Joplin, Missouri - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

JOPLIN (1,009 alt., 37,144 pop.), built literally upon the mines that have nurtured it, is near the center of a lead and zinc belt that swings in a 30-mile crescent across the corners of three States — the greatest zinc producing area in the world. Although Joplin's business and social life is keyed to the price of these metals, the increasing importance of local agricultural products and industries has eased the pinch of the lean mining years, and given Joplin a remarkable economic stability.

Straddling the boundary of Jasper and Newton Counties, the city is spread across a high, rolling prairie that covers many ore deposits. Since their discovery nearly a century ago, the richest horizons have been "worked out," leaving a labyrinth of abandoned passages which have been filled with water to provide a firm foundation for the city. South of Joplin, the prairie ends abruptly at Shoal Creek, whose winding valley and sharp, wooded bluffs — where an extensive city parkway has been developed — introduce the Ozark Highlands.

Joplin Creek, three blocks east of Main Street, divides the city into East Town and West Town, once rival mining camps and now distinguished from each other socially and financially. In West Town, the business section extends for 33 blocks along Main Street. Commercial structures, varying in height from two to five and more stories, dominate by sheer size and numbers the rather uniform residential area surrounding it. In this "downtown" section, between Third and Eighth Streets, are the principal hotels, theaters, banks, retail stores, and office buildings. At the Tenth Street intersection, a narrow wholesale and industrial district extends along the Missouri Pacific and the St. Louis and San Francisco railroads tracks. At Twelfth Street are the municipal market buildings, the crossroads for the wholesale fruit and produce trucks of neighboring States.

Once gaudy with saloons, dance halls, and gambling rooms, Main Street is now keyed to the conventional pitch of a prosperous American business street. With the exception of a flamboyantly ornamented three-story white building, once known as "The House of Lords" and famous for its saloon and gambling tables, and a scattering of other buildings dating from the boom days of the 1870's, most of the structures have been built since 1900. It is in the incidental aspects of Main Street life that Joplin's alliance with its past and with the Southwest becomes apparent. Among the well-dressed Middle Westerners who typify the region, one sees the tall, angular Ozark type, and an occasional cowboy from the Southwest. Sidewalk conversations mix the Ozark dialect with the Texas drawl. "Marriage parlors — one flight up," are open day and night, and second-hand stores near the edge of the business districts display, among a jumble of other items, cowboy boots and pistols.

The most prosperous homes and the city's few apartment houses are here in West Town. Along tree-shaded streets are well-kept brick and frame houses much alike in size and design. Close to the business section, among the older houses, are a few of the handsome homes erected by persons who "struck it rich" during early mining days. In the far northwest, between Byers and Jackson Avenues, and Glenview and Jaccard Avenues, the Roanoke district of modern houses crowns an elevation which looks out upon old Smelter Hill, now occupied by the Eagle-Picher Lead Company's plant and the dwellings of its employees.

Except for a small area of substantial homes in the Eastmoreland district centering about Fifteenth Street, East Town is a section of smaller residences. Broadway, the original business thoroughfare, still contains a few of the narrow brick and frame buildings and residences of days long past. Close to the business district live the majority of the Negroes who compose 2.2 per cent of Joplin's population, a considerable number of foreign-born, and the Indian groups who make up 1.9 per cent of the inhabitants. In the area where early "close-in" mining was conducted, the houses are small and shabby. Beyond this district, they appear increasingly prosperous.

Outside the fringe of Joplin's residential areas are the mines, the ore mills with their immense chat piles, and the mineral processing plants. Piles of weathered rock and shallow, weed-grown depressions mark the shafts of abandoned "gopher hole" mines. Mounds of new, raw earth show where occasional small operators are taking out the less profitable ore left by larger mining companies. Once the chat piles over shadowed everything, but today many of them have been used up in highway construction.

Joplin's story revolves around the mining first of lead, then of zinc. Yet it was not lead but land that attracted the first settlers to the area. In 1838, John C. Cox, a Tennesseean, settled on Turkey Creek, near the end of what is now Mineral Avenue. A year or two later, the Reverend Harris G. Joplin, a young Methodist minister from Greene County, Missouri, staked out an 80-acre tract, on which, near a spring which still flows, he built a cabin just east of the creek that now bears his name. By 1841, a settlement had grown up around the two cabins and Cox had opened a store. Commissioned postmaster, he set up in his store the community's first post office, called the Blytheville Post-office in honor of Billy Blythe, a wealthy and popular Cherokee who lived on Shoal Creek. Church services were held in Reverend Joplin's cabin until he returned in 1844 to Greene County, where he died three years later.

The discovery of lead in the immediate vicinity of Joplin was accidental, despite the fact that the almost pure deposits were so close to the surface that they were sometimes exposed by flooding creeks or hard rains. About 1849, David Campbell, a miner from Neosho, visited his friend, William Tingle, on Turkey Creek at the mouth of Leadville Hollow. Noticing what he thought to be an abandoned Indian or Spanish excavation, Campbell investigated. When the first digging produced more than a hundred pounds of galena, Campbell and Tingle developed the mine. Pig lead from it was hauled overland to Boonville and sold by Tingle's slave, Pete. From there it was taken by steamboat to St. Louis. In 1850, the firm known as Tingle & McKee advertised that they had a good mine and were in the process of building a log furnace.

