Lamar, Missouri

Lamar, Missouri, was the first home established by John Truman and Martha Ellen Truman after their marriage, and the place where Harry S. Truman was born on May 8, 1884. The family’s short residence joined the modest routines of a new household and a mule-trading business to a birth that would become central to the town’s place in the Truman family story; they left soon afterward, and Harry would have no memory of Lamar.

Setting and First Home

Lamar was a dusty, wind-blown market town and the county seat of Barton County, about ninety miles due south of the Young family home. John bought a corner lot and a white frame house for $685. Measuring just 20 by 28 feet, it contained six small rooms, with no basement, running water, or plumbing. It was nevertheless new, snug, and sunny, with a south-facing casement window in the parlor.

The house was the couple’s first home together, but its modest size also marked the narrow scale of their beginnings. John’s purchase gave the family a place of their own in a town far from the Young home, where the couple would face both the practical demands of earning a living and the sorrow of losing a child.

John Truman’s Mule Business

For another $200, John bought a barn diagonally across the street and opened a mule business there. His notice in the local newspaper, the Lamar Democrat, offered mules for sale at the White Barn on Kentucky Avenue and invited customers seeking teams to call on him. The business did not prosper, and its disappointment was part of the reason the family’s time in Lamar proved brief.

Birth and Naming of Harry S. Truman

Martha Ellen Truman’s first child, a boy, was stillborn during the couple’s first autumn in Lamar. A year and a half later, on May 8, 1884, she gave birth to another boy in a bedroom off the parlor, a room so small that there was barely space for the bed. Dr. W. L. Griffin attended the birth and received a fee of $15. To mark the occasion, John planted a young pine in the front yard. A later story that he nailed a mule shoe above the front door for luck is identified as apocryphal.

Two days after the birth, a Baptist circuit rider carried the baby outside into the spring air and held him up in the sunshine, remarking on how sturdy he was. Dr. Griffin did not register the birth at the county clerk’s office until a month later, and the child was entered without a name. His parents had been undecided whether to use a middle name honoring Martha’s father or John’s; they settled on the letter S, which stood for neither. They named the baby Harry, after his uncle Harrison. He would become Harry S. Truman.

Departure and Later Significance

The family soon left Lamar. The mule business had disappointed John, and he sold out and moved the household north to a farm near Harrisonville, only seven miles from the Young place. Harry was still an infant. He would retain no memory of Lamar or of the house where he was born, so the town’s significance in his life rests not on recollection but on family history: it was the setting of his parents’ first home together and the place of his birth.