Saturday, March 24, 2012

Nannie Harris-Charity Kerr-Alice Van Ness.


Nannie Harris.
Just before the Lawrence Massacre, General Ewing, had a number of women from Jackson County Missouri, arrested for being spies and other reasons.  Nannie Harris, Charity Kerr and Alice Van Ness along with fourteen others were imprisoned in a cheap, poorly constructed, two-story brickbuilding in Kansas City, on Grand avenue between Fourteenth and Fifteenth streets.  The rear of the building extended back into a ravine, where the walls of the foundation had been built without excavation, the ground there being low, and the intenionbeing being to fill about the walls and thus give them earth support.  But this filling had not been done.  The rear room of this building, in the first-story, had never been completed.  There was no floor in it, and the hogs that then reanged at large in Kansas City came there to lie in the shade and the loose dirt which they rooted up along the walls.  It much be said that there was negligence in the case of this building by General Ewing.


Charity Kerr.

Some time in the summer of fall of 1863, it was decided to send the women to St. Louis, where better housing could be found for them.  Some how the women found out they were to be removed from Kansas City, and they determined to escape if possible.  They dug under the foundation wall of that part of the building occupied by them, and in one more night they would have dug their way out and would be free.  But a wind-storm came up and the building collapsed, killing a number of women and wounding others.


Alice Van Ness.
Aka Alice Vane.

If you would like to read more about these women and the Lawrence Massacre, then read the following book, it has many illustrations like those on this page.  This book can be found and read on the internet.
( Quantrill And The Border Wars.)  By Connelley, William Elsey, Pub. 1910.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The truthful account of the premedidated murder of five young women by Kansas Jayhawkers can be found in the book Quantrill of Missouri. The building collapse was no accident as has been proven.

Anonymous said...

Utter fabrication and revisionist, Union cover up. That is not what happened. There were no hogs. There was no attempted breakout. Some of the girls were actually chained. The girls were murdered by a group of Union soldiers who deliberate undermined the foundation and caused the collapse. Immediately afterward the Union powers at be of they area lied to cover up the real truth. Dozens of Unionist books picked up the cover up and published them for 140 years. To the victors go the revisionist history.