The Turnbo Manuscripts

by Silas Claiborne Turnbo
1844-1925


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WHERE LIZE SIMS WAS KILLED AND BURIED
By S. C. Turnbo

One Sunday morning during the hottest days of the Civil War a party of mounted men met Lize Sims on the public road on the Keesee Farm on the north side of White River and shot him to death and left his body lying on the road side where it leads down the hill toward Buck Creek. His father was an old man and lived then in what is now the Mrs. Nancy Elizabeth Clark dwelling where Mrs. Clark died on the 13 of February 1907. As is well known this house is In the south east part of Taney County, Mo. On the same day that Sims was killed his body was brought to his fathers house and the writers sister Margarette Turnbo and Adaline Jones and Jane Jones daughters of John Jones and Mrs. Moore mother-in-law of the dead man took the body out of the wagon box and carried it into the house. John Jones made a rough coffin while some of the women stood on the look out for the approach of enemies. Only part of the flat on which they lived was under fence then and a spot of ground was selected on the flat just outside of the fence and a little more than ¼ mile south of the house where a grave was dug and the remains of Sims were buried there on the following Tuesday after his death. Since that time the entire flat has been put in cultivation. The spot of land on which this grave was dug was well known until 20 years afterward When the locality where the body received interment was obliterated by time and cultivation of the land and no one now knows the exact locality of its whereabouts. A few days after the burial of the dead man some of the old man Sims family tied a white cloth around a post oak tree where he was slain which remained there many months before it rotted away. Lize Sims wife was named Nitha. She was a daughter of Anderson Mouce. Nitha Sims visited her husbands grave 10 years after he was killed.

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