Founded in 1851, Westminster College was one of the few Missouri colleges to function in some fashion throughout the Civil War, even as the conflict disrupted the campus, the town of Fulton, and Callaway County. At the war’s outset in May 1861, the Missouri legislature reconfigured the militia as the Missouri State Guard, and eight companies soon enrolled volunteers from strongly pro-Southern Callaway County, including the Callaway Guards, whose captain and commissary sergeant were Westminster seniors Daniel H. McIntyre and Joseph S. Laurie. According to college lore, they left old Westminster Hall before commencement to join the Guards, fought at the Battle of Carthage on July 5, and never returned to campus. At commencement later that June, with Missouri in turmoil and Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson and the legislature having fled the state capitol before Federal troops, the faculty certified the two absent seniors eligible for their degrees, and President Samuel S. Laws conferred diplomas on them in absentia, an act that helped lead to his imprisonment in St. Louis’ Gratiot Street Prison and later exile to Europe for much of the war. Westminster was further affected by reduced faculty and enrollment, by Union occupation of Fulton, by local militia and guerrilla violence, and by nearby fighting including the July 28, 1862, battle of Moore’s Mill. The old Overton farm southwest of Westminster saw the final action on July 17, 1861, in a running fight considered the first significant Civil War combat in Callaway County, when U.S. Reserve Corps infantry under Colonel John McNeil, moving from Jefferson City to block passage by Missouri State Guard cavalry under Brigadier General Thomas B. Harris, were ambushed and fought through to the Overton farm, where the Southern attackers were eventually routed, though they succeeded in preventing McNeil’s force from stopping Harris’ cavalry. Afterward Union troops entered Fulton for the first time. Daniel H. McIntyre was later seriously wounded at Wilson’s Creek, spent nine months in Union prison camps after capture, then commanded Company C of Williams’ Regiment Missouri Cavalry, C.S.A., until the war’s end; after the war he practiced law, served in the Missouri legislature, and became the state’s attorney general. The war also shaped the area’s African-American history: descendants of 133 former Callaway slaves served in eight Missouri regiments of U.S. Colored Troops, gaining freedom through enlistment from November 1863, with some fighting at Nashville and many dying in combat or from disease.
