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Holly Fling

Dr. Betsy Delmonico

English 498

Capstone Project

16 December 2010

Folk History from Down on the Farm in Shelby County

I grew up on a farm in Shelby County during the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, cable

television was not available outside of the city limits, and no one had yet considered the

possibility of owning technology, such as personal computers or VCRs. Instead, we relied on our

imaginations and storytelling for entertainment. My father, who was born in 1921, was an

animated storyteller and we spent many evenings riding in the farm truck through the

countryside listening to him tell his tales. He was not the only storyteller though, as several of

our elderly neighbors enjoyed nothing more than sitting with my father under the big maple tree

in our backyard trading tales.

Given that my father and the other old storytellers are all gone now, it has been more than

twenty-five years since I have heard them tell their tales, but I still hold many of them in my

memory, some more fragmented than others. While these oral accounts were certainly fun to

listen to as a child, as I grew older I realized that they probably had been embellished.

Regardless of the level of truth however, these stories are oral histories that have been passed

down by word of mouth and they should be recorded before they become missing pieces of times

past.

In Folkloristics Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones claim that “[i]n addition to

being historical phenomenon themselves—whether conceptualized as survivals, continuities, or

revivals—examples of folklore also frequently serve as sources of historical information” (84).

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They go on to explain that “[w]hen used as historical sources, folklore examples enable

researchers to reconstruct past events and to supplement, corroborate, and challenge or correct

existing historical records and interpretations” (84). As an example, Georges and Jones describe

the work of William Lynwood Montell. In the absence of historical records due to fire, Montell

gathered and analyzed historical traditions of local people to reconstruct the history of Coe

Ridge, an African American colony in Cumberland County, Kentucky. Georges and Jones clarify

that not every oral tradition is historical truth (85), but Montell asserts that “no historian who is

aware of the ways of the people on a local level, especially in rural areas where ties to the land

are strong, will question the importance played by oral traditions in the lives of the people”

(xvii). Furthermore, Montell insists that “[a]ccuracy of local historical legends is not the most

important question to be faced by the person who gathers and analyzes them, but rather the

essential fact is that these folk narratives are believed by the people who perpetuate them” (xvii).

Regardless of the level of historical truth, Montell worked “to preserve for the generations to

come a bit of the area’s history which otherwise might one day be erased from the memories of

the local people” (13). Like Montell, I too am working toward a preservation of the past. The

past belongs to those who lived it, to those who remember it, and to those who will someday read

about it, so it is of utmost importance to preserve it for the interest of the future generation.

My father was born and raised in Shelby County, where he lived practically his entire

life, so all of his tales revolved around this area of Missouri. In fact, many were based upon our

family farm. I have chosen to recall from memory and do further research on six specific tales

that he and the other storytellers used to recount: the Honey Trail tale; the old cemetery; the men

in the Blue and the Gray at Walkersville; the brick factory at Walkersville; the history of the

Brick House; and the story of the big rock from the river. I have chosen these particular stories

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because they fascinated me most as a child, and for that reason they stand out more clearly in my

mind than others.

The remains of what my father referred to as the Honey Trail run alongside Salt River

and past an old cemetery surrounded by an iron fence and hidden in the woods on the west side

of our family farm. My father had told me that our farm had once been several farms and the

people who lived Back West, as he called that section, were buried in that cemetery. While

working in the field, he would occasionally unearth artifacts with his plow. For instance, he once

discovered a gold wedding ring, which probably belonged to one of the original settlers of

Shelby County. I began my research of the cemetery by studying the names of the original

Shelby County settlers, particularly those who settled in the Salt River Township on the west

side of my family’s farm. There are maps at the Shelby County Historical Society Museum in

Shelbina which show the names of the original land purchasers, as well as maps showing

ownership of land in 1878 and 1902. At the museum I also found census records dating back to

1840 which noted who lived in the homes and included family, slaves, and servants. Next, I went

through my family’s farm abstract, which is essentially a collection of legal documents, such as

land patents, wills, and court records, which records actions with the farm. I found our abstract to

be a number of combined abstracts, showing that the farm was, as my father said, originally

several separate farms. The earliest abstract shows ownership of Peter Roff and dates back to

October 20, 1835. According to an account archived at the Shelby County Historical Society

Museum and written by Nicolas Watkins, one of Shelby County’s first settlers, Peter Roff

actually settled this land in November 1832. Interestingly, Watkins reports that when he, Peter,

and three other men arrived in Shelby County in 1832, they did not find any other white settlers

to the west of where they settled on Salt River.

