People

Emerson, John W.

John Wesley Emerson briefly served as Major and Colonel of the 47th Missouri Volunteer Regiment organized in his home town of Ironton, Missouri. His story and legacy reaches far beyond Ironton, however.

A graduate of the law school of the University of Michigan, Emerson settled in Ironton in 1857 and soon became the town’s leading attorney. His first brush with history occurred in August, 1861, when newly commissioned Brigadier U.S. Grant chose Emerson’s home to establish his headquarters. It was Emerson, who authored a series of articles on Grant’s career for the magazine Midland Monthly near the end of his life, who claimed that while camped at his home Grant developed the plan to conquer the Mississippi.

After serving as a judge in Ironton, Emerson was appointed to the post of U.S. Marshall in St. Louis, and moved there in 1887. In St. Louis, he met the Meston brothers, who persuaded him to become the principal investor in an electrical manufacturing company they were forming. The Meston’s start-up, St. Louis-based Emerson Electric Company, still bears his name.

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