Spinning Wheel at the Ray House at Wilson Creek Battlefield near Spring field. This spinning wheel is from mid 1800's at the historic Ray house. Mrs Ray raised 10 children and most likely was able to make a lot of their clothes with this device.
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The Ray House at Wilson's Creek
Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield
Connie Langum; Hallowed Ground Magazine
Ray House
View from the porch of the Ray House at Wilson's Creek (Rob Shenk)
By August 1861 many families had settled in the Wilson Creek area (now known as Wilson’s Creek). Families such as the Gibsons, who owned and operated a grist mill, the Manleys, the Sharps, the Shorts, and the Edwardses whose house was the site of Southern headquarters during the August 10th battle. The most prominent family in the area was that of John and Roxanna Ray whose house served as a hospital during and after the Battle of Wilson’s Creek.
John Ray migrated to Missouri from Tennessee in the late 1840s. When he moved to Missouri he already was a widower and he brought his daughter Elizabeth with him. Roxanna Gizzard, a Georgian, married William Steele in 1837 and the couple migrated to Missouri in 1840. William Steele died in 1848 and Roxanna was left with four children to rear. Women were in short supply on the frontier and John Ray began courting the Widow Steele within a year of her husband’s death. The two were married in 1849 and by the time of the August 10th battle at Wilson’s Creek Roxanna had given birth to six more children. After marrying Roxanna, John Ray purchased the 120 acres of the Steele estate along with two slaves previously owned by William Steele.
With a new child being born almost every year the Rays quickly outgrew their home and John Ray decided to purchase the 40 acres adjacent to the old Steele estate.
After purchasing the land, construction on the new house began almost immediately and was finished by 1852. John Ray and his family were living in this new house when he was appointed postmaster of the Wilson Creek Post Office on January 18, 1856, a position he held for ten years. Because his house served as the Post Office, the Ray home was the hub of the little community that inhabited the area around Wilson Creek. The Ray house also happened to sit right along the Telegraph or Wire Road which was the major thoroughfare for all traffic military and civilian in the 1850s and 1860s. The Butterfield Overland stage began using the Wire Road in 1859 as its route from Tipton, Missouri to San Francisco, California, so the Ray family had a firsthand look at pioneers headed west for the next two and a half years. The stage route was discontinued in 1861 due to the Civil War.
The Civil War had begun in Missouri and Kansas, according to some, in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Missouri was already in the Union as a slave state and Kansas wanted to come into the Union as a free state, and so the border area between the two was ripe for conflict. Raiders from both states traveled back and forth pillaging, plundering, and killing. When the Civil War officially began, it gave those folks a legal excuse to continue the depravities they had begun in 1854. The Rays were aware of the impending military activity as they conducted their daily routines in August of 1861. By August 9th a Southern army of over 10,000 troops was camped all along Wilson Creek. On the morning of August 10th, some of the Ray children were outside tending to their horses when a Confederate soldier told them to take shelter because there was going to be a fight. All of the Ray family including their slave Rhoda and her four children took shelter in the cellar where they stayed for the entire six-hour battle. John Ray sat on the front porch throughout the battle and observed the action in his cornfield and the continuing action on what became known as Bloody Hill.
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