Civil War Program Focuses on Local Family Stories

Two days before Gen. Sterling Price's Confederate forces entered Pacific and destroyed railroad property, officers stopped at the Catawissa stone farmhouse of Riverboat Dan McAuley looking for horses.

Upon learning that McAuley had hidden his horses, they forced his wife to cook for them and kidnapped his two oldest daughters. They kept the girls, ages 18 and 19, for three nights before releasing them to return home. It was an incident that scarred the family for three generations.

"Gen. Sterling Price is no hero of mine," Billy Murphy, McAuley's great-great grandson, recently told an audience that packed the Pacific High School auditorium March 24. "After that none of the local men would have anything to do with those girls. It damaged their lives for years."

It was a story that had been whispered in Catawissa and told among family members, but not talked about publicly. Murphy said it was a story that needed telling to give a true look at the Civil War.

Murphy was one of eight speakers who related incidents of the Oct. 1, 1864, battle of Pacific that academic historians refer to as a skirmish - if they mention it at all.

As the nation observes the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, descendants of Pacific families were asked to relate their family's experiences.

The Meramec Valley Genealogical and Historical Society staged the program as part of the 2011-2015 Civil War Sesquicentennial celebration. The society, which collects local family histories, looked at its own archives to identify speakers.

Bobby Kommer, Catawissa, said his family fought on both sides of the war. His Musick ancestors, who had fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, joined the Missouri State Guard before the start of the Civil War and later joined the Confederate Army. His Whitworth relatives remained loyal to the Union and volunteered to fight for the north.

After he spoke, Kommer dropped down on the second-to-bottom auditorium step and watched the rest of the presentation, nodding in agreement as each of the speakers told their stories.

"Bobby is representative of Missouri, and of our region, because that's how it was, cousin against cousin," said Maggie Brundick Koetting, the program narrator.

Nancy Thater, MVR-III Odyssey director, said Missouri was unique in the Civil War, having two governors, two seats of government and two volunteer militia groups.

"It was all very confusing for citizens," Thater said. "Loyalties were divided across the state."

There were more than 1,000 battles and engagements in Missouri during the Civil War, the third highest of any state, Koetting said. And Pacific was a center of troop movements throughout the four-year conflict because it sat at the junction of two of the four railroads west of the Mississippi River.

It was the Pacific Railroad and its southwest branch that battalions, companies and regiments of Union solders were sent to guard. The Pacific rail center survived until the last months of the war when Confederate forces finally destroyed it.

On Oct. 1, 1864, Price's ragtag army torched the railroad bridge over the Meramec River south of town, looted stores on St. Louis Street and burned every railroad building in downtown Pacific to the ground, including the depot, eating commissary, repair shops, roundhouse, storage buildings and water towers.

After a four-hour conflict that included pounding Union forces with cannon fire, the rebels were driven from town. They took a railroad baggageman, known locally as Uncle Peter Morrison prisoner, robbed him of his shoes and sent him to walk home barefooted.

But in Gray Summit, at the home of the Ming family, Southern sympathizers who had barbecued the fatted hogs and baked big cobblers, they found what could have been the first good meal they had in months, according to local history writer Sue Reed.

"Johnny Ray, have I died and gone to heaven?" one Confederate foot soldier rhetorically asked another.

Reed uncovered the story of the barbecue held for Price and his men during oral interviews for her book on the Jeffries family. Like Kommer's relatives, Jefferies family members chose their sides and enlisted in opposing armies.

"At that picnic dinner, there actually were first cousins of the men they had just fought at Pacific," Reed said.

Local lore and stories told by grandparents were often what kept the Civil War stories alive in families, Reed said.

But there were documents that survived. Henry Alt displayed the original discharge that his great-uncle Charles Frise carried with him from the time of his discharge until the war ended.

"It's amazing that it's still in as good shape as it is," Alt said. "He couldn't put it away at home. He had to carry it with him all the time, folded up, to prove he wasn't a deserter in case he got stopped."

