Hello Sally,

Sally it looks like I have to be the one to give you the bad news about your hero, William C. Quantrill. First piece of bad news for ya, he was born and raised in Ohio...Dover Ohio in fact, after he got in the guerrilla game he let out he was from Maryland...more southern but alack and alas not true. His own dear daddy was one Thomas Henry Quantrill who would marry Caroline Cornelia Clarke.

Thomas Quantrill while a trustee of the Dover School, misappropriated funds (startling suprise that). He was informed on by a Harmon V. Beeson. This kinda upset Mr. Quantrill Sr. and he decided to go over to Beeson's house and kill him with a derringer, however when he got there, Mr. Beeson hit Quantrill over the head with a red-hot poker. Being hard headed it didin't kill him. Mr. Quantrill's next adventure concerned slandering a Mrs. Roscoe and giving out she was a loose woman. She armed herslf with a bullwhip, found Quantrill on a street corner and gave him an old fashion Ohio cowhiding.

Now to the demise of son William and later.Quantrill was shot by Union troops in 1865 near Taylorville, Kentuck, and died in a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky on June 6, 1865. The 27-year old was buried without fanfare in an unmarked grave, in what later became known as St. John's Cemetery, Louisville.

In 1887, a newspaperman and Quantrill's boyhood friend, William W. Scott, dug up the grave at the prompting of Quantrill's mother, a Dover school teacher. He brought the bones back home. Or at least some bones. Experts believe more remain in Kentucky. And what guerilla leader worth his salt is buried in only two places? A Quantrill grave in a Confederate cemetery in Higginsville, Missouri holds still more fragments.

In Dover, Quantrill remains were buried in the Fourth Street Cemetery in 1889 -- maybe. No one knows what was in the box that went into the ground. Scott kept the bone fragments and the skull for himself, unsuccessfully attempting to sell it over the years -- in secret so he wouldn't hurt Mrs. Quantrill's feelings.

Part of William Quantrill rests in the Confederate Cemetery, Higginsville, Missouri.
After Scott's death, his son gave the skull to a club formed by a group of Dover teenage boys, which later became the Zeta Chapter of the Alpha Pi fraternity. The skull was shellacked and named "Jake." From 1905 to 1942, the skull was part of a fraternity initiation rite, a candle lit ceremony where inductees would touch the skull, and then dip their hand into a cauldron of molten lead (hot water coated with aluminum powder paint). In 1972, an aging alumnus of the fraternity donated it to the Dover Historical Society.

In the early 1990s, it was finally time to bury Quantrill. Prodded by the Missouri division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Kansas State Historical Society negotiated with Dover, and managed to get three arm bones, two shin bones, and some hair. They buried them under a simple headstone, with full military honors, on Oct. 24, 1992 at the Old Confederate Veteran's Home Cemetery in Higginsville, Missouri, where six of his raiders rest.

The skull stayed in Dover -- buried in a plastic child's casket at the Quantrill family plot on Oct. 30, 1992. The casket was surrounded by concrete to prevent theft. A marker had been donated by the Sons of the Confederacy in the 1980s.

While the skull was above ground, the Kent State anthropology department made a cast and reconstructed Quantrill's facial features. The University has one stuck in a box, somewhere; the other sits in the fridge in the museum in Dover, Ohio.
The refrigerator is a 1929 General Electric model, used for emergencies, "if we have a banquet or something." The head has been dressed up for parties, and suffered a flattened nose after someone slammed the fridge door on it.

The board says some people think it's kinda neat, kinda fun, and others think the whole thing's disgusting, and we should forget about this guy. He was a scoundrel as far as Northerners are concerned. His own aunts in town would not mention him; would not admit that he was a relative."

The museum needs visitors, and money, and there is plenty of history to see during the Mansion guided tour, which costs $6. But the fridge and the head are in the Carriage House, which is free -- So Sally I guess we could say, that's him all over...bad pun, but the best I could do for a fellow Buckeye.

Chase.