Joplin and the Jasper County Zinc Boom, 1873 to 1911

Joel T. Livingston's A History of Jasper County, Missouri, and Its People, published in 1912, carries the mining story past the 1883 history's account of the first diggings. It follows zinc ore from the dump pile to the head of the market, Joplin's turn from camp to city, the first mills, the drill and the new camps, and the strikes, prices and panics up to 1911. This page keeps to what the book says and names the people it names.

Written from A History of Jasper County, Missouri, and Its People (1912). Everything below comes from that book, and where it gives an opinion, we say so. You can read the full book free on the Internet Archive.

Jack finds a price, 1866 to 1873

The earlier county history covers how lead brought miners to Joplin Creek. Livingston names E. R. Moffet as "one of the men who sunk the first shaft," and Pat Murphy, "the father of Murphysburg," as the man who proposed the name Joplin for the joined towns. What the 1912 book adds is zinc.

Zinc blende, which miners called jack, was already being tried in Missouri. The book credits George H. Hesslemyer, a St. Louis man from Germany, with starting zinc mining and smelting in the state, beginning in 1866 with blende from the dump piles of the Potosi lead mines in Washington County.

In 1872 Hesslemyer went to Granby for zinc silicate for his new Missouri Zinc Company. The miners there threw it on the dump as waste, and he got two carloads with no trouble. Once Henry T. Blow, head of the Granby Company, learned it had value, he telegraphed to give no more away. The first price paid for jack at Granby was two dollars a ton.

Joplin and Oronogo miners tossed jack aside too, thinking less of it than of tiff. In 1872 D. Bowman, writing up the district for the Globe Democrat, and Professor Swallow, the state geologist, told them the "supposed worthless" jack was high grade zinc blende. Dorsey & Porter, Moffet & Sergeant and Murphy & Davis sent two carloads to a LaSalle, Illinois, firm, and the first batch brought five dollars a ton. In the fall of 1873 Chris Guenerich, for Matthiessen & Hegeler, and John Immel, for the Illinois Zinc Company, began bidding against each other, and Guenerich raised first class ore to nine dollars a ton. Livingston dates the county's zinc industry from their coming.

Joplin in 1873: smelters, panic and the lead box

The camps on either side of Joplin Creek were organized as two towns, Joplin and Murphysburg, on January 11, 1873. A special charter joining them became law on March 23, 1873, which the book counts as Joplin's birthday. It puts the population at about four thousand, while a St. Louis Globe-Democrat article it reprints claimed more than five thousand permanent residents. Seventeen lead furnaces were running day and night.

The same article said Joplin's lead for 1872 was worth $6,000,000, nearly a third of all the pig lead received at St. Louis, and that poor miners needed steam pumps to work below the water line. The book's list of the main 1873 smelters includes Moffet & Sergeant in the Joplin Creek valley, Dorsey & Porter at the foot of Swindle hill, Corn & Thompson at East Joplin, and the Lone Elm Mining Company, whose smelter later became the White Lead Works.

The panic of 1873 hit that fall. With the high cost of living, royalty and pump rent, many miners threatened to quit. The book credits the Pitchers with acting first, cutting the royalty on their land and pumping the mines free, and the other companies followed. The city printed ten thousand dollars in scrip, which Joplin banks and mining concerns took at par, and after the panic it redeemed every dollar.

Ore itself served as money. Every merchant kept a lead box, and the book's example is a miner it calls Mr. Jones, who paid for half a dollar's worth of sugar with ten pounds of mineral. The Bank of Joplin, organized in May 1873 by Moffet & Sergeant and W. F. Botkins, a Baxter Springs banker, took the city's scrip at par. Its first depositor was Ralph Muir, the iceman.

Holes, black jack and white lead, 1875 to 1881

Livingston says Joplin's growth slowed in the later 'seventies. Lead prices fell late in 1877, and a new camp at Short Creek, now Galena, just across the Kansas line, drew people away. Many shallow pockets were worked out, and miners left those shafts, he writes, not knowing richer jack lay a little deeper. Lead was still the standard, and jack never brought more than fourteen dollars a ton in that decade.

