Captain Thomas Clark Harris (1824-1887) moved his family to Kirksville, Mo., after serving as a 1st Lieutenant, a 2nd Lieutenant and a Captain in the Civil War. His last assignment was with Company H of the 7th Missouri Cavalry. This happened to be the same unit with which a man named Jacob Alfred Tinsman of Adair County served as a Sergeant. Readers may remember that in Part 88 of this history, Jacob had been stationed a short distance from the Westenhaver farmhouse when Corporal Hervey Dix became the first casualty of the Civil War in Adair County in 1861. Jacob had heard the gunfire and set out for Kirksville to sound the alarm.
Last week, we learned about the first skirmish of the Civil War in Adair County at the Westenhaver home north of Kirksville. There, Corporal Hervey Dix from Iowa became Adair County’s first casualty of that war.
Hervey Dix was not a native of Missouri, but during his duties as a corporal in the early part of the Civil War, he became the first casualty of that war in Adair County, Mo. He was buried in Kirksville, and after the war, he was honored by having a post of the Grand Army of the Republic in Adair County named for him.