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By the time I visited the cemetery I was familiar with most of the names I found. William

Coard, his wife, Frances, and his daughter, Hester, are all buried in this cemetery. In the abstract

I read William Coard’s land patent, as well as his will, which gave me a feel for the lives of these

settlers. In A History of Monroe & Shelby Counties, Missouri, which was published in St. Louis

in 1884 and according to the title page was compiled and written “From the Most Authentic

Official and Private Sources,” I discovered that in 1831 Major Obadiah Dickerson was the “first

settler in Salt River township [and] was also the first permanent one in the county” (875). The

Coard family settled in Shelby County only seven years after Dickerson, as their land patent

from the abstract is dated September 1, 1838 (Thomas, R.L. V. 113, P 554). Three of the

headstones, dating from the 1850s to the 1860s, belong to the children of L. and T.J. Duncan.

The Duncan family is not in our farm abstract; however, a map of the original land purchasers

shows Levin Duncan to have settled a farm bordering William Coard’s farm in 1848.

The Honey Trail that runs between the cemetery and the river is mostly overgrown now,

so it does not appear to be a trail until about forty feet into the woods. According to my father

however, people used to drive their horse-drawn wagons up into Iowa in search of honey along

this trail. He reported that the trail crossed our farm and forded the river at this remaining

section. My investigations reveal both truth and distortion in my father's account. According to A

History of Monroe & Shelby Counties, Missouri, prior to 1836 the only roads running north and

south were called the ‘Bee roads’ (660-61). There were only two of these roads and they were

“little better than trails” (661). These Bee trails ran through the central and eastern parts of

Shelby County and they were made by the settlers of the counties to the south, who every fall

traveled north in search of honey (661). Anywhere that the trail might cross a stream was called

the Bee ford, so A History of Monroe & Shelby Counties, Missouri records the Bee ford of Salt

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river [sic], the Bee ford of South Fabius, and so on (661). Evidently the Bee ford of Salt River

would be where the trail crosses Salt River on the western side of our farm.

The Callaway trail, “the route commonly pursued by the honey hunters of Callaway

County” (661), ran north of Shelbyville. As our farm is south and west of Shelbyville, this is not

the trail from my father’s story. Next, however, the 1884 book talks about the Boone trail, “made

by the bee hunters from Boone County,” which “crossed Salt River above Walkersville” (661).

Our family farm is located on Salt River above Walkersville, showing that my father’s Honey

Trail was the Boone Trail and parallels the history books. The Western Historical Manuscript

Collection-Columbia sponsored by the University of Missouri and the State Historical Society of

Missouri makes reference to Bee Roads in both Knox and Scotland counties, the two Missouri

counties north of Shelby. Additionally, this collection claims that Clark County, Missouri, just to

the east of Scotland County, “was the terminus of the old ‘Bee Roads’ of pioneer days.

Therefore, it is unlikely that these trails actually led north into Iowa.

Aside from my father, one of my favorite storytellers was our neighbor Melvin Snell,

who passed away in 1982. Melvin used to recall his grandmother’s claims to having seen, as a

child, the injured and dead soldiers in both the Blue and the Gray laid out in the front yard of a

house that sat on a hill near Walkersville. I do not recall if Melvin ever stated exactly how many

men were seen by his grandmother, so I hoped to find this information in my study. To begin

researching this oral account, I searched for evidence of a dispute near Walkersville during the

Civil War. In Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac 1861-1865 E.B. Long and Barbara Long,

claim that on Wednesday, the second day of April 1862 “there was a skirmish near Walkersville”

(192). Correspondingly, my great-grandmother’s copy of the General History of Shelby County,

Missouri 1911, which was written by the citizens of Shelby County and published in Chicago in

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1911, explains that on this date Col. H. S. Lipscomb, of the Eleventh Missouri State Militia, a

union calvary, and a Captain Wilmont, along with thirteen other men who were in charge of a

wagon load of supplies, started from Shelbina to Shelbyville (86). Approximately a mile

downriver from Walkersville, confederate “Tom Stacy, with sixteen of his band, bushwhacked

the party, killing two militia men named Long and Thomas Herbst and a prominent and worthy

citizen of the county named Lilburn Hale” (86).

