Oronogo

In my previous post about the Reunion Community, I mentioned that it was located in Jasper County about two miles northwest of Oronogo. Like the Reunion Community, Oronogo, too, has an interesting history. Founded as a lead mining camp prior to the Civil War, it was called Minersville until some years after the war.
The story of how the name change came about is a fascinating sidelight in itself. During the early mining days, it was common for miners to barter for goods and services when they didn't have cash, with lead ore being the principal medium of exchange. One day, a miner supposedly offered a merchant at Minersville something other than ore as trade for the merchant's goods, and the merchant refused the offer, saying it was "Ore or no go." The name stuck, got contracted to Oronogo, and eventually was adopted as the official name of the town.
Oronogo was a booming little town during the heyday of the Tri-State Mining District from late 1800s until the middle part of the twentieth century, and it witnessed its share of notorious incidents over the years. For instance, the Bank of Oronogo was robbed by infamous characters on at least a couple of different occasions, once by Roy "Arkansas Tom" Daugherty and another time by Clyde Barrow. The last I knew, the old bank building was still standing, although it was sitting vacant and in a somewhat dilapidated condition.
During the latter half of the twentieth century, Oronogo became almost a ghost town, but in recent years it has made a comeback. It is home to a relatively new elementary school (part of the Webb City School District), and a building boom has turned it into a thriving bedroom community for Joplin, Webb City, and other surrounding towns.

Thomas Livingston

In my last post, I mentioned Tom Livingston's killing of Union troops near Sherwood, Missouri, during the Civil War and the subsequent destroying of the town by Federal soldiers in retaliation.
Livingston was an interesting character who refutes the common perception of Confederate guerrillas in Missouri. Today they are thought of by many as little more than outlaws who merely used the Civil War to indulge an already-established proclivity toward lawless behavior, but, in reality, such a stereotype fits a relatively small number of them. Livingston, for instance, was a well-respected merchant and smelter in Jasper County prior to the war, and many of his followers were landowners and established citizens of the county. Livingston lived at a place called French Point, located on Center Creek just a mile or two west of present-day Oronogo, which was known as Minersville during the Civil War, and most of his men, as I pointed out last time, came from the western half of Jasper County in and around Sherwood.
Livingston was killed in July 1863 while leading a charge on the courthouse at Stockton in Cedar County. Acording to one story, he was brought back to Sherwood and buried in the cemetery there, but a second, more likley story, says he was buried in an unmarked grave at Stockton.