by Lynn Morrow

How often did twenty-something young women travel for a few hundred miles in carriages or wagons across southern Missouri and northern Arkansas during the Civil War? Probably more than we have imagined. Carrie Lenox and Eleanor King traveled out of Phelps County into northern and central Arkansas twice during 1864. Driven by the boldness of Carrie Lenox, her story, briefly told, is worth remembering, as is the commitment of her friend, Eleanor King, to her family and friends. The ladies, and Carrie Lenox’s cousins, several Lenox brothers, had to deal with wartime crises however dreadful it was to them personally.1

War cost the Lenox family revered brothers and fathers—David, a founder of several Primitive Baptist Churches, and Hamilton, the county’s wealthiest stockman, sided with the proslavery South. The vicissitudes of war pushed the wealthy brothers to retreat to Arkansas, where David died in early 1864 and Hamilton in December 1865. Both are buried in unmarked and unknown graves likely in Van Buren County, Arkansas. Hamilton’s sons, William Harrison Lenox, David Franklin Lenox, and Thomas Hamilton Lenox, all ex-Confederates, invested their lives and futures in Arkansas and Texas. The youngest son, Dr. Wilson Lenox, also an ex-Confederate, returned to Phelps County a couple of years after the war.

While the war dragged on, David and Hamilton’s grown children increasingly worried for the safety of their parents. Although it was sometimes dangerous, local folks moved around to make a living, traveled in and out of Missouri, sent mail—legal and illegal—to friends and relatives in and out-of-state. The Union tried to suppress mail sent to rebels, but much of it got through to recipients; in the stress of war, correspondents were willing to risk the consequences. And, young women from Phelps County traveled to and from Confederate Arkansas to visit friends and to see beloved parents. Such was the case with Carrie Lenox and Mrs. Eleanor A. King. Afterwards, in May 1864, upon Mrs. King’s arrival in Rolla from St. Louis, Yankees arrested her on suspicion of being a Confederate mail carrier within Union army lines. Through the captured correspondence, Eleanor King’s deposition for the provost marshal’s office, and in court records the documents revealed a dramatic window about the ladies’ travel and middle-aged widow refugees returning home from Arkansas to the Missouri Ozarks.

When the war broke out, Mrs. King lived in Houston with her husband, Texas County clerk James A. King, whom she had married in 1856. They boarded deputy clerk, M. B. Asbury, whose brother Ai Edgar Asbury went to Jefferson City to haul powder for the Missouri State Guard rebels back to Houston in spring 1861. King joined the Confederacy, and Eleanor joined him and other partisan Missourians at Sylamore, Arkansas, in 1862, where Capt. King sickened with “disease of the liver,” and was discharged. The couple returned to Spring Creek, Phelps County, to Solomon King’s farm where his eldest son, James, died and Eleanor continued to reside. But, after her arrest, she proclaimed to her Union captors in 1864 that “my father-in-law is an awful mean Union man,” but “I am a rebel sympathizer.”

Mrs. King’s testimony described how she accompanied twenty-eight-year-old Carrie Lenox, her late husband’s cousin and the oldest child still living at David and Elizabeth Lenox’s home near Lake Spring, Dent County, on a trip south. Mrs. Elizabeth Lenox’s unmarried and younger children remained at home when she and David retreated to Arkansas. The two young women, without acquiring an approved pass from the provost marshal in Rolla, traveled to Batesville in a two-horse wagon in March 1864 taking “shoes, hats, coffee, sugar, and little

articles” spending over “ten days to two weeks” that were “quite pleasant.” The town was under Unionist Col. Robert A. Livingston’s command, but the army permitted the ladies to see friends. Once there, Mrs. King became sick, but she stayed with her widowed aunt, Mrs. Mitchell, and visited former acquaintances. The determined Carrie, however, chose to push south to locate her mother, and accompanied by Batesville friend Sarah Price, continued her wagon trip to Brownsville, a concentration of strongly-Southern partisan families, east of Little Rock. After resting for a time, the party traveled north to Phelps County. Carrie’s Arkansas sojourn lasted a couple of months.

