In the late 1800s, Avola had three churches, a store, a post office, and a hotel. Avola was the principal trading point of Drywood Township until the Pacific Railroad was built through the area and Sheldon was established along the line in 1881. Most of the population and businesses of Avola soon moved to the new town.

Today, about the only remaining vestige of the old community of Avola is the Avola Cemetery, located about six miles northwest of Sheldon on Highway N.

 

Hell on the Line

In 1881, a prohibition law went into effect in Kansas making it a dry state. However, gambling remained legal in the state. Meanwhile, drinking alcohol was legal in neighboring Missouri, but the Show-Me State disallowed gambling. To accommodate both the thirsty Kansans and the card-playing Missourians, enterprising businessmen began to build "double saloons" straddling the border. Missourians who wanted to gamble could simply walk a few feet from the Missouri side of the building into the Kansas side, and Kansans who wanted to imbibe in spirits could saunter over to the Missouri side. 

I've previously written on this blog about one such business establishment, built on the state line just east of Galena, Kansas, during the early 1880s. Called Budgetown, it had a notorious reputation, and was run during much of its existence by Joe Thornton, who was later lynched in Joplin for killing a police officer.

A similar place sprang up on the state line east of Pittsburg, Kansas about 1887. Alternately known as Berry Hill, the place was usually just called Hell on the Line. The place was established by P. H. Sawyer, a prominent citizen of Pittsburg, and one or more of his associates, but it was licensed and operated under the name of the bartender, no doubt to disguise where the money behind the place was actually coming from. 

However, the bartender died after the place had been operating just a few months. Sawyer and one of his associates, former Kansas state legislator A. J. Vickers, were arrested about the first of March 1888 and charged with selling liquor without a license. They gave bond of $500 to appear at trial. Although I have been unable to learn the ultimate outcome of their case, the Hell on the Line saloon soon ceased to operate. 

The small community of Berry Hill, which was never much more than a wide place in the road, continued to exist into the mid 1900s, but it, too, is now scarcely a memory. 

Nogo, Missouri

The past couple of weeks I've written about places in Jasper County that were once thriving little villages but that no longer exist or barely survive. I'm sticking with the general theme, but I'm shifting to Greene County this week. Nogo, which was located about three miles west of Strafford or seven miles east of Springfield along the railroad between the two larger towns, is another such place. 

Today, Nogo is completely within the bounds of Strafford, but at one time it was a separate place and was even something of a rival of Strafford. Strafford came into existence about 1869 or 1870 when the railroad was being laid between Rolla and Springfield, whereas Nogo didn't come along until much later, sometime around 1890. The people living in the area that became Nogo got together and decided they wanted a school of their own. They proposed to build the school themselves and petitioned to have a separate school district created for the school. The petition, however, was rejected; so, the schoolhouse became a "No Go" as well, and the entire community took on that name. 

In 1898, the people of Nogo stirred the ire of some Strafford folks when they petitioned the county to create a new township with Nogo as the seat of the township. The Nogoites didn't want to have to travel to Strafford to vote or conduct other legal business. Officials from Jackson Township, in which Strafford was located, opposed lopping off part of their township to create a new one because Jackson was already a fairly small township. Strafford, the officials said, was the center of the township and was already convenient for voting. According to a Springfield newspaper, some Strafford residents suggested that there would be more reason than ever for their little neighbor to the west to be known as Nogo by the time the township issue was settled. 

Alas, they were right. The township petition failed, and Nogo gradually faded into oblivion. At the time (1898), Nogo had a store or two, a blacksmith shop, and a post office. However, it lost its post office in 1905, and by the mid 1900s, all that remained of Nogo were a few foundation stones. Probably even those are gone now.

Fidelity, Missouri

Last time, I wrote about Medoc, Missouri, a small community in northwest Jasper County that used to be a thriving little town. Fidelity, located in the south-central part of Jasper County, is another small community in my general vicinity that used to be a thriving little town but no longer is.

A post office was established at Fidelity in 1855, and the town laid out in 1856 by William Cloe, who erected a large store building there. A large mill soon followed, and, according to Livingston's History of Jasper County, "for a while, this little village gave promise of being a town of importance." Indeed, the town thrived during the 1860s and early 1870s, before beginning a period of decline. According to North's 1883 Jasper County history, Fidelity was "famous" during the Civil War and for a number of years thereafter. 

Apparently, Fidelity was dominated by Southern sentiment during the war. I recall running onto a report by Union major Frank Eno during some Civil War research I was doing years ago, in which Eno said his soldiers had chased some Confederate guerrillas "into that misnomer Fidelity." 

Fidelity was the site of somewhat notorious incident in 1871 when a "Mr. Dye" got into an argument with S. Knowles and another man, T. M. Wakefield, tried to intervene. Turning his wrath on Wakefield, Dye struck the man in the back and, when he turned around, he stabbed him twice in the breast.

