Old Auxvasse Presbyterian, where the congregation first met in 1828 in a log church, stands on a hill that had earlier hosted travelers along the trail, some likely buried there before the first noted interments, and Old Auxvasse Cemetery holds Southern and Union veterans as well as regional leaders. Among those buried there are William Henderson, accidentally shot and killed at Brown's Spring while serving under Col. Jefferson F. Jones and the only fatality in the standoff that led to the October 1861 non-invasion compromise associated with the "Kingdom of Callaway," and Alexander Weant, who built an iron-handed oak cannon meant to intimidate Federal invaders. The Maddox family was among the community's oldest, with Sherwood and America Margaret Maddox arriving from Kentucky in 1830, their son Jacob becoming a prominent mule breeder and trader and a leading claimant to the title "Father of the Missouri Mule Industry," and America Maddox reportedly driving off a Federal patrol seeking her son Irvin by confronting them with a broom and an axe and thwarting their attempt to burn the house. Louisa Morris Maddox likely nursed wounded men in her home after the July 28, 1862 battle at Moore's Mill, and a 2005 metal-detector examination of the previous church footprint uncovered a Civil War-period bitten bullet, strongly suggesting the old church may have served as a makeshift field hospital. Also buried there is Pvt. Elijah Peter Blankenship of Franklin County, Va., who served in Gen. Lewis Armistead's brigade during Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, crossed the stone wall at Cemetery Ridge, survived four or five wounds, later raised a family, and was known locally as "Pleasant" Blankenship until his death in 1913. East of the cemetery, a rare unimproved stretch of the Boone's Lick Trail crossed Auxvasse Creek as part of the Old St. Charles Road, a major east-west Civil War thoroughfare in north-central Missouri, and this area lay near the July 28, 1862 Battle of Moore's Mill, where forces under Col. Odon Guitar and Lt. Col. William F. Shaffer moved against Confederate Col. Joseph C. Porter before Porter's dismounted cavalry ambushed elements of the 3rd Iowa and the fighting intensified. In 1864, during General Sterling Price's expedition into Missouri, guerrillas from Capt. William T. ("Bloody Bill") Anderson's band passed eastward here on the Boone's Lick Trail before burning railway depots at New Florence and High Hill and destroying nearby Danville. Reverend John F. Cowan became pastor of Auxvasse Presbyterian Church in November 1861, guided the congregation for 53 years through most of the war years, taught for 23 years at Westminster College, received a doctorate in 1881, and died of a heart attack on April 5, 1915, the morning after preaching his last Sunday service.