During the year of the Tingle-Campbell strike, a Negro boy belonging to Judge Cox turned up several large pieces of ore on Joplin Creek, near the Campbell mine, while digging for fishing worms. "Cox's Mines or Nigger Diggings" developed, and soon other strikes were made in the Joplin Creek area. Further hope of immediate development, however, was shattered by the Civil War. No major engagements occurred in the vicinity, but Jasper and near-by counties became a marching and recruiting ground for the contending armies. Foraging parties discouraged mining enterprise by taking whatever they found, including smelted lead to use for bullets.

When the war ended, the richness of deposits in the vicinity attracted national attention. Old and new mining companies began operations, and miners and prospectors poured into the region. Land was offered for lease on a royalty basis of 10 per cent of the ore recovered. Necessary equipment consisted of a pick and shovel, a windlass and ore bucket, a hand drill, and some blasting powder. Here was the poor man's chance for fortune, and a fever of small mining operations broke out.

For the most part those who migrated to the Joplin and other Tri- State mining camps had little in common with the Bret Harte characters who crowded the West in the gold rush days. Although the mining camps drew their share of adventurers, most of the settlers were of English and Scotch-Irish descent — "hill folks" from the near-by Ozarks — who came with their wives and children. Even in the "wide open" early days, family life was the dominant factor in Joplin and the other mining camps of the area. Newly arrived European immigrants have played no role in the Tri-State mining fields. Until recently, the development of the area has been characterized by successful individual enterprise and a lack of labor disputes.

In 1870, the Granby Company, then the largest in the area, offered a prize of $500 to the miner or company of miners who produced the largest amount of ore within a given period. E. R. Moffet and John B. Sergeant, employees of the company, won the prize. Quitting their jobs, they leased a piece of land from Judge Cox along Joplin Creek and spent most of the prize money for powder and tools. They then sank the first shaft in the valley, and having struck a rich pocket of lead ore, built smelting furnaces on the present site of the Union Depot. A few years later, when Captain E. O. Bartlett invented a process for making sublimed white lead, Moffet and Sergeant purchased the patent. With this monopoly, and the expanding prosperity of the mining field, they developed their Lone Elm Mining and Smelting Company into one of the largest in the district.

Within a year after Moffet's and Sergeant's strike, 500 men were mining lead in the Joplin Creek valley, and intense rivalry sprang up among the various companies. On July 12, 1871, Patrick Murphy of Carthage organized the Murphysburg Town Company, which purchased a tract of 40 acres west of Joplin Creek and platted the town of Murphysburg. A few weeks later, Judge Cox retaliated by platting a townsite east of Joplin Creek, between Galena and Cox Avenues and Central and Valley Streets, which he named Joplin City in honor of his old friend, the Methodist minister. Rivalry between the two new towns was immediate, and bitter. Saturday night fights became the accepted means of establishing superiority. Between major brawls — lead by such characters as "Reckless Bill," "Three Fingered Pete," "Rocky Mountain Bob," and "Dutch Pete, the bad man from Bitter Creek" — the children fought back and forth with stones. The winter of 187 1-2 was known as "the reign of terror," and "Dutch Pete" was its monarch. But in the early spring, J. W. Lupton, a miner, licked the armed bully, and other law-abiding citizens were stirred to action. Lupton was made constable. On March 19, 1872, the county court was petitioned to incorporate the two towns under one charter and name it Union City. This charter had hardly been granted before its legality was questioned, but on March 23, 1873, when the combined population was approximately 4,000, the State general assembly passed an act re-incorporating the two towns as the City of Joplin.

Because it was generally regarded as a boom town that would soon exploit its wealth and die, the city at first held small attraction for the railroads. In 1875, however, Moffet and Sergeant' organized the Joplin Railroad Company, which, in 1877, completed a 39-mile branch line connecting with the Gulf Railroad at Girard, Kansas. Two years later, this road was purchased by the St. Louis and San Francisco Rail road. In 1882, the Missouri Pacific Railroad extended its tracks to Joplin; four other railroads followed during the next two decades.

The railroads not only provided a cheaper method of freighting lead, but made possible the development of the zinc industry. Joplin's growth was immediately stimulated. The potential value of zinc had been pointed out before the Civil War, but its extraction was difficult, the market price was low in comparison with lead, and freighting charges were high. Miners consequently discarded "black jack" as worthless. Eventually, however, a satisfactory means of processing the ore was discovered, and by 1872 Joplin began to ship out zinc. The price rose rapidly from $3 to $15 per ton. In 1880, Jasper County zinc production was double that of lead.

By 1888, the city, with an approximate population of 8,000, was a nationally recognized lead and zinc center. But the town was young, and sudden wealth is a heady wine. Great fortunes were made and lost in "handkerchief-size" plots. Men plunged, either in cards or with mining leases. Miners were paid off in the saloons (the town had 40) on Saturday nights, and spent Sundays nursing heads cracked during drunken brawls. The price of metal fluctuated, and it was sometimes possible for a miner to make more by digging ore himself and selling it to a buyer than by working for the companies. Lead and zinc were widely accepted as money. Small boys gleaned the waste discarded by careless and inefficient mining methods, and turned in the metal for candy. A miner who lacked cash for tickets at the Blackwell Opera House could exchange a wheelbarrow load of ore for family admission. Even groceries could be purchased with lead or zinc.