Early home tells story of Maryville

The beige two-story Caleb Burns house sits at the corner of Second and Walnut Streets in Maryville, Mo. Although unimposing, this small structure is an early piece of Maryville history. This house, built in 1849, is arguably the oldest home in town.

Although there is at least one home in Maryville older than the Burns home, Tom Carneal of the Nodaway County Historical Society said the society bought the structure in 1977 because of its roots.

“We thought it was important to preserve it as the oldest home in Maryville on its original foundation,” he said.

Caleb Burns moved to Northwest Missouri from Clay County in the early 1840s, settling in a log cabin at what is now Second and Buchanan Streets. Along with Thomas Brown, John Saunders and Amos Graham, Burns helped Maryville become the seat of the young Nodaway County in 1845.

Burns bought much of the land that makes up modern-day Maryville in 1846, historical society museum volunteer Melissa Middleswart said.

“Which includes this house, First through Ninth Street, Grand,” Middleswart said. “Most of the land the university is on was in that tract of land.”

Burns married Jerusah Byers in September 1846, and the two built the house at Second and Walnut Streets in 1849.

“A lot of this was still just farmland,” Carneal said. “He picked a good spot from his cabin on Buchanan one-quarter mile west to build this house because there was water here. He had water here all the time.”

Two shallow spring-fed wells are still on the property.

The house, although one of the first in town, was unlike many houses built at the time; for instance, it never had a fireplace.

“That is important. It was a new, modern home,” Carneal said. Instead of a fireplace, the Burns installed a cook stove. “The cook stove was invented in 1845. In 1849, if you built a house and put in a cook stove, you were modern.”

A cook stove from the pre-Civil War era, the type of stove the Burns would have had, is in the kitchen.

“Someone distantly related to Caleb Burns gave them a wood stove that had belonged in the Burns family,” Middleswart said. The stove came from Steelville, Mo.

Another modern technique was the use of 2”x4” balloon framing in the construction.

“It’s framed and just goes up,” Carneal said. “He was using very modern techniques when that was built.”

Despite the modern home, Burns wasn’t a wealthy man.

“We always call it the working man’s home,” Carneal said. “I don’t think anyone who lived there had very much money.”

Burns went to California for the Gold Rush of 1849, but came home relatively empty handed in 1850. When he returned to Maryville, he served as the county superintendent of schools, and justice of the peace. When the Civil War began, Burns left Missouri.

“During the Civil War he wasn’t a slave holder, but was a Confederate sympathizer,” Middleswart said. “He traded farms and went to Texas in 1861.”

Burns became a preacher in Denison, Texas, and died there in 1888.

The house went from Burns to Nathan Murphy in 1861, then to T.L. Robinson in 1865.

“The Robinsons owned this house until 1874, which is one of the reasons we have this wedding dress,” Middleswart said of a dress displayed in the dining room of the home. “That was a Robinson’s.”

The dress is just one of many local treasures in the Caleb Burns house. A love seat and two chairs in the parlor are from the 1800s. A post-Civil War rope bed with a corn shuck mattress owned by Nathaniel Sisson is in one of the two upstairs bedrooms; a table and china cabinet in the dining room predate the Civil War. Blue dishes with gold trim that sit on the top shelf of the china cabinet, brought to Maryville from Pennsylvania in the 1800s, have their own story.

“Dishes went from here to California on a wagon and they were shipped back here,” Middleswart said. “Some of them broke. They went to California in the most horrible conditions, and now they break.”

Various people owned the Burns home until Dr. J. S. Ford, minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, purchased it in 1910. Ford died writing a sermon at his desk in 1912; the desk is still in the parlor.

“I’m a great defender of that desk,” Carneal said. “It was Mr. Ford’s. I think that is very important because it belonged to the Ford family.”

The house stayed in the Ford family until Gladys Ford and her nephew Jack Ford sold it to the historical society for use as a museum in 1977.

“When Miss Ford knew she was going to retire and go back east she contacted us and said, ‘Do you want to buy this house?’” Carneal said. “We didn’t have a museum and we bought the house. That was the start of the museum. I was quite excited.”

Other than a few improvements, such as electricity, new wood floors in the late 1940s/early 1950s, the wood shed converted to a bathroom in the early 1900s, and front porch, the house remains relatively as it was in the 1800s.

“Lucky for us, but not lucky for them,” Middleswart said of every owner of the Burns house. “They were poor and left the house pretty much the same.”

The house served as the Nodaway County Historical Society Museum until 1995 when the new museum opened across the street at 110 N. Walnut St. The Caleb Burns house remains a museum dedicated to an earlier time in Nodaway County.

The house was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

“The reason they wanted the house is it was a working man’s house,” Middleswart said. “It was a regular house that regular people lived in. That’s one of the appeals.”

The house and museum are closed during the winter; they re-open March 5.