The Place:
From the Wikipedia page for Harrisonville, Missouri:
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Harrisonville is a town in Cass County, Missouri, United States. The population was 10,019 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Cass County. It is part of the Kansas City metropolitan area.
Harrisonville was founded in 1837 upon land donated to Cass County by Congress for county purposes, and was named for Congressman Albert G. Harrison, who was instrumental in obtaining the land grant. The area suffered greatly during the American Civil War, though Harrisonville was one of the few places exempted in Union General Thomas Ewing's notorious General Order No. 11 (1863), which ordered the depopulation of three entire Missouri counties and part of a fourth.
In 1972, Harrisonville was the site of escalating tensions between a handful of would-be hippies—mostly Vietnam veterans—and town elders, which culminated in a brief rampage by 25-year-old Charlie "Ootney" Simpson. In the town square, in plain view of onlookers, he killed two police officers and a bystander before shooting himself. The victims were officers Donald Marler and Francis Wirt and local businessman Orville Allen. His motivation turned out to be personal, not political; he had saved money to buy a farm, but the seller had recently backed out of the deal, and Simpson had used the money to bail his friends out of jail.
The Robert A. Brown House, Harrisonville Courthouse Square Historic District, and St. Peter's Episcopal Church are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
A May 2017 report from Missouri State Auditor Nicole Galloway gave the city the lowest possible rating of "poor," citing complex, often overlapping tax districts, contracts awarded without appropriate bidding processes and overuse of money pulled from restricted funds.
My commentary:
This is still very much a small town county seat, and it still has very strong feelings about the Civil War. Along I-49, there is a very moving memorial to the Burnt District - the two-and-a-half counties of Missouri along the Kansas border that were essentially depopulated after the Lawrence Massacre on August 21, 1863. The Courthouse described above still stands and is still used today.
The Person:
From the Wikipedia page for Albert Galliton Harrison:
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Albert Galliton Harrison (June 26, 1800 – September 7, 1839) was a three-term United States Representative from Missouri.
Born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Harrison graduated from Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky, in 1820. He was then admitted to the bar and began his law practice in Mount Sterling. Seven years later, he moved to Fulton, Missouri.
Harrison served as member of the Board of Visitors to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1828, and from 1829 to 1835 was a member of the commission to settle land titles growing out of Spanish grants.
In 1832, he was elected as a Jacksonian Democratic Representative to the Twenty-fourth Congress (March 4, 1835 – March 3, 1837). Harrison was re-elected as a Democratic Representative to the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Congresses (March 4, 1837 – September 7, 1839).
Albert G. Harrison died six months into his third term in Fulton, Missouri at the age of 39 in 1839. His remains were interred in the Congressional Cemetery, Washington, D.C.