That she succeeded in her mission is confirmed in a subsequent June 1864 letter from Capt. Levi Wybark, commander at Salem, Missouri, to Gen. Odon Guitar—the captain reported a recent rumor from an Arkansas refugee. He told Wybark that Confederate Col. Solomon G. Kitchen had guided Southern friends as far north as the soldiers could safely travel, including wives who had been living in Arkansas. “The Widow Lenox has moved up in this country. . . . She had some 5 or 6 Negroes and 5 mules and horses. Kitchen, with 25 men, escorted her as far as Jack’s Fork River, her farm is near Lake Spring.” Carrie’s entourage settled in at her father’s farm on Dry Fork Creek in Phelps County.2

Back in Batesville, Mrs. King healed up by late May and left with friends to go shopping for clothes in St. Louis. That a small group of unarmed men and women could set out on horseback for a shopping trip in spring 1864 from Batesville to St. Louis indicates that sometimes wartime affluence and connections in the countryside, more than wartime danger, influenced whether folks traveled or not. On the way, two irregular Southern partisans stopped them and forced a trade of their poor horses for the mounts that the two male escorts rode, but they left the two ladies’ horses alone. The foursome reached Pilot Knob, boarded a train, and arrived on June 8th in Carondelet where Eleanor stayed with the widow of Dr. B. G. Lingow’s family. In Waynesville, Mrs. Lingow’s menfolk had supported the rebels and the Union occupied their four buildings. But, Col. Albert Sigel wrote to Gov. Hamilton Gamble that the Lingows “were ordered out of our lines for treasonable expressions,” i.e., the Yankees banished the Lingows from Waynesville.

The Waynesville refugees in Carondelet had a “house full of boarders,” and welcomed their Southern friends for a couple of nights. Daughter, Sue Lingow, told Eleanor King that local police “suspected [her] as a mail carrier,” a “false report” Mrs. King later asserted to the provost marshal. King, however, did admit she had one letter from Sarah Price in Batesville to deliver to Carrie Lenox, but “she was not a rebel.” King took her satchel of night clothes and moved to the Lindell Hotel for a night and spent another night with her traveling friends at Hiram McKee’s, a former teacher, farmer, and Spring Vale postmaster east of Waynesville. Finally, the single women, Belle Lingow, Maggie Rhea, and Emily Weaver, the latter another young lady from Batesville, accompanied Eleanor King on the train to Rolla.3

By late June the provost marshal at Rolla had the twenty-five-year-old King and her traveling mates under arrest. In Eleanor’s “Sworn Statement” about her recent journey, she also told of an earlier trip to Arkansas with Carrie Lenox. She said they went to Batesville in the “winter of 1863” so Carrie could visit her parents; the adult expatriate Lenoxes had notified their Missouri relatives that David was very ill. One tradition reported that he died herding cattle, but he more likely died of a fever or infection. Elder David’s wartime Arkansas activities probably included preaching to Confederates when he could.

Aware that a chance encounter with a Union militia could restrict her movement, Carrie Lenox acquired a pass from Gen. Thomas A. Davies in Rolla to go to her father “in a critical

condition” in January 1864. The military commonly granted such passes to civilians for family emergencies. Eleanor, Carrie, and a Mr. Howard traveled in the Lenox family carriage for two weeks in cold weather. Howard served as an escort, saying he intended to join the Union’s 11th Missouri Volunteer Cavalry in Arkansas. The group took a main wagon road to Thomasville, Ash Flat, and to Evening Shade (sometimes called Hook Rum). Then they went southwest to Van Buren County, Arkansas.

After Carrie and Eleanor arrived, David Lenox died. The will of David Lenox, attested to later by his widow Elizabeth in Phelps County, indicates that during the fateful January 1864, David and Elizabeth were in Van Buren County with family members Hamilton and Pamela Lenox. Brother Hamilton and David’s wife Elizabeth witnessed Elder David Lenox’s will on January 23, 1864. More Lenox relatives were in Van Buren County, too. Hamilton’s eldest living son, Bill Lenox, farmed there with his wife Ellen. He raised a cavalry company in Van Buren County a few months later, but Unionists captured him in Cole County, Missouri, in October 1864. After burial of David Lenox, apparently Eleanor and Carrie went to Batesville, where Ms. Lenox’s cousin, Mary Ellen Templeton, joined them. The ladies headed north, the latter going to relatives in Waynesville.4

