Tag Archives: Tony O’Bryan

End Games and a Dead End

By Tony Lawson

I finally made it over the the Steamboat Arabia Museum to look for a chloroform bottle to at least get some good photos of our own for the Civil War medicine exhibit at Wornall. The bottles at Clendening Medical Library were nice, but I could not positively date them to the Civil War.  They looked more 1872 than 1860s to me  Esoteric, I know, but its my job.  I knew I had seen a collection of medicine bottles at the SAM and their provenance was flawless.

When I finally saw the collection again this week, I learned a few things.  First, the labels on many of the bottles were paper and were destroyed by the mud and water.  We have no earthly idea what some of those bottles contain.  At one point, the SAM sent some sample bottles to a lab for testing.  The lab called back to confirm the order and had a conversation that went something like, “Yeah, some of the medicines that we do know that were widely used in this period of history contained opium and if we find opium in this stuff we have to notify the DEA and you guys are going to have to spend some money to keep it secured and inaccessible from the public.”  Umm…okay box it up and send it back. Click…brrrrr.

Second thing learned was, they do not know whats in the bottles and they do not want to know what is in the bottles.  So, no chloroform bottle yet, however, I did meet a man who offered to loan us a Civil War saber and bayonet.  Unfortunately, those items accounted for only about 2-4% of Civil War battle wounds.

Unfortunately, my work here at UMKC History Makers is at its end.  I have enjoyed writing these blogs and I hope anyone that read them found some of that joy too.  I hope we meet this way again in the future.  In the meantime, the the search for artifacts and archives continues, the dream lives on, and I have many miles to go before I rest.

On Knowledge, Networks, and Notches

By Tony Lawson

I would not be in my internship position at the Wornall House without my solid academic background.  For years, I have worked hard in school, earned good grades, and received a few honors and accolades from academia.  My knowledge of historiography, American History, and specifically Missouri history, has paid off in getting me into this choice internship at Wornall House.  I have loved every minute of it.  Now that I am in this position and have accomplished a few things, I look back and recount what it took, beyond this background knowledge and education, to get things done thus far.

The first thing I was able to do was “hook up” the Wornall House with Dr. Matthew Osborn at UMKC for a planned “Whiskey as Medicine” cocktail party/fundraising event in the fall.  At an early meeting I learned of the planned party and suggested that Dr. Osborn would be an excellent guest speaker at the event.  Dr. Osborn has specialized knowledge in the area of the consumption of alcohol and drugs in early America and teaches a popular course at UMKC called “Getting High in America.”  My connections at UMKC through the History Department made that possibility a reality.  I look forward to hearing Dr. Osborn’s short speech about the topic of “Whiskey as Medicine” while enjoying shot of whiskey at a cocktail party in the fall.

My second accomplishment was to connect the professional photography work of Bethany Wears to the project.  Bethany took the photos I have used in these blog entries about Wornall House and the more formal blog entries I am posting at the Kansas City Public Library’s Civil War on the Western Border website.  Bethany’s photos inspired me.  They really did.  The muse visited when I wrote the piece on the .44 lead ball for the library and I am proud of that work and most fortunate to get the opportunity to network with Jason Roe PhD at the library.  He is an editor with the mostest!  The thing is, Bethany does not work cheap.  She is a full-blown professional and charges around $175 an hour for her work.  So far, I have been able to get her work donated to the museum.  Will I be able to get Bethany to donate more of her time and work?  Stay tuned!

The six planned blog entries at the KCPL website coincide with the planned exhibit at the Wornall House.  Those blogs and my encyclopedia entries there are my best “published” work.  Each of those pieces are like notches on my pistol grips.  I’m a sure shot Border War history writer and those articles and blog entries are a record to prove it.  I look forward to adding more notches over the summer.