After finding proof of a skirmish, I next set out to discover the identity and whereabouts

of Melvin’s grandmother at the time of the Civil War. Although I did not know Melvin’s

grandmother’s maiden name, I knew that his Grandmother Wiggins had once lived on the eighty

acres of our farm on which my mother’s house now sits. According to an 1878 map, J.H.

Wiggins did own this particular piece of land. I then directed my research to the General History

of Shelby County, Missouri 1911 to research the Wiggins family, where I found that John

Wiggins was united in marriage to Shelby County’s Martha Cadwell on December 8, 1870 (489).

The couple had four children, one of which was “Allie, the wife of Elwood Snell” (489). Allie

Wiggins Snell would have been Melvin’s mother and her mother, Martha Cadwell Wiggins,

would have been Melvin’s grandmother. As Martha was married in 1870, she would have been a

young girl at the time of the Walkersville skirmish in 1862.

The location of the house from Melvin’s story is approximately one mile downriver from

Walkersville and there is clear historical evidence of an 1862 skirmish in which two militiamen

were killed. Because only three men were killed, two being militiamen and one a businessman,

Martha Wiggins’ claim of seeing soldiers in blue and the gray may seem a bit questionable. Still,

the men she allegedly saw lying in a neighbor’s yard would have included not only the dead, but

also the injured. Although I have found no information on injuries during this minor Civil War

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event, injuries were common in the Missouri wilderness and perhaps merited little or no

attention. In From Memory to History Barbara Allen and William Lynwood Montell explain how

original actors of historical events become displaced through orally communicated history.

According to Allen and Montell, even chief actors (Quote) “may be displaced by… better known

or locally more prominent figure[s]” (36-37). As this incident took place during the Civil War,

this could explain how two militiamen and one citizen came to be described as the men in the

Blue and the Gray. While the facts reported by Melvin Snell as coming from Martha Wiggins

may have been blurred by a young girl or even altered through recounts over the past one-

hundred forty-eight years, Martha Cadwell Wiggins likely did see these dead and injured men

which show that Melvin’s tale is likely true folk history.

Melvin also reported that his grandmother had handled almost every brick that built

Shelbina. This intriguing hyperbole suggests that the Cadwell family was associated with a brick

plant. Most of downtown Shelbina dates back to the 1880s and 1890s and local folklore says that

there was once a brick factory at Walkersville. Because Walkersville was once “the biggest town

in Shelby County,” as my father always said, land that is now associated with Shelbyville or

Shelbina was, at that time, referred to as “the Walkersville area.” Unfortunately, there appears to

be no information available as to where the brickwork for downtown Shelbina was made, however,

according to the A History of Monroe & Shelby Counties in September of 1881a two-story brick

building was constructed in Shelbyville with its brickwork done by William Moore (839). In

1838-39 several Moore families settled farms near Walkersville. Township 56 and 57 maps from

1878 and 1902 show William Cadwell as a land owner in the Walkersville area too, but on the

opposite side of the river from the Moore farms. As clay is known to be found around this area, it

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is possible that the brick factory said to have been located at Walkersville could have been

owned by William Moore, who was likely a descendent of one of the original settlers.

Another example of locally produced brickwork is found in the folk history of what

Shelby County residents now call “the Brick House.” From my father I learned that several

houses had stood on our farm in the past because various land patents had been consolidated, but

that by the time I was born in 1972, only one large brick house remained. All of the other houses

had been wood frame and therefore more susceptible to the elements. Exactly what year the

Brick House was built was unknown, but under the listing of “Farms for Sale” in the November

21, 1894 Shelbina Democrat an ad appeared for George Roff’s farm. George is the son of Peter

Roff, whose land patent for 154.63 acres, dated October 20, 1835, is in the farm abstract. By the

time George put up the farm for sale in 1894, he had expanded Peter’s original land patent to

two-hundred thirty-five acres. He was asking thirty-six dollars per acre and boasting that the land

was “[o]ne of the most desirable farms in the county.” The farm included a six-year-old eight

room house as well as a “large frame barn.” This means the Brick House was built in 1888.

Although the barn is long gone, the rock walls of the barn’s basement foundation are still in

place and there is an old well beside where the structure once stood, as well as a cistern near

George’s oversized brick house site.

