Carthage: Marble, Battles, and Belle Starr

Carthage, Missouri has been named for a fallen city, fought over like one, and rebuilt in stone by people who intended it to last.

The town was platted in eighteen forty-two, a county seat rising out of the southwest Missouri prairie. Nineteen years later, on July fifth, eighteen sixty-one, about sixteen days before the first Battle of Bull Run, Missouri became the site of the first significant land battle of the Civil War. Union Colonel Franz Sigel led eleven hundred well-trained troops south from Springfield to intercept Missouri's secessionist governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, who was moving with roughly six thousand poorly equipped Missouri State Guardsmen. Sigel's artillery was devastating at first. But he was badly outnumbered, and by evening he was retreating through the streets of Carthage under fire.

The Confederate victory was strategically minor but symbolically enormous for a secession movement that desperately needed good news. It also holds a unique distinction: the Battle of Carthage is the only engagement in American history in which a sitting state governor personally led troops in the field against the United States government.

The town was burned and rebuilt after the war. And the rebuilding introduced something extraordinary. A quarry opened near Carthage in the eighteen seventies containing the only gray marble of its kind in the United States. The stone had a silver luster unlike anything quarried elsewhere in the country. It ended up facing the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City, portions of the United States Capitol, and the White House. The Romanesque Revival Jasper County Courthouse, completed in eighteen ninety-five and built entirely of native Carthage marble, still stands in the center of town.

And then there is Belle Starr. Born Myra Maybelle Shirley near Carthage in eighteen forty-eight, she grew up here, attended the Carthage Female Academy, learned music, read Latin. The Civil War, and the death of her brother, set her on a different path. She would become the most notorious female outlaw of the American West, friend to the James and Younger gangs, convicted horse thief, shot dead in eighteen eighty-nine in a case still officially unsolved. Carthage remembers her with some ambivalence, and with considerable pride.