One other accomplishment, and I’m still holding my breath on this one, is in obtaining artifacts for the exhibit. The original theme of the project was Civil War Medicine.  As I have mentioned in previous blogs, the Wornall House does not own any artifacts that can be directly related to Civil War medicine.  Through my own creativity, I managed to connect the .44 caliber lead ball to medicine, but other than the bullet, the museum owns nothing medically related.  We have to come up with that stuff on our own.  Through my network of personal acquaintances at our restaurant, The Bean Counter Cafe’, I have an inside track with the folks that own the privately owned Steamboat Arabia Museum (SAM).  The SAM has  quite possibly the largest collection of antebellum artifacts in the world.  What they have medically related and what they may loan us for the exhibit remains to be seen.  It is a project in the works that may work out well and I owe that to my network–and the fine food and congenial atmosphere of our business.

I had a fair part in choosing the topics for the upcoming Wornall House exhibit and and I am taking on the responsibilities of researching and writing for the project beyond the terms of my internship.  I will be working over the summer because it so many ways the planned exhibit has become my baby.  With Anna Marie Tutera accepting a new position at the Kansas City Museum the Directors job at Wornall/Majors will be open.  I plan on throwing my hat in the ring if I get even half a chance to do so.  I know it is long shot, but if I were to get that gig, I would credit it to my personal network and the proverbial notches on my gun as much as my hard-earned and respectable MA in US History from an R-1.

Networks and Notches

Rumors of Murder at the Wornall House

Frank C. Wornall's memoir of the Wornall House is missing a few pages. Do the missing pages point to murder? (photo by bethanywearsphotography.com)

Frank C. Wornall’s memoir of the Wornall House is missing a few pages. Do the missing pages point to murder? (photo by bethanywearsphotography.com)

By Tony Lawson

When I first became familiar with the Wornall House history, one of the stories I heard was the tale of wounded Confederate soldiers recuperating in the second floor children’s bedroom.  When the Union troops moved in and pushed Shelby’s troops back south they found the Wornall House being used as a regimental field hospital and the wounded Confederate soldiers inside.  Local lore claims Union troops came into the bedroom and bludgeoned to death several wounded Confederate soldiers to make way for their own comrades wounded in the Battle of Westport.  I was told that that plaster on the first floor ceilings had to be replaced from the blood that had oozed through from this event and that there still remained blood stains on the bedroom floor. Someone suggested we call in the police department forensics team to spray Luminol and whip out the black lights.

As I dig through the primary source material I have yet to find hard evidence that these murders occurred at the Wornall House.  I did find that all the floorboards in the home were replaced sometime in the early twentieth century when plumbing, gas and electricity were installed.  So, cancel that call for Luminol.  There is nothing in Frank C. Wornall’s papers that explicitly tells this story, however, he does cryptically say that after the battle the Missouri State Militia officers had to use their sabers and other means to prevent the less disciplined troops of the Enrolled Missouri Militia “from killing them all.”

Frank apparently repeated this story several times in speeches that he gave over his long lifetime.  In those cases, Inflection and tone would have been provided, however, in text form, that statement is perfectly vague.  Does he mean some were killed and others were not?  Or, does it mean, the EMM troops wanted to kill them all.  It hints at the story of murder, but it is not conclusive of anything other than there was a confrontation between MSM officers and EMM troops over the handling of wounded Confederate prisoners at Wornall House. The confrontation nearly became violent at the least and at most it was the violent and cold blooded murder of wounded prisoners that has been obscured and forgotten by the general tumult of the war and its aftermath.

Additional evidence of this event is hinted at in the Wornall’s recounting of the battle.  Both Frank and his father, John, mention the presence of seven dead Confederate soldiers on the southwest lawn.  One of these was a colonel and a makeshift rail fence had been constructed around his body.  There were surely lots of Confederate dead lying around the Wornall farm; why do they both mention those seven? Were these the Confederates bludgeoned to death in the bedroom?

(As an interesting side note, I discovered that the officer left in charge of the Confederate prisoners at Wornall House was Colonel John F. Richards who later headed up the firm of Richards and Conover Hardware Co.  The building they built still stands as prime loft space in River Market area of KC.  http://www.kcloftspace.com/richardsconoverlofts/)

Adding to the frustration of getting to the bottom of this story are several pages missing from Frank C. Wornall’s typed manuscripts at both the Wornall House and the Jackson County Historical Society.  On top of that, the memoirs are the recollections of a nine-year-old boy writing some 70 years after the event.  Everything should be taken with a small grain of salt.

