05/08/2026
Wikipedia tells us that Granby is a city in Newton County, Missouri. The population was 2,048 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Joplin, Missouri Metropolitan Statistical Area. Many residents fled the town after the Civil War occupations. The Granby Mining and Smelting Company was reorganized after the war by Henry Taylor Blow. In 1850, while traveling through Missouri on his way to St. Louis, Missouri, William Foster discovered galena ore while digging along Gum Spring Branch (Creek) on the property of settler Madison Vickery. Mr. Foster & Mr. Vickery opened the first shaft harvesting this ore, leading to the "Granby Stampede" two years later, a mine rush that populated the town. A post office was founded in Granby and has been in operation since 1856. The community took its name from Granby, Massachusetts. That same year, the towns first railroad tracks were laid. In 1857, Peter F. Blow and F. B. Kennett formed The Granby Mining and Smelting Company to smelt the mined lead. By 1859, Granby was a boom town of more than 8,000 people. The Granby Mining and Smelting Company lasted throughout most of the Civil War, held at various times by both Union and Confederate troops, until the Confederates finally blew up the furnaces to keep them out of Union hands. Mining was the chief industrial activity in Granby throughout the 19th century, with heavy concentrations of lead, zinc, galena, and calamine, until the early 1950's when the ore, once thought to be inexhaustible, petered out. The company dissolved and shut down the mines.
Along the backroads of Granby, I came across this old beauty. Missing a fair piece of it’s roof around what would have been a loft peak, this one must have been a very nice barn in its day. The first-floor walls are comprised of beautiful, local-quarried stone with inset doors and windows. Between that stone and the barn board walls of the second and third stories, there must be a hundred different shades of red and brown in that structure!
