Did you know that the land on which our Courthouse and county jail, and the old jail museum are situated was once a big pond? And that includes the beautiful county health center where I had my first job and which is no longer there due to progress.
You see, back in 1869, there was a big flurry of interest among Lebanon citizens about the railroad that was being built from Arlington to Lebanon. People who had money hurried to buy up the land in and around the city. Several of them bought land about three-quarters of a mile from town where the Frisco railroad would have to pass when it was extended on to Springfield.
Mrs. Martha Harrison, on the advice of her attorney, bought 200 acres which turned out to be the exact spot where the new town was eventually located.
As the story goes, railroad officials asked the city fathers to give them free land on which to build the station. The City Council refused and the railroad told them they would take their marbles and go home, i.e. they would build the station a mile away and the citizens of Lebanon “would see what becomes of (their town).”
The land where the railroad decided to build was surveyed and named the First Railroad Addition. Notice it was never intended to be another town, just an addition to the original town of Lebanon. In keeping with this, there would be no square since Lebanon already had a square in the old town and the streets would run parallel to the railroad.
This is why directions are so confusing to follow in Lebanon. As Frances Gleason puts it in her history of Lebanon: “People have grown old and died in Lebanon without being able to tell the directions, and strangers coming in have been bewildered in trying to find their way around.”
But I digress. According to Gleason, Joe Jolly and Ed Elder were hired to plat the ground into streets. They used a double ox team and double shovel plow and the plowing took two weeks of hard labor. At night they camped on the bank of “the big pond” where the court house now stands and built their campfire on the corner where J.T. Moore built a substantial brick house later on.
They couldn’t call the main street “Main Street” because there was a Main Street in the old town, so they named it Commercial. Then a series of streets was laid out from Commercial Street northwest four blocks and named for the first four presidents: Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison.
As the years passed, other streets were added: Monroe, Jackson, VanBuren, Harrison, Polk, Taylor, Garfield, and Logan with Lincoln connecting the old and new parts of town on the east, parallel with the railroad.
The streets which intersected these avenues were numbered with Commercial being #1, and Second, Third, etc. going on from that. Harwood which runs from Washington to the foot of the old town hill was named for the founder and first pastor of the Congregational Church, which was moved to the first block of the avenue between Washington and Locust Street.
Pearl and Ash Street ran parallel to Lincoln to the city limits on the north.The first house on Pearl Street was built by another pastor of the Congregational Church, a Rev. G. A. Paddock, but after he moved it came into the possession of the Gleason family.
For years the only other house on Pearl was a large frame building which was occupied by the family of John Armstrong, editor of the Rustic Leader at the time.
Then the J.T. Taliaferro family left their home on Cobbs Creek near Oakland and moved into the Armstrong house. You may recall that family name from my accounts of the Blickensderfers and the Oakland Mansion and Church.
My memory becomes a little “faulty” in all this but I’m wondering if that was the home occupied by the Pickens family during my school years. And it is also my memory that the Algeo sisters lived on Ash Street. I stand to be corrected on any of this.
Missouri is known as the “cave state” with about 6000 caves having been identified. I have heard rumors from time to time that there is a sizeable underground cave in Lebanon running northeast from somewhere on South Adams over towards the courthouse and it makes you wonder about the “big pond” which was on the corner of Adams and Second. Those of you who, like me, are phobic about cave-ins and sinkholes might want to disregard that rumor!
Joan Rowden Hart copyright 2018
Comments