History
A waist-high brick wall surrounds Faurot Field inside Memorial Stadium on the University of Missouri campus. On the wall, names of legendary coaches and all-American football players who wore the black and gold are set in concrete plaques.
On the west side, about mid-field, one commemoration...
Several years ago, I was invited to the home of Ron White to look at a small, maybe five by seven-inch scrapbook made one hundred years earlier by Willow Springs businessman J. Nolan Wilton. I've written about Wilton before, and it would take another dozen articles to detail the many...
As I was researching in old newspapers, an article triggered a long-forgotten memory that made me think about former WSHS teacher Neil Pamperien. According to the article, in 1966 Holiday Inns of America, Inc. wanted to build a new, two-million-dollar motel at the northwest corner of Monroe and...
Among the stellar pioneers of Howell County, Daniel George Shipman shines at the top of the list. The Reverend "Uncle Dan" was spoken of with admiration and reverence a half-century after his death here and in several communities of Southeast Missouri. Though he died in 1926, the Missouri...
As the 19th century came to a close, smallpox remained a scourge and one of the most successful viruses known to humanity. Smallpox controlled the population of Europe in regular epidemics that killed millions each year. Upon the arrival of Europeans in the new world, the disease they carried...
At the end of the nineteenth century, Howell County experienced an upturn in violence much as it had in the two decades following the Civil War. Most of the deaths resulted from feuding and caused alarm about how the next century could be. 1899 was a rough one with a smallpox outbreak that...
I suppose there aren’t many of us still around who had a homemade shirt or dress made from a feed sack. My grandmother made my shirt from a chicken pellet sack purchased at Welch’s Montier Grocery in—where else—Montier.
According to the National Museum of American History, “By the 1940s the bag...
The Great Depression began with the stock market crash in late October 1929. Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed office as President in January 1933 during the greatest economic downturn in our nation's history. By March that year, he had submitted legislation to Congress creating the Civilian...
With Veterans Day approaching, I am remembering another World War II service member, George C. Anstey, M.D.—my father-in-law. He served as Battalion Surgeon in the 3rd Armored Division at the Battle of the Bulge.
George Anstey, born in 1917, grew up in Messina, Iowa, with his father, a...
Humans have a natural affinity for sugar and sweet things. I certainly do and have missing teeth to prove it. The first settlers of Howell County likely brought a supply of salt and sugar with them, but once that was used up looked to source them locally where possible. In his history of this...