Almost 80 years ago, Jesse and Martha Haste Anderson of Osceola had a son. They named him Meredith Issac after his father’s two uncles, who had no sons. The family lived on a farm near Salt Creek, where Jesse raised horses and worked in the blacksmith shop his father had on the Osceola Square.
But if you meet Meredith at the Snowflake Garage Sale next Saturday, don’t call him by either of his given names.
“I mostly go by Andy,” he said.
Andy does use his given names on his books. He and his spouse, Linda Pool Anderson, are both authors, and have 45 titles to their names. They sell them online and also in person, and will have a selection for sale at the Snowflake Garage Sale at the Benson Center on Jan. 27.
If you’re interested in local history and the Civil War, you’ll want to check out Andy’s newest book, ”The Burning of Osceola, Missouri, and Lawrence, Kansas.” It’s an account of how, in September of 1861, 600 anti-slavery Jayhawkers, led by Capt. James Lane, came over Cemetery Ridge and looked down on Osceola. Suspecting the town was harboring Confederate sympathizers, they set up cannons and started shelling the town square, which was defended by 42 volunteers.
As a result, every building except two were burned to the ground.
While the story is familiar to most people in mid-Missouri, what you may not know is that until the Civil War, Osceola was the third largest town in the state. A prosperous port town on the Osage River. it went from 2,070 residents to a population of 187, he said. The loss included enslaved people who were working down at the harbor and fled to freedom, and nine local citizens who were executed when they refused to hand over the money in the bank to the Federal invaders.
“Jim Lane couldn’t get the money because they buried it,” Andy said.
To recompense his loss, Capt. Lane claimed kegs of Missouri sipping whiskey, two wagon loads of it, Andy said. In all, the raiders left towns with two hundred wagons of looted goods — furniture, pianos and women’s gowns.
“The chaplain went into one of our churches and stole the pews, pulpit and organ to take back to his new church in Lawrence,” Andy said.
In 1948, when Andy was 4 years old, his family packed up and left Missouri, and moved to Utah. His father was a boomer, Andy said, meaning Jesse would go anywhere there were jobs, whether as a result of an oil boom or construction boom.
“He operated heavy equipment and drove trucks, and helped build the I-5 corridor,” Andy said.
Andy started working as a chef’s aide when he was 14 years old, he said, commandeered by his mother, who worked in a restaurant, to keep him off the street. He served four years in the U.S. Navy, attended Weber State College in Ogden, wrote an outdoor column for a local paper and worked for a corporation in Utah for 42 years.
It was his newspaper editor that told Andy he should write a book. Andy’s first book, “More Than a Job — An Adventure,” won a Gold Quill Award for literature. A Vietnam veteran, he wrote about his experiences in the Navy.
“That was in 1986,” Andy said, “and I have been writing ever since.”
Linda’s newest book is “From Pigtails to Turboprops,” a memoir of her career as a pilot. Linda could be the poster child for STEM education for women — she was the director of flight operations for the third largest carrier of mail for the U.S. post office and UPS.
“When she retired, Linda was over 34 pilots who flew mail throughout the West and to Hawaii,” Andy said.
Linda also wrote “The Osage of Missouri: People From the Stars,” as well as several books about U.S. marshals and the lives of lawmen.
A fisherman and bow hunter, Andy also wrote “Andy’s Fishing and Camping Guide to Utah.” In 2007, he was the president of the League of Utah Writers.
In 2012, Andy and Linda moved back to the Osceola area, after a relative told them about a house and 10 acres going up for auction. It was niece Janie Horsman’s Southern cooking that inspired Andy and Linda to write two volumes of “Ozarkia Cooking,” he said. Andy still enjoys going out with his nephew Tim Horsman to set trot lines or snag spoonbills, he said, and he is thinking of taking up hunting again.
Ask him which side of the Civil War fence he favors, and Andy will tell you that his ancestors, like many families in Missouri, were a mixed lot.
“A lot of my friends are members of ‘Sons of the Civil War,’” Andy said, “but I don’t have a preference.”
His indigenous heritage is also a source of stories. He has a Cherokee grandmother on one side, he said, and a Choctaw grandmother on the other. The Cherokee family, named Duke, homesteaded in the Osceola area in 1834. Andy attends Northern Cherokee Nation cultural gatherings and craft fairs, and is a familiar figure at Heritage Days in Warsaw and Rodeo Daze in Osceola.
Andy will not run out of conflicts to write about — of the 10,000 military clashes that occurred during the Civil War, 1,900 took place within 100 miles of the Missouri/Arkansas border, he said. That ranks Missouri third, behind Virginia and Tennessee, for having the most military actions during the Civil War, although the state only had two true battles. Andy wrote a book about one of them, “Annie Jewel and the Battle of Wilson’s Creek,” based on records and letters of a young girl whose father was lost in the war, and who disguised herself as a Yankee drummer boy and marched into battle. The other battle was at Westport, now a part of Kansas City.
After the Civil War, riverboats continued to come up the Osage River to Osceola, Andy said, which served as a shipping point for nine counties. Was the bank money ever recovered that was buried before Lane’s forces attacked on that September day?
“Yes,” Andy said. “It was dug up and taken to Kansas City,” so does not lie buried in the ashes of Osceola.
