Nevada City, laid out as Vernon County's seat of government in 1855 and later incorporated as Nevada in 1869, was named for a California Gold Rush town after founder DeWitt C. Hunter, who had mined there before returning to western Missouri. By the 1860 census it was a thriving hamlet of about 450 people, but by 1863 war had reduced the population by at least half, leaving mostly women, children, and old men, while county officials had fled south with Confederate forces and the courthouse stood locked and deserted. The town's early wartime brush came on September 2, 1861, after General Sterling Price marched north from Wilson's Creek toward Lexington and confronted Kansas forces over Big Drywood Creek south of Deerfield. For the next two years, though unoccupied, Nevada City lay largely at the mercy of marauding Union and guerrilla forces. On May 24, 1863, nineteen bushwhackers led by Captain William Marchbanks followed a small pro-Union militia party from Fort Scott, Kansas, to Nevada, scattered the militiamen, and left two dead. Calls for retaliation rose in Cedar and Saint Clair counties, and on May 26 Captain Anderson Morton led about 100 pro-Union Missouri State Militiamen into Vernon County intending to destroy the bushwhackers and burn Nevada City, which they called a bushwhacker capital, though a county history later said none of the bushwhackers involved was from Nevada. That morning Morton's men entered town, broke into small squads, ordered residents to remove their belongings, and burned the town, sparing only the homes of Thomas Austin and James Moore because they had cared for the two dead militiamen and promised to return their bodies. As the soldiers rode out by late morning, smoke rose over the town and women and children sat crying in the street among their possessions. Nevada's people remained amid the ashes until the war's end. The next day Austin and Moore carried the bodies toward Cedar County and found one dead militiaman's home burned and his widow and children hiding nearby, with other cabins and cottages in the area also destroyed by bushwhackers. On their return from Nevada, Morton and his men struck the trail of a band of about 25 bushwhackers led by William "Old Man" Gabbert, including members of the Gabbert and Mayfield families such as Eliza Gabbert and Ella Mayfield, two of Vernon County's "Lady Bushwhackers." Believing they had raided Cedar County, Morton ordered that none be left alive; the militiamen surrounded the Gabbert house by surprise, killed seven bushwhackers, burned the house, and Gabbert escaped on an unsaddled, unbridled horse. The conflict formed part of a brutal neighbor-against-neighbor war rather than one of famous battlefields. After the war, Vernon County was left fire-blackened, blood-stained, and desolate, but returning ex-Confederates and incoming Union veterans joined in rebuilding. Business revived within a year or two, railroads arrived in five years, and within two decades Nevada was prosperous and growing. Hunter, who had built the first house, named the town, and served as its first postmaster, also raised a regiment for the Missouri State Guard, took part in events leading into the Battle of Wilson's Creek, later commanded the 11th Missouri Infantry, C.S.A., and Hunter's Missouri Cavalry, C.S.A., and returned after the war to practice law and continue in public life. As county clerk in 1862, he also removed Vernon County's records in a Confederate army wagon, helping preserve property and probate records from before the war.
