Harrisonville, Missouri - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

HARRISONVILLE, 39 m. (904 alt., 2,322 pop.), the seat of Cass County, is the economic capital of a prosperous farm area centered by a three-story buff-brick and stone courthouse in a large square.

Nowhere was the bitterness of border warfare more keenly felt than in Cass County, and no family was more closely associated with the lawlessness and brutality of the period than the Youngers. According to the autobiographical Story of Cole Younger (1903), Colonel William Henry Younger purchased a large farm near Harrisonville in 1858. Here he lived and raised cattle until he moved into the town, where he started a livery stable, bought an interest in two large stores, and received a United States Government mail contract. His sympathies, when the war broke out, were with the Union.

One evening, his daughter and his son, Cole, then 17, attended a dance at the home of Colonel McBee, a Southerner. During the evening, a group of Union soldiers, among them Captain Irvin Wally. forced their way in to the party. When Cole's sister refused to dance with the Captain, he and Cole fought. The next day Wally attempted to arrest Cole as a spy, but Cole escaped, and soon after joined Quantrill's band. Thus, inadvertently, Colonel Younger came under suspicion as a Southern sympathizer. On July 20, 1862, he was waylaid on his way home from Kansas City, robbed, and shot dead. In September of 1863, the Younger home in Harrisonville was burned by Union forces. When Mrs. Younger moved to her country home, that too was burned.

After the war, Cole Younger and Frank James seem to have organized the group which, under the leadership of Jesse James, was to become the most notorious band of outlaws in American history. For the next ten years Cole was associated with nearly all the spectacular robberies perpetrated by the band. Cole was usually accompanied by his brother James, and frequently by another brother, Robert; a third, John, was shot to death March 16, 1874, at the beginning of his apprenticeship. James, Robert, and Cole Younger, the James boys, and three other men robbed the bank at Northfield, Minnesota, September 7, 1876. In the ensuing fight two citizens and the three other robbers were killed. The James brothers escaped, but the Youngers, all wounded, were captured and sentenced to life imprisonment. Robert died in the Minnesota penitentiary in 1889; James and Cole were eventually paroled. James committed suicide in 1902, and the following year, after a long campaign, Cole was pardoned. He returned to Missouri, where he made a living lecturing. Later, he toured in a Wild West show with Frank James. He died near Lee's Summit, Missouri, in 1916. Between Harrisonville and Butler, US 71 traverses a rolling country where the farms are smaller and support more landowners and ewer tenants. Comfortably secure in well-constructed, modernly quipped houses, the farmers raise livestock, poultry, and wheat.