Knowles chased Dye into some woods and fired shots at him, but Dye escaped. Wakefield's wounds were painful but were not considered life-threatening. 

By 1883, when North's history was written, only a residence, a schoolhouse and a spring remained to mark the site of Fidelity. The town lost its post office in 1901, and Livingston mentioned in the early 1900s, like North before him, that virtually all signs of Fidelity had disappeared.

Actually, though, Fidelity still has a listed population of a couple of hundred even today. Located just south of I-44 on Highway 59, the town is so strung out, however, that it is hard to tell that it is anything more than just a few scattered homes and businesses along the road, and there is little to no evidence that it was ever a thriving village. 

Medoc, Missouri

I've lived in Joplin, Missouri, since the mid-1970s, but there are still a few places in the area I've never been. Take Medoc, for example. Located about 18 miles north of Joplin on Baseline Road, Medoc is a community I'd never visited in my life--until today.

I guess there's a good reason I'd never been to Medoc. There's not much there. Even the old Cowboy Church of Medoc sits empty, as the accompanying photo suggests.

But it hasn't always been so. Medoc was once a thriving little community in the years right after the Civil War. In fact, it was probably the third or fourth largest town in Jasper County at the time, trailing only Carthage, Sarcoxie, and possibly Minersville (i.e. Oronogo). 

Medoc started as a mere trading post in the 1840s, and the place did a lot of business with Native Americans, including the Medoc Indians, which is how the community got its name. A post office was established at Medoc in 1854. A town called Medoc was laid out in 1856 about a quarter mile west of the old trading post, and the post office was moved.

By the time the Civil War came on, Medoc was already a booming little town, but it was virtually destroyed during the war. The town was rebuilt and once again became a thriving community. Livingston's History of Jasper County says the estimated population of Medoc in 1869 was 225. 

In 1870, a correspondent to the Carthage Banner visited Medoc and described the town in a letter to the newspaper. He said the land around Medoc had some of the richest soil around, and he claimed the population of the town was almost 500 people. Among the business at Medoc were three dry goods stores, two copper shops, one bakery, two hotels, a boot and shoe shop, one harness shop, three blacksmith shops, two plow and wagon shops, one machine shop, and "one of the best flouring and saw mills in the west." (The flour mill and the saw mill were separate operations but not separate businesses.) Medoc boasted five doctors, one lawyer, four churches, and one school with over 70 students. The correspondent thought Medoc had the most inviting location in Jasper County, and he predicted that the town "will sooner or later rank among the very first for mercantile, manufacturing, and agriculture pursuits." 

Alas, it was not to be. The discovery of lead and the rapid growth of mining towns like Joplin and Webb City during the 1870s and 1880s probably hastened Medoc's decline, because some merchants did, in fact, relocate from Medoc after the mining towns sprang up. For whatever combination of reasons, Medoc experienced a slow decline in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the Medoc Post Office was discontinued in 1927. Today, little remains to suggest that Medoc was ever even a village, much less a thriving one. 

A Lonely Hearts Club Murder

Fifty-seven-year-old Verna Coe of rural Shannon County (MO) called her attorney Thursday night, August 3, 1961, and told him she had shot and killed a man at her cabin near Winona, and her lawyer, in turn, notified authorities. The county sheriff trekked to Mrs. Coe's remote property and found a man, identified as Walter Harrow, lying beside a path that led from her cabin to a shack about a hundred feet away, where Harrow had been staying for the past two or three months. The man had been shot in the back of the neck, and the woman said she shot him during an argument. Investigation revealed that Harrow, a retired real estate agent from Omaha (NE), had been attracted to Mrs. Coe's place through a "lonely hearts" correspondence. 

Harrow was not the first man who'd come and stayed with the woman during the five years that she had lived in the remote hills of southern Shannon County, and he was not even the first one she'd shot. She'd had three or four other "lonely hearts" lovers, and in 1957 she'd shot and slightly wounded one of them. She was charged with felonious assault in that case, but the man had declined to testify against her and charges were dropped.

This time she was charged with first-degree murder and jailed at Alton in Oregon County, since the jail at Eminence had no accommodations for women. At her preliminary hearing a week or so after the shooting, the sheriff testified that Mrs. Coe told him she shot at Harrow just to try to scare him but that he dodged just as she fired, and the bullet struck him. The sheriff said the woman told him she and Harrow had been arguing because he wanted her to go back to Omaha with him but that she didn't want to go. The prosecution theorized, however, that the argument came about because Harrow was trying to leave the woman and she was trying to prevent his departure. 

Following the preliminary hearing, Mrs. Coe was held without bond on the first-degree murder charge. At her trial in early September, she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a plea-bargain deal and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.