Senior Spotlight: Oronogo resident helps keeps country's history alive

Feb. 5—ORONOGO, Mo. — Former President Harry Truman has been dead for more than 50 years.

The first president, George Washington, has been dead for 224 years.

But sometimes they still walk among us and speak in the guise of local historian Kavan Stull, who has studied enough about these two figures that he goes to schools and organizations dressed sometimes as Truman and sometimes as Washington, telling their stories using their own writings.

An Oronogo resident, Stull said he has been interested in history since he was young and his parents took him and his brother to sites such as Wilson's Creek National Battlefield in Republic.

"I remember as a kid going to the Wilson's Creek battlefield site back when it was nothing but gravel roads and one little marker," Stull said. "A farmer had to tell us how to get there."

He was active in the commemoration of the centennial of World War I in 2014-2018, identifying a number of veterans of the Great War in the Carterville Cemetery and working with a committee of Carterville residents to get a veterans memorial built there.

In 2017, Stull worked with other historians to get an official military marker for the unmarked grave of Elmer Charboneau, a Carterville resident who was killed in 1918 in the final days of World War I and whose body was returned for a funeral in Joplin in 1921.

Stull also helped design and have built the veterans memorial that was added to Carterville Cemetery in 2021.

More recently, he found out he had three family members who fought in the American Revolution.

"I didn't even know I had an ancestor in the Revolution until about three years ago when my brother did some family research," Stull said. "And so I've got three of them. One of them was in the Virginia Colonial Army, and one of them was actually one of George Washington's bodyguards, then another was Pennsylvania militia."

Stull himself served in the U.S. Army for six years after graduating from Truman State University in Kirksville. He moved to the Joplin area in 1986 to work for the Empire District Electric Co. until his retirement in 2019.

Favorite eras

Stull said the Revolutionary War and World War I are his favorite historical eras.

"I think everyone has written about the other periods," Stull said. "This is kind of odd, but I think World War I, everyone's kind of forgotten about it, but it was really important at the time. Considering America's involvement, by the time we gathered an army and trained it, the actual fighting only lasted 100 days. There were a lot of casualties, people from Jasper County who were caught up in the war."

Stull portrays Truman, who was born in Lamar and received his commission as a first lieutenant in the artillery in July 1917.

"He went to Oklahoma to train in September 1917 and left Oklahoma for New Jersey in March of 1918," Stull said. "Truman's 35th Division left for France in April 1918, and after more training, it wasn't until August 1918 that they actually got on the battlefield. In September, he was involved in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, and in November, the whole thing was over."

Stull said that even though America's involvement in "the war to end all wars" was short, the country suffered more than 50,000 battle deaths in that time and 60,000 noncombat deaths.

"We were playing to win," Stull said. "I mean, we didn't go over there and just give them soldiers. We trained our own army under our command. Gen. John Pershing insisted on that, and President Woodrow Wilson insisted we have an American command and we don't just give the British and French our troops. And they were desperate; they wanted American divisions to fill in the ranks."

Stull said the Revolutionary War is his other main interest because there aren't many connections to that time in Southwest Missouri.

"Jasper County is one of 13 counties in America named for Sgt. William Jasper, so there's that connection," Stull said. "He was from South Carolina. What he got his medal for was when the British were bombarding and invading Charleston, South Carolina, one of the cannonballs knocked the flagpole down. William Jasper says, 'Shall we fight without a flag?' He climbs up on it and re-lashes the two pieces of pole together among all the firing. And for that, he gets a merit of bravery."

Stull said there is one known Revolutionary War veteran in a Jasper County cemetery, Moses Duncan, who is buried in the Cave Springs Cemetery north of Sarcoxie.

Stull said he's active in a Springfield chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution and the South-Central District of that group, which includes Missouri and will hold an annual meeting in Joplin in August 2024.

"As part of that, we're still working on the details, but we're going to plant a Liberty Tree in Joplin with a little plaque that will say 'America 250' in recognition of the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence in 2026," Stull said. "The 250th anniversary of the Tea Party revolt in Boston has already passed in December 2023, and the 250th of the firing on the Lexington Green is coming up on April 9, 2025, so the remembrances have already started."