In Rolla, Eleanor King repeatedly told her interrogators that she did not know of any mail carriers to the rebels and denied knowing the sympathies of most of her fellow travelers, except that Emily Weaver was a southern sympathizer, just as she was. It is clear Eleanor did not fear speaking her truth to the powers in Rolla. In fact, she said, “I don’t think it a fair question and I don’t desire to answer as to whether I want to see the southern people put down in this war.” Moreover, King declared, “Ms. Lenox is one of the strongest Union girls and always has been.” The captured mail from Eleanor and her friends told another story. Thus, the army sent King to the female military prison in St. Louis. Months later, in November, the army released Eleanor on $2,000 bond. As for Carrie Lenox’s mother, it would be September 1865 before witnesses at Rolla testified in probate court to begin the legal process to administer David Lenox’s handsome estate. Widow Elizabeth Lenox lived until 1867. She was buried south of her brick house in a neighborhood cemetery in the Dry Fork Creek Valley where Elder David first patented land in the Ozarks.5

Concomitantly, in 1865, Hamilton and Pamela Lenox continued to live in Van Buren County, Arkansas. Capt. Bill Lenox, a recent survivor of Johnson’s Island prison in Lake Erie, Ohio, reunited with his parents during late summer. Early in the war, the elder Lenoxes had lived below Jacksonport, Arkansas, where they had cared for son David F. Lenox, who had been furloughed from the army while he recuperated from persistent fevers in early 1863. David, a former Rolla liveryman, spent the summer of 1862 buying cattle, horses, and mules for the Confederacy. In spring 1863, he purchased mules for the Confederacy, but by summer, he could no longer function as an active infantryman, and “was with different branches of the army often before the final surrender.” The Union established a strong presence in central Arkansas that summer. David F., recently paid for his work, may have been instrumental in moving his refugee parents to the Arkansas interior, a safer haven for southerners. They likely landed at the domicile of Bill Lenox, who had left the Confederate army in July 1863 for Van Buren County, Arkansas.6

Although the specific enrollment dates are not all available, four of Hamilton’s and a couple of David’s sons, served the Confederacy, three of Hamilton’s in Gen. Mosby M. Parsons’ 10th Missouri Infantry. Parsons’ regiment was the last Confederate infantry to surrender at Shreveport, Louisiana, in June 1865. It’s reasonable to speculate that in addition to Bill Lenox,

Bill’s younger brothers, David F. and/or Wilson M. Lenox, also made their way to their parent’s residence in Van Buren County. Dr. Wilson Lenox had been with Gen. Parsons at Camden, Arkansas, during the Confederate offensive that drove the Union occupiers northward. After the surrender at Shreveport, Wilson remained in the general area for a time to practice medicine in northeast Texas. The whereabouts in spring 1865 of brother, Thomas Lenox, who like Bill, operated as an irregular associated with Col. William O. Coleman’s partisans, is unknown.

A probable scenario is that two sons—Bill and Wilson—both of whom had a level of training by physicians, helped care for their father in late 1865. William H., or Bill, had attended McDowell College in St. Louis in 1855, but he developed bronchial problems. His father sent him to Lake Providence, Carroll Parish, Louisiana, which bordered Arkansas on the north and the Mississippi River on the east, to recuperate over three winters before he permanently resettled in Phelps County to work full time for Hamilton in the stock trade. His extended stays in the Deep South may be a connection to Hamilton Lenox’s horse and mule trade in Arkansas and Louisiana. Lake Providence plantations were a great market, they led the state in cotton production requiring hundreds of mules, and the town was a shipping center. William Monks in Howell County later remarked in his memoir that Ozark stockmen commonly sent horses and mules to Louisiana. Meanwhile, the younger Wilson M. trained under his uncle Dr. James P. Harrison on Little Piney Creek in Phelps County for a couple years before joining the Confederacy. With that training, Wilson’s military superiors appointed him as a medical purveyor, a position that required a literate and responsible person. As such, Wilson was a medical officer who purchased hospital supplies, made regular reports about their use, and managed the current inventory for the field hospitals of Gen. Parson’s regiment. Sgt. Wilson Lenox mustered out at Shreveport on June 15, 1865.

Unfortunately, Pamela Lenox became a widow on December 13, 1865. The two brothers, Hamilton and David, were likely buried beside each other. Unlike his brother-in-law David, who had died the previous year, Hamilton died intestate, broke, and without negotiable assets. During the war, Phelps County plaintiffs had divided up his 3,120 acres in circuit court. Still, Pamela wanted to return to the Missouri Ozarks, so Bill accompanied his mother to Missouri. Two weeks after Hamilton’s death on December 30, 1865, Pamela signed a $100 [$1,600] promissory note with “her mark,” and Bill Lenox co-signed for security, to James J. Mathis, a wealthy Missouri farmer. Mathis families lived in southern Phelps County and James J. Mathis, like others in the 1850s, may have worked for or with Hamilton Lenox. Certainly, Pamela needed money to set up housekeeping in Missouri. Thus, by the end of 1865, widows Pamela and Elizabeth, aided by their children, lived in their home county.