Despite the paucity of hard evidence, my research tells me this story is completely believable.  Troops under the Enrolled Missouri Militia were often locals with long standing scores to settle with Missourians.  This region was the scene of the bloodiest most violent civilian insurrection in American history.  Bushwhackers and Union troops regularly tortured, hung, scalped and defaced one another’s corpses and neither side was known for taking live prisoners.  Regular army troops in pitched battles were different though.  At least they were supposed to be.

I did find evidence of Confederate prisoners being executed at the Battle of Westport, but that event did not occur at the Wornall House.  That happened after McGhee’s charge to capture Union cannons in what is now north Loose Park.  That charge marked the high point of the battle and Price’s 1863 Missouri “expedition.”  (During that charge there occurred an event rarely recorded in Civil War battles; two opposing officers shot and wounded one another with their sidearms.)  The first charge initially failed, a later second charge captured the Union position and Confederates discovered the bodies of comrades who had been captured and then executed in the first charge.  Were these the seven dead on the Wornall lawn and the source of the story of murder at Wornall?  Are there motivations for stories such as this, true of not, to be propagated after the war?

I do not know the answers to these questions.  I do know I will keep researching to learn what I can with the knowledge that a true mystery can never be solved…it can only be made a better mystery.

Ars Moriendi — The Good Death

By Tony Lawson

.44 caliber lead ball found at the Wornall House archaeological excavation, summer 2013.  (Photo by bethanywearsphotography.com)

.44 caliber lead ball found at the Wornall House archaeological excavation, summer 2013. (Photo by bethanywearsphotography.com)

I had the opportunity to attend a planning meeting for the upcoming museum exhibits at the Wornall House Museum.  At the meeting were the director of the Wornall-Majors House museums, the director of Clendening Medical Library,  and the CEO of the Metropolitan Medical Society of Greater Kansas City.  It was one of the first times in my life that all my reading and research paid off a bit in a professional manner and I could speak as an authority on a historical matter.  In this case the topic was death in the Civil War.  I was able to relate the following primary and secondary evidence to make a clear and concise case about Victorian notions of death and dying and tie it directly to the historical narrative we are constructing at Wornall House.

Once again in the Wornall House stories and histories, I have found two different versions of a single tale.  This one involves 9-year old Frank Wornall and his reminisces of the Battle of Westport.  According to Frank’s stories of the Wornall House, at some point a lone wounded Confederate soldier appeared at the back door of the home.  The man had been shot through the jaw and it was nearly removed.  He could not speak, only make wild gestures with his hands and eyes.  Somehow it was communicated to Frank that the man was refused admission at the regimental hospital because he was not a member of the regiment.

Frank had ” the run of the house” to take care of the wounded man and led him to the cistern where he bathed and bandaged the man’s wounds.  The man was most grateful and soon recovered enough to be on his way toward home and family where he could be nursed back to health.  That’s one version of the story.

The other version of this story begins the same, but ends with young Frank Wornall cradling the wounded soldier in his arms on the families lawn near the cistern.  In this version the event occurred as the Battle of Westport was ending and Confederate troops were in retreat from Union troops approaching the Wornall House, which had been converted to a Confederate field hospital.  A Confederate cavalry soldier rode up on his horse and looked down at the scene with Frank comforting the wounded soldier on the lawn.  The mounted soldier removed his pistol from its holster and shot the wounded man dead.

When Frank asked the soldier why he had shot the wounded man in seeming cold-blood, the soldier replied that it was much better for the man to die in the arms and warm comfort of friends than in the hands of the enemy.

