ST. CHARLES COUNTY HISTORY

By Dorris Keeven-Franke

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History happens. All stories, especially the difficult ones, need to be heard. Award winning author, a public historian, professional genealogist, and International speaker. Member of the Missouri Speakers Bureau and the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.
  • Smith Ball, a freedom seeker

    Smith Ball, a freedom seeker

    On Sunday, February 28, 1864, thirty-one-year-old Smith Ball had made his way from one end of St. Charles County to the other, a distance of about 25 miles, to reach freedom. His enslaver was John Ball who had passed away in 1850, leaving fifteen enslaved people living in three small cabins on his widow, Ann Hitch Ball’s large tobacco plantation.[ii] The Ball Plantation was located at Flint Hill,near the Boyd plantation, also in Cuivre Township, a community just over seven miles east of Snow Hill. 

    Smith Ball had been born May 26, 1833[iii], in Virginia, and had been brought to Missouri during the 1830s.  According to his enlistment papers, he was a light-colored black [man], 5 foot 10 inches tall, with brown eyes and black hair.  He left behind a wife Minerva Pringle, and four children, William, Lucy, John H., and Ada. When mustered in at Benton Barracks, he was examined by John Bruere, MD. of Benton Barracks in St. Louis like hundreds of other troops. He served in Company B of the 68th US. Colored Troops. [iv] The remarks on the Descriptive list stated “Recruit presented himself” meaning that he had fled his enslaver, Ann Hitch Ball(1804-1870), the widow of John P. Ball (1805-1858)[v].

    The 68th U.S. Colored Troops were Infantry, and Ball would advance to Sergeant before mustering out. He had fought at Fort Blakely in Alabama, The Battle of Blakeley was the final major battle of the Civil War, with surrender just hours after Grant had accepted the surrender of Lee at Appomatox in the afternoon of April 9, 1865. Mobile, Alabama, was the last major Confederate port to be captured by Union forces, on April 12, 1865.

    He and Minerva would raise a large family, William, Lou, John, Lina, Ada, Julia, Minnie, Birdie, and Mary. By 1900, she had passed away and was buried at Smith Chapel but her father Austin Pringle, who had been born in 1811 in Kentucky was still living with his son in law and grandchildren. When he died in 1912, at age 78, he was living alone at Foristell. He was buried at Smith Chapel Cemetery, where he had served as one of the nine original Trustees in 1871

    Notes

    [ii] 1850 U.S. Federal Census – Slave Schedules Record, United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850/i. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1850. M432

    [iii] MO Secretary of State, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Death Certificate of Smith Ball, Sept. 13, 1912.

    [iv]Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served the United States Colored Troops: 56th-138th USCT Infantry, 1864-1866; NARA; 300398; Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers Who Fought in Volunteer Organizations During the American Civil War, compiled 1890 – 1912, documenting the period 1861 – 1866

    [v]  The 1860 U.S. Federal Slave Schedule for Ann Ball, Cuivre Township, St. Charles County.

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  • Freedom Seeker Martin Boyd

    Freedom Seeker Martin Boyd

    On October 31, 1864, freedom seeker Martin Boyd, born in 1826, left the 300-acre plantation of Alexander Boyd and tried to make his way to George Senden’s store on Main Street in St. Charles, only to make it as far as Peruque Creek Fort at the Missouri Railroad Bridge. There Capt. L.D. Jay would enlist the 5’9” black man into the U.S. Colored Troops. Later, Alexander Boyd tried to show proof that he had inherited Martin from his mother Ruth Carr Boyd, widow of William Boyd, and that Martin Boyd was his property, and was seeking compensation for Martin’s Services and that as such he was entitled to a $300 bounty. Alexander did not receive it. Freedom seeker Martin Boyd would serve in Company B of the 49th United States Colored Troops, until March 22, 1866.  That December 31st, 1866, he would marry Mandy (this is Amanda) Logan, as Black Marriages were now legal. Over 8,000 African-American men would serve in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War.

    Fort Peruque was manned by Union Troops, that were Missouri’s Home Guards, assigned to guard the North Missouri Railroad Bridge (in the background), where it crossed the Peruque Creek (located at 1052 Peruque Creek Crossing today). The fort was constructed in 1862 and manned until the war ended.

    In 1827, Missouri was a new state filled with opportunity, at least for some people. Those living in Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee saw the opportunity and seized upon it. The land was selling for $1.25 an acre or if it already had “improvements” a man could get at least $2 per acre. And Dardenne and Cuivre Townships of St. Charles County were huge prairies where the crops of tobacco and hemp could make a man richer than his wildest dreams. William Boyd from Shelby County Kentucky had such a dream when he investigated it, but would die in 1830, before he could fulfill it, leaving behind his wife of 32 years, Ruth Carr, mother of his 11 children. Then, when Ruth’s father died in 1832, she brought her children and joined her brother James and his wife Susanna, who had already settled in Flint Hill. With Ruth was her 10-year-old son Alexander Thomas Boyd and at least eleven enslaved individuals.

    Photo from St. Charles County Parks website – Towne Park is loacated 100 Town Park Dr. (off of Hwy 61) in Foristell.

