Wettershaw Manor

Wettershaw Manor is a house in Two-Mile Prairie, Missouri in Boone County, owned by the Wetter family.

The house was built in 1819 and has been in many books over the years such as "Switzlers" History of Boone County, written in 1882. It was also listed in both Boone County Land Plat books, one published in 1850 and the other in 1875, in which there is a drawing of the manor, one of the last still standing.

Wettershaw Manor has all the charm of an old plantation home, taking you back to Colonial days and the founding of our great Nation. The home can trace its history back to 1819, and Dr. John J. Lowry, who was one of MU’s first curators, was elected twice to the legislature of our new State, and was president of the new State Bank in Fayette. Because of financial difficulties, he sold the manor and it comes into the hands of Lodawick Mode in 1841. Mode’s untimely death in 1844 caused the family to spend the next five years trying to save their home, only to lose it in 1849. Lodawick Mode and his sons are buried in the cemetery behind the house, along with others like the Lowrys and Dr. William Baldwin, a famed naturalist who had died at the home in 1819. The manor was then sold to Levi Parks, a strong anti-war sympathizer. Here is where he held many of Callaway County’s meetings seeking independence, a plot which would later cost him his life. In 1864 a wealthy Virginian, Dr. George R. Jacobs, purchased the plantation, as well as many others in the area, making him one of Boone County’s largest land and slave owners. In the tradition of the South, the doctor. sent his sons to Virginia Military Academy (the West Point of the South). Later they all fought for the South. During the Civil War both Union and Confederate troops camped on the grounds of the manor. The Jacobs family was at the top of Columbia’s social elite and married into the Rollins family, who were related to the Guitars, the Leonards, and the Conleys of the area. Upon the death of Dr. Jacobs in 1874, the plantation, lands, and money were split and then fought over by the Jacobs family for the next twenty years. The home was finally sold to Sanford F. and John C. Conley, the latter becoming the first professor of agriculture at MU. The manor became the family’s country home, although they spent most of their time at the Conley home in town that still stands today. The Hart family became the owners in the early twentieth century and lived here for the next forty years. The nearby town of Hartsburg is named after family member Luther D. Hart. High in the society of the time, the Harts had many overnight guests . This is where the first Wetter comes into the history of the home. Hans Heinrich Wetter, whose grand-daughter married into the Ralls family of Ralls County, Missouri, stayed at the Manor in the late twenties during many of his visits to the Area. The home was sold to the Brays in 1956 and then to numerous others, during which time it fell into disrepair. In the early twenty-first century the home was sold to the Wetter Family who have spent many years restoring the manor to her grandeur. Wettershaw Manor has grown over the years with all of its owners to well over ten thousand square feet. The Wetter family can trace its family roots back to most of the early owners, making the manor one of Missouri’s largest and oldest historical manor homes. With so much interest in the home and its history, the family has decided to share it with the public by opening the home for tours and as a bed & breakfast. One can sit in the blue colonial music room, the fine green Victorian parlor, just sit back and read a book in the two-story library which holds many family items some of which are 900 years old, take a look at the four-generation cruet collection, or wander up the spiral staircase four stories to the cupola and look out over the property.
In the home is the family’s famed art collection that dates back to the seventeen hundreds of more than twelve generations of the von Wetter-Tegerfelden family.

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