History
Recently, my wife and I closed all our accounts at the bank we have done business with for over fifty years. It was the bank of our parents and grandparents. I know many with roots in Willow Springs share memories like ours of the State Bank of Willow Springs during its long relationship with our...
While many are familiar with America’s experience with alcohol prohibition between 1920 and 1933, you might not be aware that Howell County citizens successfully voted a ban on drinking over a decade earlier. In 1907, a quarter-century self-induced drinking drought began and continued until the...
I often say I need to visit the Jacks Fork River to restore my country soul. Each spring on the way back from my annual Montier pilgrimage to visit the graves of the Casey side of the family, I typically detour up Highway 17 to Buck Hollow. The blessing never fails.
I get an instant...
In our world filled with automobiles, trucks, good roads, trains, and planes, it is hard to imagine a day when these conveniences were not readily available. Getting goods into rural Howell and surrounding counties was difficult, often taking days to deliver to a neighboring community. Without...
Before Helen’s obituary appeared in the Howell County News a few weeks ago, emails from her family alerted me to her passing. In some respects, I didn’t know Helen Tandy (WSHS 1956) as well as some, but she always made me feel as if I did. An immediate smile when she saw me on Memorial Weekends...
Last week, we needed to take our taxes to the accountant in West Plains. I am useless in this line of work, so my wife and I agreed to go to the public library, where she could organize things, and I would hunt for history. She went inside before me. In a few minutes, she called me, suggesting I...
Computers, networking, and social networking have revolutionized how I do research. I started pursuing local history fifty years ago when I was typing on a manual typewriter, and most of my digging for information was in dusty old stacks of paper in some basement. That has all changed, and a lot...
September 18th of last year marked the five-year anniversary of this column in the Howell County News. I won’t say it, but the cliché about time being airborne is true. I recall how it started, as if it were yesterday.
My sister-in-law, Sandra Whitaker, told me a married couple, Ron and...
Each year, the first measurable snowfall brings to my mind one of the worst winters in South Central Missouri's recorded history. The details of its severity and consequence are in the letters and diaries of both sides stationed in the area during the Civil War. The majority of the civilian...
The first part of this story covered my road trip in early October to Assumption Abbey, the monastery in Douglas County, 23-miles southeast of Ava, Missouri. By way of recapitulation, the purpose of the trip was to interview Father Cyprian Harrison, a 94-year-old Trappist monk. My WSHS sophomore...