Where The Family “Stayed Too Long”
Jasper County sits in the southwestern corner of Missouri pressed against the Kansas line — border country in every sense, where the Foster family settled on Center Creek in the 1840s and stayed until the war and the bushwhackers made staying impossible.
Southwest Missouri in the years before the Civil War was the kind of place where a family could put down roots and watch the ground turn to fire beneath them
Where It Is and Why People Came
Jasper County sits in the southwestern corner of Missouri, pressed against the Kansas line, its eastern edge touching the Ozark plateau and its western edge opening onto the prairie country that rolls unbroken to the horizon. It is border country in every sense — geographically, culturally, and historically. The Osage and the other nations who had used this territory before European settlement had moved on or been moved on by the time the first American settlers arrived in the 1820s and 1830s, following the same general current that carried the Scots-Irish and their neighbours westward out of Tennessee and Kentucky and the Carolinas in search of new ground.
Thacker Vivion of Kentucky was the county's first permanent settler, arriving in 1831. The county was formally organized in 1836 and named, in one of those connections that the mid-continent made constantly with the Revolutionary War world, for Sergeant William Jasper of South Carolina — the hero of Fort Sullivan who rescued the fallen colours under fire in 1776 and died at Savannah three years later. That a county in southwest Missouri should bear the name of a Carolina backcountry soldier is the kind of thing that makes sense once you follow the migration patterns: the people who settled Jasper County were, in many cases, one or two generations removed from the families who had known Jasper's world in the Carolinas, who had come to Tennessee in the 1790s and to Missouri in the 1830s, carrying the names and the memory with them.
The land they found was good mixed-farming country — rolling hills with good timber along the creek bottoms, reasonably watered, close enough to navigable rivers to ship produce east. Center Creek, running northwest through the county before emptying into the Shoal Creek drainage, gave the central township its name and its geography: farms strung along its bottomland, timber on the ridges above, the county seat of Carthage sitting on the high ground above the creek valley. By 1850 the county had enough people to appear solid on a census map, with the Foster family — Jared and Dorcas, their children around them, a household in its mid-fifties of life — among those enumerated eight miles south of Carthage on Center Creek.
Bleeding Kansas and the World Coming Apart
The argument that tore Jasper County apart in the 1850s and 1860s had roots that went back further than Kansas statehood. Missouri was a slave state. Kansas Territory, organized in 1854, was to have its character decided by popular sovereignty — meaning by whoever got there first and voted. What followed was a rolling catastrophe: pro-slavery settlers from Missouri and anti-slavery settlers from the Northeast flooding across the border in competing waves, each side trying to win the vote by sheer numbers, each side willing to use violence to prevent the other from succeeding. The result was a low-grade civil war along the Missouri-Kansas border that the newspapers called Bleeding Kansas, that left farms burned and men dead and a permanent atmosphere of terror in the borderlands.
Jasper County was the Missouri county that pressed directly against the Kansas line in the southwest. Its families were Southern in origin, many of them slave-owners or the neighbours of slave-owners, deeply invested in the outcome of the Kansas question. But the county's politics were not uniform. Some families wanted the Union and opposed secession regardless of their views on slavery. Some were Confederates from conviction. Some tried to stay neutral and found that neutrality, in this country at this time, was not a position the war would allow.
The guerrilla violence that preceded the formal war and then continued through it was a particular feature of the Jasper County experience. Quantrill's raiders and Bushwhackers and the various formations of irregular Confederate cavalry swept through the county in ways that the conventional Civil War narrative — battles with named commanders and official order-of-battle — does not quite capture. These were neighbours raiding neighbours, men who knew which farms had food and which had horses and which family had sent sons to the wrong army. The county seat of Carthage was evacuated and burned. Much of Jasper County was laid waste. Andrew Foster, writing to a pension commissioner decades later, remembered it simply: *"We stayed too long."*
The War's Passage and What Came After
The Battle of Carthage, in July 1861, brought the formal war to Jasper County's county seat before most of Missouri had organized itself for the fight. Governor Claiborne Jackson, leading Missouri State Guard forces south before Union troops could consolidate, fought Colonel Franz Sigel's small Union column at Carthage and drove it off — an early Confederate success that foreshadowed a brutal occupation of the borderlands. Within a year the guerrillas controlled the countryside, the Union forces controlled the towns when they held them at all, and the civilian population was caught between.
By late 1862 the county was largely empty of its pre-war population. Families had fled east, or south into Arkansas, or — like the Fosters — west into Kansas with a patched-up wagon and whatever the bushwhackers had left them. What remained was contested ground, burned farmsteads, and the memory of a community that had been, before the war, a going concern.
The lead and zinc mining boom that transformed the Joplin district after the war brought a different population and a different economy — one that had little to do with the farming families who had first settled the county and everything to do with the industrial Midwest that was taking shape in the 1870s and 1880s. Joplin grew from a mining camp to a city. Carthage rebuilt itself. The county filled in again. But it filled in differently, and the families who had farmed Center Creek before the war and scattered in its course were mostly gone.
Red Hot Street, Galena, and the Mining Country
Just across the Kansas line from Jasper County's southern edge lies Galena, in Cherokee County, Kansas — one of the most remarkable boom-town stories of the post-Civil War West. The lead and zinc deposits that underlay the tri-state district of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma were discovered progressively westward after the war, and when the field reached Galena in the 1870s, the result was an eruption. Two towns — Galena and Empire City — rose almost simultaneously on the same mineral field and competed for dominance with the violent enthusiasm of mining-camp towns the world over.
The street between them, connecting the two communities, became known as Red Hot Street — a name that earned itself honestly in the years when the feuding between the towns was intense enough that the doctors and undertakers worked nights and slept during the days. The violence, the gambling, the saloons, the rough economy of men newly arrived with money to spend and no particular attachment to order: this was the frontier boom-town in its fullest expression, and it played out within a day's ride of the farms that the pre-war families of Jasper County had broken and abandoned. Empire City eventually surrendered its charter to Galena in 1907. Before the last mines closed, the tri-state district had produced nearly three million tons of zinc and 700,000 tons of lead. The contamination it left behind is still there, a Superfund site on the Kansas plains, the industrial endgame of all that wealth.
Jasper County Today
The county today is best known for Joplin, a city of some 50,000 that rebuilt itself after the devastating EF5 tornado of 2011 — an event that cost 161 lives and destroyed a third of the city, and that the community has since used as the organizing narrative of its recovery. Carthage, the county seat, is a smaller and quieter place, its downtown still anchored by the Jasper County Courthouse, a Romanesque Revival structure that stands as conspicuously grand as its era required. The county's mining history is commemorated at the Tri-State Mineral Museum in Joplin. Route 66 runs through the county, and the nostalgia that has attached itself to that road has given some of the old towns a new kind of tourist economy built on exactly the kind of American mythology that the real history of Jasper County — the burning and the fleeing, the Red Hot Street, the families scattered by guerrillas — tends to complicate.
The Center Creek bottom where Jared and Dorcas Foster farmed in 1860 is still farmland. The creek still runs. The ground that Andrew Foster remembered as the old home they stayed in too long is unmarked and unremarked, which is the fate of most ground that history moved through and kept going.
That tornado of 2011 carries a personal weight for anyone who came to Joplin to trace the Foster family. Barbara Anderson — a descendant of Frederick Foster, and a cousin through that line — was the kind of person who made first forays into family history travel what they can be at their best: enthusiastic, hospitable, full of stories and local knowledge, delighted that someone had come all this way to ask. She is gone now, taken by the tornado. The family she represented, the line she carried, the welcome she offered — that is part of what the storm took from this place.
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