Pershing's Laclede: Where Black Jack Grew Up

In the small town of Laclede, Missouri, stands the nine-room Gothic-style house where John Joseph Pershing lived from the age of six until eighteen eighty-five. He would go on to command the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War and receive the rank of General of the Armies, the only person promoted to that rank in his own lifetime, since George Washington received it posthumously in nineteen seventy-six. The house was built in eighteen fifty-seven.

Nearby, the state preserves the one-room Prairie Mound School where Pershing taught before enrolling at West Point. The site became a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-six. Pershing, whose his service with the Tenth Cavalry, a regiment of Black soldiers, earned him the nickname Black Jack, grew up in this Missouri farming town far from any battlefield.