While this version of the story shocks modern sensibilities and conflicts with contemporary morals in its violence, it actually epitomizes Victorian Era notions of the ars moriendi–The Art of Dying.  The societies that brought forth the Civil War witnessed death and dying on an unprecedented scale and had to find ways to deal with the unimaginable losses of so many men in the prime of their lives, so very far from their homes.  Hospitals were places for indigents and the homeless in which to die; people in good standing with their God, communities and families spent their last hours and died at home surrounded by loved ones recounting the deeds of a life well lived. That was the concept of a good death and the Civil War destroyed it.

Being blown to atoms by modern artillery was nearly incomprehensible to the Victorian Era mindset.  Inglorious death from camp diseases cheated would be heroes from their deeds. Dying away from home while surrounded by your enemy or strangers flew in the face of the concept of a good death.  That was not cold-blooded murder on the Wornall’s lawn; it was has hot-blooded mercy.  That cavalry soldiers lead ball was a gift; the gift of a good death.

“Old Hattie” and Foucault’s Field Day

By Tony Lawson

KC Star newsper clipping from the Wornall House archives at the Jackson County Historical Society

KC Star newsper clipping from the Wornall House archives at the Jackson County Historical Society

Since reading Dr. Mutti-Burke’s book, On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Families 1815-1865 in my first semester of grad school, I have become interested in power relationships between enslaved African-Americans and their said “masters” in Missouri.  No two relationships were quite the same and they were as varied and diverse as the people and personalities that entered into them.  The only thing that characterizes all of these relationships is that the folks with the white skin were supposed to be the ones in control.

Michel Foucault would have a field day with a study of the following power relationship.

While researching for the Wornall House Museum project, I stumbled across a newspaper clipping at the Jackson County Historical Society that caught my eye.  It is a type of juicy tid-bit of history that displays how easily our society was willing to first, elide the sins of slavery and second, a bit of that dynamic of slave-master power relationships.

Like many of the Wornall stories, I am finding a couple of differing versions.  Here is one version of “Old Hattie.”  This article is undated and clipped from the Kansas City Star and it tells the story of “Old Hattie.”  My research informs me the article is circa December 1927.

At a slave auction in 1855 at Boone’s Store in Westport (now Kelley’s Bar) there was up for bid a 13-year-old slave girl named Hattie.  She was about to be sold to a “cruel” master and begged a “kindly looking” man to purchase her instead.  That man was Westport trader and city father, Charles Kearney.  He was cashing in on the Santa Fe wool trade before the war and apparently had cash to spare.  The bidding became heated until Hattie finally sold to Kearney for $1300.  That was a fortune in those days.

Kearney took Hattie home and set her “free” . . . to work for the Kearney family for the rest of her life.  And she did just that.  She rose two generations of Kearney’s children, became ingrained in the family’s life, and adopted the family name.  Colonel Kearney’s oldest daughter, Julia, married Frank Wornall, and it appears that for a time Hattie lived at Wornall House raising the Wornall children.  She reared children and cooked meals and likely knew those families better than they knew themselves.  In her later years the extended family members would squabble over which family would get the privilege of having Hattie be the live-in maid/nanny.  She lived to be 91 years old and enjoyed “listening in” to the radio in her last days.

Irony abounds in this story.

From our twenty-first century perspective it is easy to see the irony of buying a person, taking them home , and setting them “free” to work for your family until you die.  But perhaps more nuanced in the story is the ultimate power Hattie wielded over the Kearney and Wornall families.  Then again, perhaps not: the headline practically of screams about Hattie’s power.  What do you think?

Some Things are Better Left to the Pros

By Tony Lawsom

One of my tasks as an intern has been to research and write content articles and artifact descriptions that will appear in the exhibit at the Wornall House opening next fall entitled, “Farmstead to Field Hospital: A Family in the Crossfire of War and Modern-Day Medicine in the Making”.  I’m experiencing a total immersion type of education in the history of the Wornall House, Civil War Medicine and the the Battle of Westport. I love my “job.”  Ask me anything. One of the things I am working on are newsletter blurbs for publicity and PR.  Once such article is on chloroform.

