History
Following the Battle of West Plains, the afternoon of February 19, 1862, a thorough search of the town was conducted by Union troops. Any man of military age was arrested unless he could prove his loyalty to the Union cause. West Plains had been in rebel hands since the war began, and Union...
In 2015, my WSHS class celebrated its 50-year anniversary. At the annual alumni banquet, the alumni association presented scholarship awards to recent graduates. A member of our class gave the keynote speech and observed that at our commencement, the fifty-year class would have graduated in 1915...
In the 1990s I became a Special Assistant United States Attorney, and the Justice Department sent me for special litigation training in various cities across the country. Two of the trips were to the DOJ Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina.
After classes were finished each day, I would...
The weather had turned winter-like, typical for mid-February today and one hundred sixty years ago. A windy front streaming down from the north brought steady sleet that pelted the backs of the Union troopers as they approached West Plains on horseback. Their line of march had also been from the...
A waist-high brick wall surrounds Faurot Field inside Memorial Stadium on the University of Missouri campus. On the wall, names of legendary coaches and all-American football players who wore the black and gold are set in concrete plaques.
On the west side, about mid-field, one commemoration...
Several years ago, I was invited to the home of Ron White to look at a small, maybe five by seven-inch scrapbook made one hundred years earlier by Willow Springs businessman J. Nolan Wilton. I've written about Wilton before, and it would take another dozen articles to detail the many...
As I was researching in old newspapers, an article triggered a long-forgotten memory that made me think about former WSHS teacher Neil Pamperien. According to the article, in 1966 Holiday Inns of America, Inc. wanted to build a new, two-million-dollar motel at the northwest corner of Monroe and...
Among the stellar pioneers of Howell County, Daniel George Shipman shines at the top of the list. The Reverend "Uncle Dan" was spoken of with admiration and reverence a half-century after his death here and in several communities of Southeast Missouri. Though he died in 1926, the Missouri...
As the 19th century came to a close, smallpox remained a scourge and one of the most successful viruses known to humanity. Smallpox controlled the population of Europe in regular epidemics that killed millions each year. Upon the arrival of Europeans in the new world, the disease they carried...
At the end of the nineteenth century, Howell County experienced an upturn in violence much as it had in the two decades following the Civil War. Most of the deaths resulted from feuding and caused alarm about how the next century could be. 1899 was a rough one with a smallpox outbreak that...