Chariton County Historical Society Quarterly Meeting: Mid Missouri History Associates

Join us for our quarterly program on October 20 at the museum to hear Eric McNeal present on his historical research. Eric is a lifelong lover of history. He spent much of his youth involved with Civil War reenacting and visiting his mother’s family in New England, so he was consistently exposed to the concept of historical memory and preservation while growing up. He graduated from Boonville High School in 2000 and attended Southeast Missouri State University where he majored in historic preservation. Upon graduation in 2004, preservation job opportunities bottomed out and he went into education. He has been a classroom teacher for the past twenty years and earned his masters in military history in 2013. In 2017, he started a Facebook page called Mid-Missouri History Associates, abbreviated M2HA. M2 stands for Mid-Missouri but also McNeal squared since he does a lot of reenacting and living history with his dad, Hal McNeal. Eric has conducted several pieces of original historical research, particularly on the Second Battle of Boonville
in September 1861, as well as chronicling forgotten events and people of the central Missouri area. He put a lifelong fascination with cartography to work and began recreating historical plat maps in 2021, many of which have included areas of Chariton County. In his presentation on October 20 at the museum, he will display some of those maps, explain the process behind them and use them to tell a story about a tragic series of events that he researched involving Keytesville and Dalton, Missouri and how that research helped him recreate the Keytesville downtown of years past.

Eric is married to his wife of 15 years, Emily McNeal, and they have two sons – aged 6 and 10.