In the spring of 1972, the small, Missouri town of Harrisonville found itself with a hippie problem. Hippies had settled into the town square surrounding the county courthouse. The group of young people included men who had recently returned from tours in Vietnam as well as high school teens who idolized these older men. City leaders needed to act. But how?
The situation worsened to the point that one of the hippies, Charlie Simpson, would enter the square on April 21st with an M-1 carbine and murder three people before taking his own life. After the tragic shootings, the situation with the hippies did not improve. Tiring of the situation, some Harrisonville citizens formed a vigilante group to attempt to drive the hippies off the square. The two groups would clash in the battle of the Harrisonville Square.
Through extensive research, the author, a former Harrisonville resident, tells the compelling true story of the conflict between hippie culture and polite society in the early 1970s in the small town. Hippie War: Battle for the Harrisonville Square takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through the genesis of the problem, the murders, and what steps were taken attempting to bring the two sides together.
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It would be dishonest of me to say that I remember the events that took place on that April day in 1972. I was six years old and lived in a peaceful Harrisonville neighborhood on a peaceful Harrisonville street three miles away from the city square where the action in this story occurred. Growing up in Harrisonville, I have always found this story fascinating in the way that a young man finds bloody local history fascinating, particularly when it happens in his hometown. I read the book, Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse, in my late teens but many years passed before I thought of it again. In 2021 I had written a couple of books about local civil war history and was also publishing a local history blog on my website, www.Jonathan Jones Author.com. While searching for a new topic for my next blog post, my wife suggested writing about the shootings on the Harrisonville square. I immediately set about reacquainting myself with the story. A plan for one 500-word blog post turned into four installments of about 1, 000 words each. The tremendous interest that these posts generated made me think that it might be worth considering a book project centering around the event.
I was still on the fence about pursuing this as a project when on Saturday, April 16th, 2022, my wife, Jill, and I were in Harrisonville where I was presenting a program on one of my previous books to a group at the local library. I had mentioned to Jill that after the meeting I wanted to go
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