Battle of Carthage State Historic Site

The Battle of Carthage was fought on July 5, 1861, eleven days before Bull Run, between the pro-Southern Missouri State Guard and Union volunteers. Missouri's secessionist governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, took command of the Guard himself, though he held no military commission: about 4,000 armed men under Brig. Gen. James Rains, who joined him at Lamar, and some 2,000 more who were unarmed and barely trained. Against them came Col. Franz Sigel with 1,100 well-drilled men, most of them German Americans from St. Louis, sent to keep Jackson from reaching southwest Missouri and joining Confederate forces there.

Sigel's men camped at Carter Spring, now this site, on the night of July 4. The next morning the two forces met near Dry Fork Creek, about nine miles northwest of Carthage, and fought an artillery duel for about an hour. When Jackson moved to surround him and take his supply train, Sigel turned back. His column took the day's heaviest casualties crossing Dry Fork, broke a blockade at Buck Branch with a bayonet charge, and fought house to house in Carthage while his artillery held the bluffs above Carter Spring. A last stand near dark, 2.5 miles farther on, ended the day. Sigel lost the field but escaped with relatively few losses, and the result lifted Southern morale across the region.

That night the State Guard camped here. The site preserves only the Carter Spring area, little changed since 1861, with a kiosk that explains the day; the fighting spread over ten miles.