Many papers have been lost or not yet discovered. Dale Hoffman recalled that when he and his father demolished the old St. Louis Street mansion, called The Blue Goose, his father found a large scrapbook containing a diary and letters written by soldiers who had been patients in the army hospital set up in the building.

"I think my dad gave the scrapbook to a relative of one of the soldiers," Hoffman said. "I don't recall who he gave it to."

There were letters, too, that Robert B. Denny and his wife Maleta wrote to each other during his three years as captain of Company B, 26th Missouri Infantry, perhaps as many as a 100 letters, according to Bryon Denny, Catawissa, Denny's great-great-great grandson.

The husband-wife letters have not surfaced but the diary that Denny kept survived. Written in lead pencil, with an entry for each day, Denny recorded every time he received a letter from his wife Maleta and every time he wrote to her.

His company was with Sherman's forces at Atlanta, Ga., when the September invasion of Catawissa took place. Day after day he made a diary entry, ‘no mail from the north,' ‘no letter yet.' Finally on Oct. 26, he received a letter from Maleta.

"Old Pap Price only got one horse from me," the diary entry said. "That's all he got."

As Price's army moved north through Missouri it conscripted a growing number of wagons, horses and mules - all it could find, Koetting said.

Still there weren't enough horses to pull the artillery pieces, according to local Boy Scout Zach Myers, who researched what type of artillery a moving army would take with them so he could purchase an accurate replica for his Eagle Scout project.

"Because it was so hilly in the Ozarks they used the lighter 12-pound Howitzers. They wouldn't have been pulling the big Napoleon cannons that you see in pictures of Gettysburg," Myers said. "The 12-pounders were usually pulled by six horses, but by the time they got here they were usually only using four horses because they didn't have enough horses."

Bill McLaren owns the farm where the fenced Whitworth family cemetery is located and rents the adjoining Phelan property that overlooks the Meramec River and the railroad bridge, guarded for most of the war by Union solders.

"There's a Civil War campsite up there that's pretty clear," McLaren said. "You can envision the encampment."

McLaren said he had known about the burning of the railroad bridge most his life.

"I was about 4 or 5 when the late Jim Phelan's mother Annie Dailey Phelan, who was very old at the time, told me how she recalled when she was a small girl and the Rebel soldiers made the women and children carry brush onto the railroad bridge that they set on fire."

Portions of the presentation were a repeat of a program at the genealogy society's annual meeting at the Pacific Presbyterian Church last July.

"I'm glad we're doing it again because it gives me a chance to say what finally happened to my great-aunts, the McAuley girls," Murphy said. "When Riverboat Dan died he left each of his daughters $426 in cash.

The oldest one right away took her money and moved to Colorado. She later sent for her sister. They both married, one to a store owner and one to a miner. They ended up doing OK, but for a long time it was a sad, sad story. Neither one of them ever came back to Catawissa."

Henry Alt also had an after-the-fact story. He carried onto the stage with him a large spent shell that had been found in Pacific after the Civil War.

"We always had this on our farm, but I was almost afraid to claim it was from the Civil War," Alt said. "Last night I went to another Civil War event with Ron Sansone and there was an artillery expert there. I can confirm that this was definitely a Civil War shell and it was found in Pacific."

Patricia Sewell, Genealogy Society president, said additional research is being done in the society archives to locate correspondence and photographs that relate to the Civil War.

"We want to make the record as complete as possible," Sewell said.

Pauline Masson, who wrote the program script, said the use of the Pacific High School auditorium for the presentation was made possible Tom Sauvage, PHS principal. Fred Nolley and Cheryl Schlemper, MVR-III technology director who coordinated the video projection, sound and lights.

"Our little society never envisioned a program quite this grand," Masson said.

The Pacific Tourism Commission, Chamber of Commerce and Pacific Partnership sponsored the program, which Step Productions, New Haven, recorded on video.