Terry,

When you wrote in your original post that you had done "land title searches," I thought you meant you had gone to the courthouse and looked at title documents in the Recorder of Deed's office. Since I had tried the same thing and not found much on Livingston in Newton County, you had my curiosity aroused. It sounds instead like you were working from census records and Britton's books.

The principal mining concern in Granby before the war was Blow & Kennett, which became the Granby Mining and Smelting Company after the war. The partners were Peter E. Blow, his brother Henry T. Blow and Ferdinand Kennett. Peter Blow was the only one living in Newton County in 1860. In the census, he valued his real estate at $100,000 and his personal property at $50,000.

In looking at actual title documents at the courthouse, I could not find any record that Thomas Livingston actually owned anything in Granby, but he was pursuing a highly speculative legal claim against the Blow & Kennett property there. This apparently never came to anything.

Wiley Britton was in Newton County in the 1860 census. He was listed as Wiley "Britain," age 18, in Eugenia Clark's boarding house in Neosho Township, page 64. Census online here: http://ftp.us-census.org/pub/usgenweb/census/mo/newton/1860/pg00048.txt