Est. 1856 · Fourth-oldest settlement in Jasper County, platted 1858 · Site of an 1862 Confederate guerrilla attack on the town's Union home guard · 1915 Bank of Avilla building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022 · Scene of the 1932 bank robbery behind the landmark Second Amendment case United States v. Miller · One of the 'living ghost towns' of historic Route 66
Avilla traces its start to a schoolhouse built in the early 1840s near White Oak Creek in Jasper County, Missouri. Andrew L. Love and David S. Holman platted the town for public use on July 23, 1858, two years after its 1856 founding, making it the fourth-oldest settlement in the county. The land had been Osage hunting ground before white settlement pushed the Osage people onto reservation land in Indian Territory under a series of early-19th-century treaties.
By 1861, Avilla's leaders were committed Unionists inside a state and region tilting toward the Confederacy: neighboring Sarcoxie raised a Confederate flag, Carthage fell to Southern forces after the Battle of Carthage that July, and Missouri's governor declared the state the Confederacy's twelfth member that October. Avilla kept the United States flag flying over its town square regardless, guarded by a home guard company organized by Dr. Jaquillian M. Stemmons. On the night of March 8, 1862, more than a hundred pro-Confederate guerrillas attacked the Stemmons farm northeast of town, burning the two-story log home and killing Stemmons and militiaman Lathan Duncan. The Enrolled Missouri Militia later garrisoned the village, which became known informally as 'Camp Avilla.'
Avilla prospered during Reconstruction as the surrounding countryside rebuilt, then stalled when the railroad bypassed the town in the 1870s. New life came with the construction of Route 66 through Avilla in 1926, and the village's 1915 bank building became the scene of an armed robbery on May 18, 1932, by members of the Irish O'Malley Gang, who also kidnapped and later released the bank's cashier, Ivy E. Russell. One of the robbers, Jack Miller, was stopped in Arkansas in 1938 over the sawed-off shotgun used in the heist, producing the landmark Second Amendment case United States v. Miller.
Interstate 44 bypassed Avilla a second time in the 1960s, and a 1971 fire destroyed much of the town's lumberyard and several homes. Today Avilla holds a population of about 100 and is counted among the 'living ghost towns' of old Route 66: never fully abandoned, but reduced to a scattering of surviving structures amid farmland where a town of several hundred once stood. The 1915 bank building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2022 and continues to operate as the village post office, its original teller windows and vault still in place; the nineteenth-century Avilla Methodist Church and the Stemmons and Rives mercantile building are among the other structures that remain along the old highway.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avilla,_Missouri
- https://beyondhaunted.com/missouri/avilla-death-tree-legend
- https://theclio.com/entry/199610
- https://www.theroute-66.com/avilla.html
- https://stlghosts.com/the-ghost-town-of-avilla/
- https://www.joplintoad.com/4th-quarter-2020/halloween-day-3-the-ghosts-of-avilla
- https://www.ghostsofamerica.com/6/Missouri_Avilla_ghost_sightings5.html
- https://www.ghostsofamerica.com/6/Missouri_Avilla_ghost_sightings.html
Headless figure of a Confederate guerrilla known locally as Rotten Johnny RebShadow figures reported in Avilla's abandoned storefrontsLocal reports that the orchard tree tied to the legend stopped bearing fruit
The documented core of the legend is unusually solid for a roadside ghost story. During the Civil War, an unidentified Confederate guerrilla was killed in fighting near the south edge of Avilla; when his remains were found much later, his skull carried a bullet hole and his body had largely decomposed. Rather than burying him, the town's citizen militia hung his skull from a tree limb near the old road at the Dunlap apple orchard, explicitly as a warning to other bushwhackers, and it stayed there for more than a year. The historical record stops there: no source identifies the dead man, and none records what eventually happened to the skull or the tree.
Local folklore picks up where the record leaves off. Residents nicknamed the dead guerrilla 'Rotten Johnny Reb,' and generations of Jasper County storytelling describe a headless figure in a long duster, carrying an old firearm, moving low through the fields around Avilla on cool autumn nights, the season tradition holds he died in. Some tellings add that the orchard tree stopped bearing fruit after the skull was hung there and drew unusual numbers of crows to its branches, and that the figure is looking for its missing head or, in a darker version, for the town itself. These details are framed by the sources themselves as local legend layered onto a documented event, not as documented events in their own right, and no version identifies the guerrilla by name.
A second, milder thread of Avilla folklore concerns the village's emptied storefronts along the old highway. Local accounts describe 'shadow folk,' indistinct figures glimpsed through windows or along the empty roads of the abandoned commercial strip, generally described as harmless impressions of the town's earlier residents rather than a threat to visitors. Wikipedia's entry on Avilla records the Rotten Johnny Reb legend directly and cites Lisa Livingston-Martin's regional history 'Haunted Carthage, Missouri' (The History Press, 2013) as a published source discussing southwest Missouri ghost-lore of this kind, placing the Avilla story in the same body of regional folklore writing as neighboring Carthage rather than treating it as an isolated internet invention.
Notable Entities
Rotten Johnny Reb
