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March 22, 2008

By Debby Woodin

dwoodin@joplinglobe.com

In 1870, prospectors E.R. Moffet and J.B. Sergeant hit a vein of lead on a stream called Joplin Creek, north of today’s Langston-Hughes Broadway.

It earned them $60,000 in three months.

Within a year, 500 other prospectors had packed mules, horses or buckboards mostly from points East through the Missouri wilderness to get here to try their luck.

Settler John Cox saw a demand for places for the miners to live, so he platted a town on his land on the east side of the creek and named the settlement Joplin, after his neighbor, the Rev. Harris Joplin.

Across the creek, miners Patrick Murphy and W.P. Davis platted what they called Murphysburg. The two burgs struggled against each other for a couple of years until the

founders made up and merged. Joplin won out as the name of the merger, and on March 23, 1873, the city was incorporated.

A celebration of that occasion, Joplin’s 135th birthday, is planned for Tuesday. Residents are invited to come to City Hall, 602 Main St., from 2 to 4 p.m. for a reception. Ceremonial remarks will be made at 2:15 p.m. and a ribbon cutting is set for 2:30 p.m. by the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce.

Cake and punch will be served and the first 50 people to come to the ceremony will receive a free commemorative item.

A lighted figurine of the historic Newman Building, which is now City Hall, will be available for purchase from the city clerk’s office. City Clerk Barbara Hogelin sells the figurines to pay for installation of the city seal in the floor of City Hall and for other decorative elements such as the building’s Christmas display.

City staff and staff at the Joplin Museum Complex will conduct the ceremony.

Brad Belk, museum director, said there’s a lot to celebrate in the city now.

“Joplin’s booming for the second time. Both of these tremendous booms happened to turn around both centuries, 1900 and 2000.” The city experiences its first boomtown within 10 years before and after the 1900 mark, he said, and it’s happening now again.

“I see an interesting parallel of incredible growth in both of these eras that are basically separated by 100 years,” he said.

The period around 1900 saw the establishment of a number of what are today landmark institutions.

The area’s first power plant was constructed in 1890 at Grand Falls to supply electricity to the mines.

Joplin Business College, the forerunner of Vatterott College, opened in 1891 because of the demand for clerks and secretaries in the ore and banking offices that cropped up to service mining and banking interests.

The First Christian Church building at Fourth Street and Pearl Avenue was built in 1901. During that decade, the church grew at a rate of 120 members a year until membership reached 900, according to records of the Joplin Public Library.

By 1905, the First United Methodist Church was being built a block away.

St. John’s Hospital, now St. John’s Regional Medical Center, had to build an addition doubling its size in the early 1900s to accommodate 50 patient rooms and its nursing college and dormitories because of the demand for medical care here.

“We wouldn’t be here without some of the business that grew out of the mining: our hospitals, Empire District and Eagle Picher, The Joplin Globe. It’s all tied somewhat to our mining heritage,” Belk said.

“When we moved into (the year) 2000, some of these industries created by our mining heritage remain and are going strong.”

Joplin, and in fact the Tri-State Area that encompasses Galena, Kan., and Picher, Okla., along with areas north of Joplin like Oronogo grew fast and hard during the late 1800s and early 1900s until the Great Depression. Then, like many other facets of the economy, lead and zinc mining went bust.

“There was a tremendous void when the mines went out,” Belk said. “It took our city a couple of decades to regroup and to create other industries and other areas of growth and productivity,” to sustain it through the mid- and late 1900s.

Jack Belden, a former Joplin mayor and council member whose grandfather came to Joplin during that late 1800s growth spurt to make his living in the electrical business, said Joplin is lucky to have survived the mining letdown. It was tough to stay in business here in the 1940s and 1950s, he said.

“It’s like Dan Stanley Sr. used to say: ‘We could have just as easily been a ghost town.’”

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