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Why Farm Here Instead of Jasper County?
Lawrence County sits directly east of Jasper County in the southwestern Ozark country of Missouri, and the question of why a family might choose one over the other in the 1840s or 1850s is not a simple one. The land is different — Lawrence County runs up against the Ozark plateau in a way Jasper County doesn't quite, its terrain more varied, its soils more mixed, its creek bottoms narrower and its ridges more insistent. A farmer from Tennessee or Kentucky, accustomed to hill-country agriculture, might have found Lawrence County immediately legible in a way the flatter, more open Jasper County was not. The timber was good. The drainage was workable. A man who knew how to farm the hollows and the hillsides of the upper South would have known how to farm this.
The early settlers came from Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia, following the pattern of the whole southwestern Missouri frontier. They grew corn and wheat and potatoes, kept the usual mix of livestock — cattle, horses, mules, sheep, hogs — and supplemented their farm income with the furs that the Ozark country still had in abundance: beaver, wolf, fox, the kinds of animals that the mountain men had been hunting further west but that the Ozarks still harboured in the settlement period. It was a mixed and self-sufficient farming life, the kind that required a man to be competent at a dozen things and to not depend too heavily on any one of them.
The county seat of Mount Vernon sits on the high ground near the center of the county, and Aurora, to the north, became the county's commercial hub when silver mining brought a short-lived boom in the 1880s. Lawrence County was always a farming county at its core, however — the kind of place where the land supported a permanent population without ever making anyone dramatically wealthy.
More Confederate Than Jasper County? Or the Same?
The question of Confederate versus Union sympathies in southwest Missouri is more complicated than any simple county-by-county map suggests, and the comparison between Lawrence and Jasper counties illustrates the complication rather than resolving it.
Both counties were represented at Missouri's 1861 secession convention by men who voted to keep Missouri in the Union. But once the Battle of Carthage was fought in July 1861 and the Confederate Missouri State Guard established itself as a military reality in the region, the political situation on the ground shifted rapidly. The Lawrence County representative at the secession convention — a man who had voted Union — was subsequently elected lieutenant colonel of Confederate forces in the Missouri State Guard. That particular reversal tells you something about the pressure that the war's actual arrival put on formal political positions.
Lawrence County was, if anything, *whipsawed* more severely than Jasper County by the conflict, precisely because it sat slightly further into the Ozark terrain and slightly further from the obvious military roads and supply routes that gave Jasper County its strategic value. Both Union and Confederate forces moved through the county repeatedly, taking crops and livestock, conscripting men or driving them off, leaving a civilian population that had to navigate a violence that did not reliably distinguish between its sympathizers and its opponents. By 1865, the county's population had dropped below 4,000 — a fraction of what it had been before the war. The farms were abandoned, the livestock gone, the buildings burned.
The simplest answer to whether Lawrence County was more Confederate than Jasper County is probably: no, not significantly. What it was, like Jasper County, was a community divided and then devastated by a war that was being fought, in large part, over a question — the future of slavery — that many of its small-farming families did not have a direct economic stake in, but that their political culture, their origins in the slaveholding South, and the specific demands of the moment had made it impossible to stay neutral about. Men on both sides. Farms burned by both sides. A landscape that took a generation to recover.
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