The empty shafts were deadly. The Carthage Banner called Joplin the City of Holes, and the book says shafts near streets and roads were filled only after accidents and several deaths. One was Joshua P. Taylor, foreman of the Daily News, who fell into an open shaft on a dark night in August 1877. Miners hauled him up with a windlass and rope, but he died of his injuries.

Zinc kept gaining. A Daily News piece of April 4, 1878, quoted black jack at $11 a ton for first class ore and said only two Parr hill mines, worked by Hoffman & Saunders and by Barbee & McClelland, turned out a grade worth about a third more.

The same years built the works that used the ore. Moffet and Sergeant's Joplin Railway Company, organized in December 1875 partly to haul ore to market more cheaply, drove its last spike, made of lead, on August 26, 1877. The book says smelters lost at least a third of their lead as fumes until E. O. Bartlett of Philadelphia, after experimenting from 1866 to 1876, found a way to catch them. Bartlett, Moffet & Sergeant and Geo. T. Lewis built the White Lead Works in 1877, and the book says the navy painted its battleships with Joplin white lead. A Joplin zinc works, organized in December 1881 by P. Murphy, William Byers, Thomas Connor, T. A. McClelland, O. H. Picher, L. P. Cunningham, C. H. Brewster and Ed. Zilliken, employed a hundred or more men until the Empire Zinc Company moved it to Kansas.

Mills, the drill and the new camps, 1880 to 1899

The first mining mill in the county went up at Carterville in 1880, built by Weyman & Guengerich, and the book marks it as the start of modern ore cleaning in southwestern Missouri. Carterville gained 2,401 people in the 'eighties as some of the district's richest mines opened.

In 1890 P. L. Crossman of Oronogo brought in the steam drill. Before that, Livingston explains, a prospector sank a shaft and gave up if he found nothing, while a number of drill holes on a tract showed with reasonable certainty how much ore lay below. Zinc stood at twenty-four dollars a ton in December 1889, slumped after the panic of 1893, and rose by jumps to sixty dollars in 1899. By then the old windlass and horse hoister were nearly gone except in prospecting.

New camps grew up across the county. At Duenweg, six miles east of Joplin, H. U. Dale, Josiah Bennett and others sank the Newsboy shaft in 1895, and forty acres once offered at ten dollars an acre sold for $40,000. Neck City, first called Hell's Neck for the bend of Spring River around it, had some 600 people by the close of the decade. The book tells how Doctor Henry of Alba, riding home on a stormy night, kept losing his hat to one limb because his horse was circling, and at daylight found zinc ore under the storm torn tree. At Reeds mining began in 1898, and one prospector is said to have bought his share for a crippled cow.

Prosperity grew around the old Troup mines to 1,500 people by 1899. Near Carthage, Frank Lamb began the Hayseed mine in August 1889. Rich zinc mines were found at old Sarcoxie too.

Blendville, Rex City and the output of the 'nineties

In 1876 a paying lead mine opened on the Cox land southwest of Joplin, and the settlement around it was called Cox Diggings. The Empire Zinc Company began mining there in the fall of 1889. Doctor Carter and Captain Rice organized the Mahaska Company to the east, and Mrs. M. C. Allen of Evansville, Indiana, whom the book calls Joplin's first "mining queen," worked the land to the west with the Snyder Brothers. By July 1, 1890, the place had about 1,500 people and took the name Blendville.

In 1892 T. W. Cunningham laid out his eighty acre farm there in town lots within reach of the miners, and Blendville was annexed to Joplin that year. In 1890 the Rex Mining Company, made up of E. D. Porter, A. E. Stillwell, Galen Spencer, Henry Newman and others, paid $110,000 for a thousand acres southeast of the city, where Rex City grew up. In February 1891 the Snyder Brothers sold a thousand tons of Blendville zinc to Vivion & Son of Swansea, Wales, reported then as the first American zinc sent to Europe.