There were 1500 casualties after the three day Battle of Westport and the Wornall House became one of six local hospitals to care for the wounded.  I am certain surgeons used a lot of chloroform at the Wornall House and, using the creative imagination of an historian, I wrote a blog type of article where 9 year-old Frank Wornall perhaps caught a whiff of that sickly sweet smelling stuff as he tended to the wounded in his home after the battle.  The article I wrote was well researched and Jason Roe PhD at the Kansas City Public Library provided expert editing advice.  What the article needed to top it off and grab attention was quality photos of a vintage chloroform bottle.

But wait, there’s a catch:  The Wornall House Museum does not posses any Civil War era medical equipment, has no research library to speak of, and must beg, borrow, and ask permission to use nearly every item they are coming up with for the exhibits…including any photos of chloroform bottles.  And…there’s a deadline for the article to make into the April newsletter for the Kansas City Public Library newsletter.  Tonight!  By 5 pm!  

I tried to rescue the last minute situation by contacting Clendening Medical Library.  They have old chloroform bottles.  I’ll drive down there with that high quality digital Nikon camera I bought my wife twelve years ago and take some good pictures my dang self and save the day.

I thought about trying to snag our employee, Bethany, from our restaurant for the job. She runs a successful part-time photography business and takes stunning photos. I stopped by the cafe’ on my way downtown and the place was packed.  The look on my wife’s face let me know to not even ask to take Bethany away, not even for even a minute.  I’d have to take the photos myself.

Once I got to Clendening, I had to use all of my Irish charm to get them to walk across the giant rats maze that is KU Medical Center campus and please unlock the cabinet, take out the bottles and let me snap some shots.  My charm must have worked. They were very pleasant, cooperative, and even became interested in my project.  They even let me take some shots of a pencil drawing of a doctor administering chloroform to a patient.  That drawing gave me the willies.

I was snapping and clicking away with the camera like Jimmy Olson.  I was also blabbering away, schmoozing it up, and piling on my pleasant charms like a used car salesman at one of those we-finance-you-car-lots.  And apparently I was not paying any attention to what in the world I was doing with my wife’s over-complicated digital camera.

I got back to the the car all excited about my work and pleased with my genius and congeniality in the face of short notice.  I scrolled through the pics to see what I got.  I swear that I aimed, focused, and pushed the button twenty times on three or four items from several angle.  I even heard the click and saw a few flashes.  This is the total of what I got.  Two photos that look like this.

Nice shot...of the far wall.

Lesson learned: Some things are better left to the pros.  For the upcoming amputation kit photos: I’m going to shanghai Bethany for the job. On the bright side, The National Museum of Civil War Medicine e-mailed a couple pictures of chloroform bottles along with permission to use them at about the same time I was taking these lovely shots at Clendening Library.  They will accompany the article in the newsletter that you will be able to find here in a week or two.

 

 

Mystery Solved at Wornall

"H"

Horse Parking?

By Tony Lawson

One of the tasks I was assigned as an intern at the Wornall House was to solve the riddle of the bronze “H” plaque.  None of the current staff of volunteers and administrators knew exactly what it represented or when it was put there.  Archaeologist Doug Shaver did a preliminary investigation over the summer and concluded it was put there sometime between 1890 and the 1930s and it was NOT placed by the NPS for its Historic American Building Survey (HABS) in the 1960s.  From experience in old buildings I knew it was not structural, and so did Doug.  It was surely commemorative of something.  But what?

I asked around locally.  Nothing.  For kicks and a learning experience I tried crowd sourcing.  I took it to hundreds of my Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee relatives and friends on Facebook.  There are lots of antebellum homes there.  Maybe one of my cousins has seen this.  Nada.  I took it to reddit.com askahistorian and whatisthisthing.  Some insisted it was structural.  Hospital?  Horse Parking?  A tiny vertical landing pad for helicopters?  I learned in the UK this “H” plaque is the designation assigned to building with a recessed fire hydrant.  I learned that in an episode of “Psyche” there was a button behind a plaque like this in a tourist trap type of museum that shut off a fountain that then allowed access to a secret portal.  Very interesting.  But, zilch in the hard facts department.

