County of site: Wayne County
Location of town: MO-49 & MO-CC, N. of Piedmont
A good account of the robbery, and what put this smear in the road on the map, is well done on the Sundown Trail
"We start in Gads Hill, a hamlet along Highway 49 north of Piedmont in Wayne County. At its peak, this place-name only had a handful of houses and businesses, and today it has even fewer.
"The town's namesake is Gad's Hill in Kent, England, the setting for a highway robbery in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I.
"How fitting, then, that Gads Hill in Missouri (somehow losing the apostrophe) was the setting for another kind of robbery on January 31, 1874. Jesse James and friends picked this location for the first train robbery in Missouri.
"Gads Hill was the high point along the Iron Mountain Railroad between Des Arc and Piedmont. This made it the ideal spot for a hold-up.
"In this article in Wild West Magazine, author Ronald H. Beights explains in gory detail how the robbery went down. Five masked men rode into Gads Hill and took control of the town and railroad station. They threw a switch so that the next train would be shunted to the siding and forced to stop. Then the robbers proceeded to... well, rob the passengers at gunpoint.
"What was most ingenious about the robbery, however, wasn't the robbery. It was the public relations.
THE MOST DARING
ROBBERY ON RECORD
The south bound train on the Iron Mountain railroad was boarded here this evening by five heavily armed men
and robbed of _ dollars. The robbers arrived at the station a few minutes before the arrival of the train and arrested
the agent and put him under a guard and then threw the train on the switch.
The robbers were all large men, none
of them under six feet tall. They were all masked and started in a southerly direction after they had robbed
the express. They were all mounted on fine blooded horses. There's a hell of an excitement in this part of the country.
"Today, an historic marker along Highway 49 is the only remnant from that fateful day in 1874. The Iron Mountain Railroad -- now Union Pacific -- is still in operation, but the line was altered after World War II to accommodate higher-speed trains. It now cruises through Gads Hill on a higher grade and jumps over Highway 49 at a concrete overpass." ~ Southeast Missourian, by James Bauhgn, Tuesday, April 1, 2008
"Gad's Hill was established in 1872 by George W. Creath.
It is located at Section 34, Township 30 N, Range 3 E, at the junction of Highways CC & 49." ~ History of Southeast Missouri, 1889, Goodspeed p. 460.
"It is on the St. L. I. M. & S. R. R., 6 miles north of Piedmont. It is noted as the place where a train was recently stopped and plundered by ruffians, as of 1874. It had 1 store and a saw mill." ~ Campbell's Gazetteer of Missouri, 1874, p. 639.
"At Gad's Hill, a small station on the Iron Mountain Railway, the first train robbery in the State was effected on January 29, 1874. It was said at the time that the five men who did the work were Arthur McCoy, two of the Younger Brothers, Jim Reed and Green Wood. Only the passengers were robbed." ~ Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri, 1901, Conrad, Vol. 2, p. 544.