Liberty: The Town That Taught Jesse James
Near Kansas City, Missouri
Liberty was platted in eighteen twenty-two as the seat of Clay County, making it one of the oldest incorporated towns west of the Mississippi River. It grew into a prosperous college town after William Jewell College opened in eighteen forty-nine, funded by a ten-thousand-dollar gift from a Columbia doctor of the same name. But Liberty earned its most notorious footnote on February thirteenth, eighteen sixty-six, when the James-Younger Gang rode into town and robbed the Clay County Savings Bank in broad daylight, making off with nearly sixty thousand dollars in bonds and coin.
A nineteen-year-old student was shot and killed by a stray bullet. It is often called one of the first daylight bank robberies of peacetime in United States history, and no one was ever arrested. The bank building still stands as a museum today.