My father’s sister and her husband, Don and Esther Harrison, who lived in the house

more than sixty years ago, were its last occupants. They lived there during the first year of their

marriage, after which they moved to Mexico, Missouri, where they spent the remainder of their

lives. Although the Harrisons have both passed away, their only child, Ed, still has an Indian

weapon that was found on the farm by Luke, an elderly African American, and given to his

mother when she lived in the Brick House. By the late 1970s large holes had developed in the

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outer walls of the empty house, posing a threat to the teenagers who were known to trespass.

Sadly, for fear of an accident, my father had the house demolished in the summer of 1980, but its

history still stands through the oral accounts that my father had heard when he returned home

from the Second World War to work on his father’s farm.

My father had been attending school at Truman State University, which was then known

as Northeast Missouri State Teachers College, when World War II broke out. After serving his

country he did not return to school, but instead returned home to Shelby County to work on what

is our present family farm, at that time owned by his father, Dr. Samuel L. Simpson. My father

worked on the farm alongside Luke, who had been born on our farm and had worked there

throughout his life, and he told my father what were referred to by Luke as “just old stories” as

they worked together. Luke’s old stories were tales that had been orally passed down to him over

the years.

One of these stories involved the construction of the Brick House. As the tale goes, the

house was built by freed slaves in or about 1880 for the Roff family and financed by a crippled

man who lived in a room at the top of the house facing south and who kept his money in a box

under his bed. Records from the Shelby County Circuit Court and Shelby County Probate Court

at the Shelby County Courthouse prove that Jonathan Roff made frequent loans at high interest

rates to various members of the community, including to his brothers George and Thomas. The

1880 census shows Jonathan living with George and George’s eleven-year-old son, George. This

record lists Jonathan as asthmatic showing that his health was poor. Jonathan died in 1889, so it

is quite possible that he was the crippled man who loaned the money to construct the Brick

House, in which—for one year only—he lived in the upstairs room facing south.

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Schedule two of the 1860 Census lists the slave inhabitants of Shelby County. Unlike

schedule one of the 1860 Census, which lists free inhabitants, schedule two does not list names

of the slaves, but rather the name of the slave owner, the number of slaves with their ages, sex,

and color. During this census Peter Roff is shown to own six slaves: one fifty-seven-year-old

black female; one thirty-six-year-old mulatto male; one twenty-six-year-old black female; one

twenty-year-old mulatto male; one six-year-old mulatto female; and one one-year-old mulatto

male (2). After the slaves were freed they were believed to have remained on the farm, which

may not have been unusual behavior. In A History of Northeast Missouri written in 1913, Walter

Williams claims that “[m]ost of the masters in Missouri at least, treated their slaves humanely,

and were kind and considerate” (638-39). Although claims similar to those of Williams have

been disputed and discredited, Williams may be at least partially correct when he adds, “some of

the colored people refused to leave their old masters, and nearly all held their former owners in

great respect, and continued to look to them for help in time of trouble” (639). The former Roff

slaves were believed by Luke to have formed the bricks for the Brick House from the clay on the

farm and then to have baked them in kilns that they had fashioned underground. There was a

hickory grove there from which wood was cut to fire the kilns; as my father said hickory burns

very hot. It is also true that yellow clay forms the soil on the location where these bricks were

supposedly molded, and that this section of the farm is just to the south of what has always been

known as the Clay Knob.

When these former slaves passed away they were buried in the same cemetery as the Roff

family, a cemetery which was formally located just to the south of the Brick House although

later a road was built through this cemetery. In the farm abstract an affidavit states, “That a

certain deed dated February 17, 1913, recorded February 17, 1913, book 85, page 507, in said

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Shelby County, conveyed from Richard S. Hooper and Emma E. Hooper to William T. Coard a

strip of ground off the entire north end of said above-described sixty acres wide enough to make

½ acre for a road.” This section of the abstract serves as evidence that a road was constructed

south of the Brick House. Luke told my father that the bodies of the white were moved to the

present Roff family cemetery, the bodies of the black were left under the road; only a few

gravestones were removed. The exact whereabouts of these stones is unknown; however, the

Roff Cemetery does contain two bases that are both missing their stones and one unmarked

stone, so these may have been the stones from the black graves in the original cemetery. From

Brett Rogers’s research on “Improvisation and Tradition: Grave Art in Black Missouri,” which

he presented at the 2010 Missouri Folklore Society Conference, this is not surprising. Rogers

pointed out that graves in black cemeteries are often marked with whatever may have been on

hand at the time. For instance, pipes, concrete blocks, bricks, carved pieces of wood, or even

stones may have been used for tombstones. Many of the stones from Rogers’ research bore some

sort of markings, whether carved or painted, so whoever moved these stones probably knew they

marked the graves of ex-slaves. If a few stones were removed, it can be assumed from Rogers’s

research that these stones likely bore no markings to differentiate them from any other stone on

the property.

