History
Many years ago, I started to try and account for the people of Howell County who disappeared during the Civil War. I’ve mentioned several times that our population in 1860 was 3,169 souls. Thus far, I’ve been unable to come up with 100 names still here in 1865. Where did all the people go? ...
Many of the skills I learned on an Ozark farm, I still use today. Sawing boards. Hammering nails. Cutting brush. Loading firewood. With the firewood, particularly, if it is raining, my mind flashes back to the woodpile at the Shannon County farmhouse and my grandmother, directing a pitiful look...
Despite the Civil War ending in April 1865, Missouri Governor Thomas C. Fletcher would struggle with guerrilla bands and brigands occupying the Arkansas-Missouri border for his entire time in office. In November 1865, he asked the Missouri Legislature for funding for the state militia to suppress...
My first memories of roller-skating, at around age seven in Iowa, are of metal contraptions with steel wheels that clipped on my shoes, and my grandmother explaining the fundamentals. She claimed to have roller-skated as a child. The concrete floor of a single-car garage made a poor venue, and I...
The return home to war-ravaged Howell County by its former citizens held many challenges, as most improvements made in the decade before the war was destroyed. The town of West Plains was intentionally burned to the ground by Southern sympathetic guerrillas in October 1863. The destruction was...
My last column, “Willow High’s Ferris Bueller,” not surprisingly, generated a lot of responses. From his school days in Willow Springs; his service as a Missouri Highway Patrol trooper; his position as Director of Transportation for the Associated Wholesale Grocers; and as the Potentate of the...
In my previous article, I discussed summertime activities in our county in the days before electronic media. The Chautauqua Movement was a big part of those activities, but the subject needed its own consideration.
The noun Chautauqua isn't commonly used today and needs a little explaining. Named...
A lifelong resident of Willow Springs with children of her own once told me that in every class at Willow Springs High School, there is “one” boy. For the Class of 1964, it’s fair to say that one boy was Bill Tandy.
I emailed a WSHS classmate of his that before Bill became a Missouri State...
Summertime heat and humidity today often drive us indoors, but in the Ozarks one hundred years ago, before air conditioning was commonly available, folks went outside. In researching diaries, journals, and letters from our earliest settlement period through the Civil War I was surprised at the...
We are indebted to historian Ella Lilly Horak as the primary source for this profile. She had known the doctor and his family from the time they arrived here in 1911. I’ve been intrigued by Doctor Haycraft’s image taken later in his life. His dress and appearance in a photo taken in Willow...