I suspected the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  They loved placing bronze markers in their hey-day.  They have several markers around the KC area and there was a file at the Missouri State Historical Society I was yet to lay my hands on.

I finally found the answer, in the last place I looked.  The last file in a box at the Jackson County Historical Society contained forgotten facts and documents .  It turns out the “H” confused the JCHS for a while too.  From 1965 to 1985 they apparently had no idea what it was until local historian Kathy Taggart found documents that told the story of the H.

“…the enclosed records were found which indicate the plaque was one three hundred which were purchased by the Kansas City Centennial Celebration on March 1923 and paid for by Mrs. AdaMacLaughlin.  Apparently the H indicates historic importance.  To date we know of no others in existence.”  — K. Taggart  January 1985

Mystery solved!  It was my first professional case and now I’m closer being a real live hard-boiled history detective.  Now where is my shot of whiskey, cigar and .38?  Somebody que up my theme song…

H file at JCHS

The last place I looked!

 

A Note from an Impatient American Historian

Nothing happens fast when you are working on a collaborative public history project. There are a thousand pieces of a puzzle that must all come to together. Visits to archives, conversations with those who may know where information might be found, documents must be perused, phone calls made, emails sent, meetings attended, drafts of papers, and more drafts of papers, daydreams, lots of daydreams, favors asked, and favors called in. (Which reminds me I need to add Thank You notes to my ever-growing list of things to do.) All these things are all aimed at that magic moment where an exhibit, single artifact, or piece of writing strikes the viewer or reader with that A-ha! moment. They get it. It sticks. They take it with them down the road and they share it.

I just got back from my first Missouri Conference on History in Jeff City. It was my first conference where I delivered a paper away from the comfort of UMKC. That 20-minute paper took a year to come together and its not finished yet. If I taught and shared a tenth of what I learned it was a great trip. I participated and heard a lot of conversations where ideas and research was shared. There were authored PhDs, undergrads, grads, amateurs, and professionals all sharing their research and ideas, mingling together shaking hands, renewing old acquaintances and exchanging e-mails with the new ones. It was the most attended MHC so far and I’ve realized more than ever that creating history is all about planning and collaboration. No good project is the work of a single author, exhibitor, designer, or researcher. They’re already planning for the next conferences. In 2015 it returns to KC and I can’t wait!

Time, collaboration, planning, that’s what creates good public history. It’s an example of good old-fashioned American democracy in action and at its best. And it ain’t easy and doesn’t happen fast.

Stewards of History

By Tony Lawson

I have been immersing myself in the history of the Wornall House these last few weeks and I’ve learned as much about the present as I have the past.  What strikes me most is the depth people have for caring about the past.  The archives I visit, the historic objects I observe, and the meetings I attend all indicate the collective concern of individuals toward preserving the past and handing it down to future generations to study, analyze and evaluate.  I feel the weight of the generations before me–as well as my profession and my moral obligations to myself and the society I live in–tasking me to do the best job I can in dissecting this history to learn from it and pass it down to the next generations. Like teaching, as a historian I am always asking myself; am I doing a good job?   Have I learned all I can?  Am I fair and honest? Am I a worthy of being a steward of history?  

Tony@JCHS

What one person deems an important piece of history and worth preserving, such as genealogy, ephemera, or financial records, may be insignificant to another, but all these types of things wind up in archives.  I’ve been sorting through some archives at the new digs of the Jackson County Historical Society piecing together the puzzle of the past so that I may tell a compelling story of the Wornall House.  I did not think I would be interested in genealogy, but I got sucked into a black hole for about 90 minutes yesterday.  I barely escaped.  I’ve always prided myself on being a local history geek, but I am stunned by the amount stuff I did NOT know about the Wornall family in Kansas City history.  So far, I seem to only be working around the edges of my topic picking up tidbits of information here and there.  Hopefully, this thing will start to come together when I write some papers and start to organize my research.