In central Missouri during the summer of 1864, Southern partisan cavalry roamed the countryside, and after reports that William “Bloody Bill” Anderson and his men were nearby, Captain Joseph Parke led 44 troopers of the 4th Missouri State Militia Cavalry from Boonville into Howard County on August 28, 1864. Heading east toward Rocheport, Parke’s command was ambushed at Rawlings Lane on the old Boonville-Rocheport Road about 3 miles northwest of Rocheport. Anderson had used horsemen in the lane to the Rawlings farm as decoys while most of his men, joined by a small group led by Clifton Holtzclaw of Howard County, waited over a hill in a line parallel to the farm lane. Parke followed the decoys into the lane and charged, and when all his men were inside it the Southern cavalry attacked, decimating his detachment. Parke left before the fighting ended and met Major Reeves Leonard with Union cavalry moving toward the scene, while Anderson withdrew his main force and some of his men continued fighting along the road as survivors from Parke’s command conducted a rear guard retreat to Boonville. Parke was later dismissed from the service for his actions. Those killed from the 4th Militia Cavalry at Rawlings Lane were Sergeants Alvin Moore and George Baugh, Corporal David A. Slough, and Privates John H. Hathaway, Alfred Gosnell, James O’Neal, and Thomas Mitchell; their bodies were taken to Thespian Hall, placed in coffins, honored in a brief service led by the Reverend James Morton, and buried side by side in a common grave, while Orderly Sergeant Porter Davis, found dead several days later near the battlefield, was also buried there. The cemetery, originally the old Methodist Episcopal Church Burying Ground, was in use by at least 1820 and was turned over to the City of Boonville in 1841 after proceedings begun by merchant Jacob Wyan. The Civil War sharpened tensions in a community founded by Southerners and their slaves and later reshaped by German immigration, contributing to the turbulence that culminated in guerrilla fighting around Boonville in 1864. Earlier in the war, Boonville had served as a jumping-off point for Union troops from Illinois and Iowa, and soldiers from the 1st and 5th Iowa Infantry and the 37th Illinois Infantry who died there were first buried in the cemetery before being reburied after the war in Jefferson City National Cemetery. Local Union veterans who remained buried there included Sergeant Lee Harris of the 68th Regiment, United States Colored Troops, who enlisted on February 29, 1864 and served in the defense of Fort Pickering and the siege of Fort Blakely before mustering out in Louisiana in February 1866, as well as Charles Collins, James Shipley, and Cyrus Wilson of the 62nd and 65th regiments, United States Colored Troops; Collins and Shipley, who enlisted in Boonville in November 1863, belonged to companies that fought at Palmetto Ranch, Texas, on May 13, 1865. The cemetery also holds William Colt and his young son Willie, who died in Boonville in 1856 after contracting fever while traveling overland from Kansas.