    In 1840, Mrs. Boyd, now living in Cuivre Township, had 14 enslaved individuals living here and working on her plantation. By 1850, the number of these enslaved individuals had grown even larger to 17 African Americans living on the Boyd plantation. The youngest is now an 11-month-old boy, and the oldest is now a 44-year-old woman, among the 8 females and 9 males on the tobacco farm. Unfortunately, the 1850 Census taker did not take the number of buildings there were to house these individuals, and their names were never given. The accounting of this is all based on an honor system, for tax purposes only.

    By 1860, Ruth Boyd 78-year-old mother of Alexander Boyd, is living with her son, next to her son Thomas, on the Boyd family plantation. Ruth is the enslaver of 7 people living in two cabins, Alexander has 8 people living in one cabin, and Thomas has 7 people as well living in two cabins. In all, this Flint Hill tobacco plantation has 22 enslaved people living in 4 cabins, which range from a pair of 5-month-old twin girls to a couple of women who are estimated to be 30 years old. No, the 1860 Federal Census, never gives us names of all of these people. But according to records, St. Charles County Park historian Ben Gall shares the names of 14 of these 22 people. They are Martin, Amanda, Henry, Lucy, Thomas, Emeline, Ella, David, Maria, her daughter Maria, Rose, Joshua, George and Ruth. The Boyd Plantation is now Towne Park, part of the St. Charles County Park System.

    In 1870, the United States Census revealed so much. Forty-eight-year-old Alexander T. Boyd, and his wife Ann Medora (McRoberts), are still living on the Boyd plantation, with their three children, Fannie aged 13, William aged 12, and 2-year-old Fenton. With them live white 26-year-old Henry Minor and his 30-year-old wife Mary, who works as a farmhand for Alexander. Martin lives on the plantation with his wife Mandy, and their 1-year-old son Samuel. In 1912, 86-year-old Martin Boyd passed away and was buried in the Smith Chapel Cemetery. (For more see https://smithchapelcemetery.com/)

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  • Elijah Lovejoy in St. Charles

    Elijah Lovejoy in St. Charles

    Around 1822, a schoolteacher named Anthony C. Parmer sold his two story brick building at 301 South Main Street to a prominent physician from Vermont named Dr. Seth Millington. Seth, and his brother Jeremiah were prominent residents in the early village of St. Charles, but Seth would pass away from the Cholera epidemic on August 4, 1834. At the time of his death Seth Millington’s estate would include nine enslaved African Americans. The instructions left in his will was for them to be taken to Liberia.

    Seth and Jeremiah had a sister Sarah also called “Sally” who had married Thomas French but she had become widowed in 1835 and she had gone to stay at Seth’s former home in 1837. Sally and Thomas French’s daughter Celia had married the former St. Louis editor Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was a well-known abolitionist and newspaper editor, in addition to being a Presbyterian minister. On October 3, 1837, Elijah Lovejoy had just finished giving a talk at the Second Street Presbyterian Church and was visiting the home of his mother-in-law with his wife and baby. The church was just up the street (where today’s SSM St. Joseph Hospital is today) and only a block away from Sally French’s apartment.

    St. Charles Presbyterian Church on Second Street

    When Lovejoy had left the church a few minutes before, he had been passed a note of warning written by his close friend William M. Campbell, warning him that he was in danger. Campbell said that a large group of men were about to visit his mother-in-laws upstairs home (at 301 South Main Street, today’s Goellner Printing) and suggested that Lovejoy and his family leave St. Charles immediately. Campbell, whose home and office was just down the street (201-207 South Main Street), was a fellow member of the Presbyterian Church. Campbell was also an attorney, and executor of the estate that included Archer Alexander (1806-1880), his wife Louisa, and their children. A few minutes later, a large group of angry men arrived at Sally French’s door to her upstairs apartment in the former Millington house, and the mob was just about to attack Lovejoy, when his wife fainted and the men fortunately chose to retreat.

    Lovejoy’s close friend George Sibley (1762-1863), whose wife, the former Mary Easton (1800-1878), had founded the girls school called Linden Wood, which was just a short distance away, would lend Lovejoy a horse. That night Lovejoy would quickly leave St. Charles, and make his way back across the Mississippi River to his home in Alton, Illinois.

    After the burning of Francis McIntosh on April 28, 1836 in St. Louis, Lovejoy had championed the end of lynchings of Black Americans and the abolition of slavery, in his newspaper the Alton Observer saying,

    “As long as I am an American citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write and to publisher whatever I please, being amenable to the laws of my country for the same.”

    Sadly, it would only be a few weeks later though when Lovejoy was revisited by another angry mob on November 7, 1837, in Gilman’s Warehouse in Alton. There Elijah Lovejoy was shot and murdered while trying to save his press, which had been thrown into the river. Lovejoy has often been referred to as a martyr and the founder of the “free press” in America, a right guaranteed to all citizens under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

    The formerly enslaved John Richard Anderson is said to have witnessed the whole event, as he was working as a typesetter for Lovejoy at the time. Anderson was a former slave of the Bates family, who after being emancipated, would learn how to read and write and later become a Baptist minister, like his close friend John Berry Meachum. (Both of them are buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum in the Baptist Minister’s Lot, purchased by the Baptist minister John Mason Peck.)

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