Mount Zion Church was a Civil War engagement fought in Missouri, 1861. It was a Union victory.
Brig. Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss led a Union force of 5 mounted companies and 2 companies of Birge's sharpshooters into Boone County to protect the North Missouri Railroad and overawe secessionist sentiment there. After arriving in Sturgeon on December 26, Prentiss learned of a band of Rebels near Hallsville. He sent a company to Hallsville the next day that fought a Confederate force under the command of Col. Caleb Dorsey and suffered numerous casualties, including many taken prisoner, before retreating to Sturgeon. On the 28th, Prentiss set out with his entire force to meet Dorsey's Rebels. He routed one company of Confederates on the road from Hallsville to Mount Zion and learned that the rest of the force was at Mount Zion Church. Prentiss headed for the church. After a short battle, the Confederates retreated, leaving their killed and wounded on the battlefield and abandoning many animals, weapons, and supplies. This action and others curtailed Rebel recruiting activities in Central Missouri.
On December 28, 1861, Union and Confederate troops clashed near Mount Zion Church in Boone County as part of the wider conflict engulfing the nation. Federal forces emerged triumphant, and this success, combined with other Union gains across central Missouri, effectively shut down Confederate efforts to recruit soldiers in that region. Organized Confederate military presence would not return to the area again until General Sterling Price led his Missouri State Guard in a last-ditch offensive during the fall of 1864.
Boone County became the destination for a Federal column under Brig. Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss, whose task was to safeguard the North Missouri Railroad, hamper the secessionist Missouri State Guard as it tried to organize, and generally intimidate secessionist feeling throughout the area. His command consisted of five companies drawn from the Third Missouri Cavalry [Federal] along with two companies of Birge's Western Sharpshooters. This force departed the Northern Missouri headquarters at Palmyra, Missouri, on December 24.
Prentiss reached Sturgeon on December 26, and word soon reached him that State Guard troops were gathering near Hallsville. The following day he dispatched a company toward that town, and the men clashed with a State Guard detachment led by Colonel Caleb Dorsey. The fighting lasted about ten minutes and took place roughly half a mile north of Mount Zion Church, a site situated some three miles southeast of Hallsville and fifteen miles northeast of Columbia. Union soldiers sustained losses in the encounter, with some captured, and by 6 p.m. the remainder had pulled back to Sturgeon.
At around two in the morning on December 28, Prentiss moved his whole command out to confront Dorsey's men. Dorsey's ranks held roughly 900 State Guardsmen, but the majority seem to have been local men serving as volunteers, and many carried no proper military arms, though plenty had brought along civilian firearms of assorted kinds. Along the road leading from Hallsville, a detachment from Prentiss's column broke apart one company of Guardsmen some 100 yards from the eastern side of Mount Zion Church, and from this encounter discovered that the remaining force occupied the churchyard atop a nearby rise. In truth, the main camp lay elsewhere, tucked into a brushy hollow just east of the church itself. Prentiss then pushed forward against the Guard's position, launching three separate charges. By the time of the third assault, the Confederates had used up their ammunition, retreated toward their wagons, and were subsequently overwhelmed. Fighting came to a close around eleven that morning.
The church and its cemetery now hold a place on the National Register of Historic Places. Buried within the cemetery grounds are soldiers who lost their lives there, and a marker honoring the Missouri State Guard stands among them.
Union troops pushed Dorsey's men out of the northern reaches of Boone County all the way to Columbia, breaking the Missouri State Guard's hold on the area. The cost to Dorsey was steep: 25 killed, 150 wounded, and 60 taken prisoner, one of them an officer, along with the loss of wagons, 90 horses, and 105 weapons. What remained of the force scattered, and Dorsey himself moved west into Perche township, in Boone County's northwest corner, heading toward the Missouri River. Once prisoners had been exchanged through negotiation, he set up camp close to Everett, Missouri. Not long afterward, Maj. Gen. Sterling Price, commanding the State Guard, ordered him to disperse his troops entirely. The fighting at Mount Zion, together with the related engagement at Roan's Tan Yard, brought a lasting halt to any organized State Guard presence in central Missouri. By February 1862, the surviving portion of Dorsey's command had crossed the Missouri River to join up with General Pierce. Guerrilla activity would later resurface south and west of Columbia, but Confederate troops would not meet Union forces again in a standard battle in that region until Price's Raid came through in the fall of 1864.
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