The nineteen sixty-four cemetery records collected by Roy Neff agree that “Roff

Cemetery is Located about 4 1/8 miles north and west of Shelbina, Mo. on the Simpson Farm

Where the old Brick House is located [sic].” The record also states that “slaves made the brick

for the house on the farm that the house is located on.” The record does not point out however,

that the slaves had been freed by the time the house was built, but the farm ad in the Shelbina

Democrat serves as evidence that twenty-three years had passed between the end of the civil war

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and the construction of the Brick House proving Luke’s assertion to be correct. These records

also claim that “the burial place was only a short distance south of the house,” but when “a road

was put thru the burial place… most of the bodies were moved to the present site, where the

large stone marks the place for all of the names found.” By “most of the bodies,” Neff refers to

the named white bodies. According to this data, “[t]he present stone is about ¼ mile south of the

house in a pasture, now in fragments.” Although this would have been true in 1964, during the

early 1980s my mother spent hours jamming metal rods into the ground until she had uncovered

all of the stone fragments. She then reconstructed the Roff family’s cemetery, restoring a piece

of the farm’s history. Eight members of the Roff family are buried near this large stone: Peter;

his first wife, Sarah; his second wife, Nancy; his sons, Jonathon and Robert; his daughter-in-law,

Julia, who was the first wife of George; George’s and Julia’s son, George; and Thomas’s first

wife, Mary. Caroline Roff’s first husband, William Harding rests under a separate stone.

Additionally, following my father’s death in 1993, we buried his cremated remains on the farm

in the Roff Cemetery.

Family lore claims that the black people who were buried in the original cemetery, and

whose bodies supposedly remain under the road, were the ancestors of Luke. Luke told my father

a story about a seven-foot-tall black woman who had lived on the farm. According to this oral

account, about a mile south of the Brick House, where a rock bluff overlooks Salt River, there

was a large flat rock. According to Luke, this woman carried that rock on her back from the river

up to the Brick House where it served as a doorstep, and she died later that night. At some point

the name Robert Ryburn was carved into the face of the rock. In the farm abstract I found a deed

dated September 14, 1908 on which date Edward Ryburn purchased the land just south of Peter

Roff’s original farm. Edward Ryburn and his wife Amanda sold their land on March 12, 1914.

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Robert Ryburn may have perhaps been their son. Before tearing down the Brick House, my

parents had this rock moved to their own home. It took three large men with pry bars to load the

rock onto the rear of a tractor with a three point hitch hay fork, but to this day the big rock from

the river continues to serve as a step—a metaphorical step back into the past and forward into the

future, as well as a tangible stepping stone to the door of my childhood home.

The use of large river rocks as doorsteps must have been a common practice during the

nineteenth century, as there are two of these large rocks functioning as steps up to the patio at my

childhood home. The second rock came from the northwest corner of our farm where it had once

been used as a step up into another farmhouse that had been located on our farm. This rock bears

the initials C.C., so I set out to look for persons with those initials who had lived near that spot.

A 1902 version of the Shelby County atlas shows that 123 acres on the northwest section of our

farm were then owned by C.W. Coard. I found in the farm abstract that C.W. Coard had

purchased this section of the farm on November 20, 1897. While C.C.’s identity cannot be

proven, the initials do match the name of C.W. Coard, who at one time owned the land from

which this rock was taken.

As time goes by more and more knowledge of the past becomes lost, perhaps forever.

The only surviving picture of the Brick House known by my family hangs on my mother’s

dining room wall. It was taken in 1917 and shows five people sitting on the lawn, but the only

two identified on the back of the picture are Emma Ida Bunting Rozholtz and Bonnie Dean

Bunting Muller. According to the farm abstract on March 1, 1920 John A. Bunting and wife

Adelia A. purchased a section of the farm, but it was not the section on which the brick house

stood, therefore the Bunting children must have been visitors on the day that this picture was

taken. In addition to this picture my mother’s dining room also contains two pieces of furniture

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both made of walnut and taken from the Brick house—a corner cupboard and a mantle, as well

as a doorstop.

