3 days ago
Oronogo bank vault related to Bonnie and Clyde robbery to be saved, rebuilt in Louisiana
Online For the latest on the restoration of the Oronogo vault, visit the Bonnie & Clyde Ambush Museum's Facebook page at To watch Aiden Chamber's story about the Oronogo bank robbery and hear other Jasper County stories, go to his Facebook page at
ORONOGO, Mo. — If the cinderblock structure on the southeast corner of First and Central could talk, what a tale it would tell.
Thanks to a man from Texas and a 2025 Webb City High School graduate, the structure will get a chance to tell its tale at a museum in Gibsland, Louisiana.
It is a tale was about a failed bank robbery by Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde fame, and two henchmen on a November day in 1933. The cinderblock vault is 11.5 feet long by 11.5 feet wide by 8 feet high, and it stood for more than 120 years until Tuesday. It was part of the former Farmers and Miners Bank on the corner of First and Central.
Jeff Hill, a former television meteorologist and current nursing student from San Angelo, Texas, said he was looking for the former vault and bank but mistook the small building on the southeast side of the corner as a boiler room.
Aiden Chambers, a recent Webb City graduate who loves to tell forgotten stories about Webb City, Oronogo, Joplin and other communities, pointed him in the right direction.
'Aiden went back to the site with me and pointed to the other side of the street and said that was the bank,' Hill said.
Chambers said many people, even residents of Oronogo, are confused about that corner.
'A lot of people think it's in this grassy area behind the post office on the west side of the corner, but it's not,' Chambers said. 'The vault was in the back of the bank, and right here you could walk right over to it.'
Chambers said he discovered where the bank was located by matching the rounded concrete lip at the base of the entire building with a picture of the bank from the Webb City Sentinel taken in the early 1900s.
Hill said he's cutting up and removing the rounded curb and taking it to Louisiana where it and the vault will be part of a display at the Bonnie & Clyde Ambush Museum.
That museum is located 7 miles north of the spot where the couple met their death in an ambush by law officers on a gravel road in rural Louisiana.
The building the museum is located in was once a cafe and historians say that cafe is where Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow enjoyed their last meal before leaving to meet a hail of gunfire.
'The plan is to rebuild the vault, and I'll have to use a lot of new material because most of these bricks are brittle and tend to crumble in someone's hands,' Hill said. 'The plan is to install the curved lip at the front of a patio and put the vault in the back and it'll be another location where we can hold reenactments of bank robberies at the annual Bonnie and Clyde Festival we hold every year.'
The heist took place Nov. 30, 1932, with Barrow, Hollis Hale and Frank Hardy. The group used a hotel in Carthage as a base for a series of robberies in Jasper County and surrounding counties for several days before leaving the area.
Hill said the heist in Oronogo went wrong from the start and that a number of Oronogo residents heard about the robbery in time to grab their guns and trade gunfire with the gang as they fled the bank with only a few hundred dollars.
About five months later, Parker and Barrow returned to the area with new gang members and moved into an apartment over a garage at 215 W. 34th St. in Joplin, resting and recuperating for about 13 days before the deadly shootout April 13, 1933, where they shot and killed Constable Wes Harryman and Joplin police Officer Harry McGinnis.
The two were killed in an ambush May 23, 1934, near Sailes, Louisiana.
