John William Boone was born on May 17, 1864, to Rachel Boone in Miami, Missouri, in a Union army camp occupied by the Seventh Militia, Company I. Rachel Boone had been enslaved at birth in 1843 in Kentucky. It is unclear just exactly who enslaved…

John Lange, Jr., was born enslaved in Harrisburg, Kentucky on October 4, 1840 to a free man and an enslaved mother. During the Civil War he worked with his father as a butcher and at the end of the Civil War the Lange family moved to Columbia…

When Willie was eight, Rachel Boone married Harrison Hendricks and moved into his home, which sat "just back of the old Land Fike's Mill [Eureka Mills] on Mill Street." Melissa Fuell Cuther noted: "The house was a one-room log…

Melissa Fuell was born in Warrensburg, Missouri, on May 15, 1886, and attended and graduated from the Howard School and was active in music. She went on to study at the Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, where she trained to be a…