Records such as farm abstracts, wills, and court records, tombstones, furniture, and

names carved into rocks serve as reminders that these people once existed, but oral accounts that

have been passed down from Luke to my father or from Martha Cadwell Wiggins to her

grandson Melvin Snell tell us more about history than artifacts can do alone. Lost history may

never be recovered, but by writing down everything I remember about the oral accounts I heard

as a child, I can help to preserve the history of the original settlers of Shelby County, Missouri.

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Works Cited

Allen, Barbara and William Lynwood Montell. From Memory to History: Using Oral Sources in

Local Historical Research. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History,

1981. Print.

Citizens of Shelby County. General History of Shelby County, Missouri 1911. Chicago: Henry

Taylor, 1911. Print.

“Farms for Sale.” Shelbina Democrat. 21 Nov. 1894. Shelby County Historical Society Museum.

Archives. Print.

Georges, Robert A. and Michael Owen Jones. Folkloristics: An Introduction. Bloomington:

Indiana U.P., 1995. Print.

Long, E.B. and Barbara Long. Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. Garden City,

NY: Doubleday, 1971. Print.

Montell, William Lynwood. The Saga of Coe Ridge: A Study in Oral History. Knoxville: U of

Tennessee P, 1970. Print.

National Historical Company, St. Louis. History of Monroe & Shelby Counties, Missouri. St.

Louis: National Historical Company, 1884. Library of Congress: Internet Archive:

Ebooks and Texts Archive. Web.

Neff, Roy. Salt River Township: Roff, Cemetery. 1964 Shelby County, Missouri Cemetery

Records. Shelby County Historical Society Museum. Archives. Print.

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“Original Land Purchasers.” Map. Shelby County, Missouri, Township 57-N Range 11-W (5th

PM). Shelby County Atlas. 1833-38. Shelby County Historical Society Museum. Archives.

Print.

Roff, George and Thomas Roff, executors of Jonathon Roff Deceased.” Accounts and Vouchers

for Settlement. Shelby County Circuit Court and Shelby County Probate Court. Shelby

County Courthouse. 14 May 1890- 11 November 1891. Shelby County Historical Society

Museum. Archives. Print.

“Section 7—Township 57—Range 10 No. 5.” Abstract of Title. Shelby County Abstract and

Loan Co. (A Corporation), Shelbyville, Missouri. Print.

Simpson, James Lloyd. Oral Accounts recorded by Holly Simpson Fling.

Snell, Melvin. Oral Accounts recorded by Holly Simpson Fling.

W. R. Strachan, Assistant Marshall. “Schedule 1.—Free Inhabitants in Salt River Township in

the County of Shelby State of Missouri enumerated by me, on the 14th day of June 1860.”

Post Office Shelbina. Page 37. Shelby County Historical Society Museum. Archives.

Print.

W. R. Strachan, Assistant Marshall. “Schedule 2.—Slave Inhabitants in… the County of Shelby

State of Missouri enumerated by me… June 1860.” Shelby County Historical Society

Museum. Archives. Page 2. Print.

“Township 56 & 57 North Range 10 West of the 5th Principal Median.” Map. Shelby County

Historical Society Museum. Shelby County Atlas. Archives. 1878. Print.

“Township 57 & Part of 56 N. Range X W. of the 5th P.M.” Map. Shelby County Historical

Society Museum. Shelby County Atlas. Archives. 1902. Print.

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Wailes, [first name illegible], Enumerator. “Schedule 1.—Inhabitants in Salt River Township, in

the County of Shelby, State of Missouri enumerated by me, on the 11th and 12th day of

June, 1880.” Shelby County Historical Society Museum. Archives. Print.

Watkins, Nicholas. “History of Shelby County.” Shelby County Historical Society Museum.

Archives. Print.

“Collection Inventories and Descriptions.” Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Columbia.

University of Missouri and the State Historical Society of Missouri. Web.

Williams, Walter. A History of Northeast Missouri. Cherry Hill, NJ, 1913. Web. Google Books:

American Libraries.