Skim Milk Yankees Fighting: - Athens, MO - There's a Book About It on Waymarking.com

County of site: Clark County
Location of site: MO Hwy CC, former town and State Historic Site, Athens
Author: Jonathan Kearns Cooper-Wiele
Published: 2007
Publisher: Camp Pope Bookshop

"It had it all: Cemetery Hill, the Cornfield, a cannonade, ignominious skedaddles, valorous stands, backs to a river, a numerically inferior force triumphing, neighbors firing upon neighbors, refugees, a bayonet charge, an arms differential, entrenching, casualties, death, bloated corpses, and the wonder and terror of volunteers “seeing the elephant.” Evoking such epic engagements as Shiloh, Antietam, or Gettysburg, these characteristics belong to the nearly unknown Trans-Mississippi Civil War Battle of Athens (pronounced “Aythens”), Missouri. Commencing around 5:30 a.m. on the sultry morning of August 5, 1861, in Clark County, in the far northeast corner of Missouri near the Iowa border, it was over in a couple of hours.

"Long known as the “farthest north” battle of the Civil War (although Salineville, OH, and St. Albans, VT were, as historian Leslie Anders put it, nearer to the north pole) Athens was in fact the closest actual combat came to the state of Iowa. The town of Athens, a thriving market community with a population of about 800 in 1861, stood on a bluff above the Des Moines River in northeast Missouri. Across the river was the Iowa town of Croton, which was connected by rail with the important northern military hub of Keokuk, Iowa. In the early months of the Civil War, a regiment of pro-Union Home Guard militia under Colonel David Moore occupied Athens while it received military supplies at Croton. A pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard militia unit under Colonel Martin Green, itself in search of arms and ammunition, attacked Moore’s numerically inferior force on three sides. Better weapons and tactics decided the battle in the Home Guard’s favor. An opening artillery assault by the State Guard overshot the Home Guard position, one round passing through the front and out the back of the home of a prominent citizen (the famous “Cannonball House,” which is still standing) and destroying at least one building in Croton, which represents Iowa’s closest brush with the mayhem of battle.

"The Battle of Athens secured northeast Missouri for the Union, although the distraction of Green’s attack and subsequent activity in the area probably contributed to Confederate victories in the Battles of Wilson’s Creek and Lexington. Many of the men of the 1st Northeast Missouri Home Guard went on to serve in the 21st Missouri Infantry Volunteers, of which their colonel David Moore became the commander." ~ The Camp Pope Bookshop