Pamela outlived her sister-in-law by a half dozen years, but her remaining life left an indelible imprint in the Phelps County circuit court. Dr. Wilson Lenox, used power of attorney to petition the court for lack of due process concerning his parent’s property. He represented his mother and other heirs, while he worked and lived in Rolla. In 1871, Pamela reclaimed and occupied her real estate dower of an improved farm and octagonal-perimeter house, where she spent her final days. Pamela’s dower and the separate Hamilton Lenox probate litigation was led by Richard and Charles Bland, staunch Unionists, but post-war Democrats who hated the Radical Republicans. By the 1870s, Hamilton and Pamela’s children had few assets to inherit, three sons had left the state, and Hamilton’s stockman’s empire was gone. However, Elder David and Elizabeth’s progeny had nearly 2,000 acres of land, the brick house, and experience and means to resume commercial stock raising. For the rest of the nineteenth century, Dr. Wilson Lenox and the Blands were prominent leaders for the Democratic Party in the Northern Ozarks.7

1. 1. Documents central to this story are in the Union Provost Marshal Papers, 1861-1866, Missouri State Archives, Microfilm F1151, July 1864-March 1865, and Ancestry.com, Fold3, under E. A. King.
   2. Capt. Wybark to Gen’l. Guitar, June 1, 1864, in Official Records of the Rebellion, Vol. 34, Pt. 1, 164-65, describes Widow Lenox and others coming north from Arkansas.
   3. The Iowa City Republican, Nov. 19, 1862, reported that the army offices occupied four houses, the quartermaster, sutler, hospital, and commissary store rooms, some or all must have been Lingow’s. The army later arrested Emily Weaver, Wilson Leroy Tilley, and others as spies, and that left another large military commission file concerning families in Waynesville, Batesville, and St. Louis. Weaver’s story is summarized by W. J. Crowley, “The Ordeal of Emily Weaver, “Independence County Chronicle, 17 (October 1975), 1-45, and primary documents are in a 200-page military case file on Ancestry.com, Fold3, under Weaver’s name. In 1860 McKee boarded one of the engineers and several laborers who worked to construct bridge supports for the South West Pacific Railroad to cross Big Piney River, but the war stopped the project.
   4. See David Lenox’s will witnessed in Van Buren County, Arkansas, in Missouri, Wills and Probate Records, 1766-1988, David Lenox, Ancestry.com. Bill Lenox married Ellen Stigleman, who had been living with her sister, Rachel Hooker, in Lebanon, Missouri, in 1861.
   5. Elizabeth Lenox is buried at the Coppedge Cemetery, east of Lake Spring.
   6. See David F. Lenox, “Personal Memoirs of a Missouri Confederate Soldier,” edited with an introduction by John F. Bradbury, Jr., Phelps County Historical Society Newsletter (October 2002), 3-25, and Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Northeast Arkansas, Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1889, 881-82, for the Dr. W. H. Lenox entry.
   7. See Pamela Lenox’s promissory note with Bill Lenox as security in James J. Mathis v. Pamela M. and Wilson Lenox, note, Phelps County circuit court, filed Feb. 5, 1872, Missouri State Archives; Richard gained subsequent fame as “Silver Dick” Bland, while Charles served as chair of the Phelps County Democrat Committee, circuit judge, and finally, appeals court judge in St. Louis.

 

Lynn Morrow, M.A., Missouri State University, served as research historian for the Center for Ozarks Studies, managed the historic preservation consulting firm Kalen and Morrow, and administered Missouri’s national model in public records preservation at the Missouri State Archives. Lynn has published widely in the Missouri Historical Review, Gateway Heritage, Missouri Folklore Journal, OzarksWatch, Big Muddy, and in other serials, dictionaries, and anthologies. He co-edited two documentary histories, co-authored Shepherd of the Hills Country: Tourism Transforms the Ozarks, 1880s-1930s (University of Arkansas Press), and edited The Ozarks in Missouri History: Discoveries in an American Region (University of Missouri Press).