Joplin grew 161 per cent in the 'nineties, and the book says no Joplin depositor lost a penny in the panic of 1893. Livingston's first table puts district zinc and lead sales at $3,367,687 in 1890 and $10,715,307 in 1899. His later table gives $10,862,464 for 1899, though both agree on $7,171,814 for 1898.

Modern mills, wages and the panic of 1907

By the book's last decade the windlass, horse hoister and hand jig had given way to the modern mill. Livingston's output table covers the whole district around Jasper County, not the county alone. For 1911 it lists 266,377 tons of zinc ore and 46,244 tons of lead ore, worth $13,055,512 together, and its top year is 1907, at $15,419,927. Within Jasper County in 1911, Webb City and Carterville led at $5,256,982, ahead of Joplin at $2,885,842 and Duenweg at $777,895. Zinc's high for the twelve years was $60.00 a ton in 1905, and lead's was $88.50 in 1907.

Because jack had climbed to sixty dollars by 1899, the Oronogo miners struck for higher pay in May 1900. The Granby Company, which controlled most of the mines there, arbitrated with the miners and agreed to a sliding scale: $1.75 a day when jack sold under twenty dollars a ton, $2.00 from twenty to thirty dollars, and twenty-five cents more for each five dollar rise, paid to the spade hands, tub men and others.

In 1907 the county was booming when a New York trust company's failure set off a panic. Banks limited withdrawals, and mine owners paid wages in small checks. At the Yellow Dog mine at Webb City, a miner who earned $17.50 for the week got eight $2 checks and one for $1.50 to spend with his grocer and butcher. Real money came back over the bank counters on January 1, 1908.

Finding mining families in Livingston's history

Livingston says he built the book from interviews with old-time citizens, letters, scrap books and newspaper files. He thanks John Nelson of Carl Junction for a file of the Weekly Carthage Banner and Charles Ebert of Los Angeles for a scrap book of Webb City and Carterville events, and he warns that the early Webb City and Carterville papers were not preserved.

The book prints lists worth searching for a surname: the 1873 trustees of East Joplin and Murphysburg, the main smelting firms of 1873, the eighteen charter members of the Ancient Order of United Workmen lodge of 1877, the zinc works organizers of 1881, Carterville's trustees, Webb City businesses taken from the Times, Joplin city officers year by year in the 'nineties, the Rex Mining Company men, the mining companies at Prosperity, and the first Joplin road commissioners.

Expect spellings to wander. The zinc buyer and later road commissioner appears as Guenerich, Guengerich and Guergerich, the drill man as both Grossman and Crossman, and the land owning family as both Picher and Pitchers. Search every form a name might take.

People from this history in our records

These Jasper County residents have biographies on our site from the county histories, and each one mentions lead and zinc mining. Their sketches name parents, spouses, and where the family came from.

• John C. Webb (b. 1826)
• David N. Friend
• T. W. Hill
• James M. Smith
• Joseph H. Myers
• E. Lee Schooler (b. 1860)
• Monroe Clark (b. 1832)
• James Myers
• John Henry Taylor (b. 1837)
• Stephen A. Smith
• William E. Hall (b. 1845)
• Charles F. Taylor (b. 1842)
• Henry D. Smith (b. 1831)
• N. U. Wilson
• R. C. Friend
• William M. Williams (b. 1859)
• Joseph C. Miller (b. 1828)
• Stephen Smith (b. 1839)
• Albert B. Smith (b. 1849)
• John W. Spencer
• Joe S. Wilson (b. 1846)
• Albert C. Webb (b. 1877)
• F. Luther Burch (b. 1858)
• John W. Burch (b. 1841)

The county in this history

Where to look next on this site for families from Jasper County.

• Jasper County: Biographies from the county histories · People in the county history · Lead and Zinc Mining in Jasper County, Missouri, 1848 to 1883

Finding your ancestor in Jasper County

• Census records (free through 1950) list each person's occupation and town, so a work family shows up decade by decade.
• Death records: search our Missouri database by surname.
• The county histories themselves: the biographical sections of A History of Jasper County, Missouri, and Its People hold hundreds of family sketches.
• Newspapers on the Library of Congress's Chronicling America carried obituaries, accidents, and local news.

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