History

In the spring of 1958, the Montier School bell rang for the last time, when the school that had existed for decades was absorbed into the Birch Tree system. By that year, the school only served six grades. Seventh- and eighth-grade classes had merged the previous year. My brother’s class was the...
He arrived in Howell County in October 1859, at the age of six. Howell County itself was only two years old. In the last of his seventy-plus years in the county, James Nelson Starkey remembered and described the fledgling town of West Plains. Those accounts give us a glimpse of what life was like...
In the late 1950s when I lived in Montier, the folks who attended church, generally went to one of the two churches located in Montier—the Methodist Church, across from the cemetery, or the Church of God of Prophecy, on Highway 60, a couple hundred yards west of Welsh’s Montier Grocery.  The...
The founding of the Howell County community of Brandsville is attributed to wealthy Chicago, Illinois brewer Michael Brand. Less than a year after the railroad arrived in Howell County, Brand teamed up with the president of the Kansas City, Fort Scott, and Memphis Railroad to plat the town on...
For three years, I had a college roommate, Archie. His schemes were legion, and his persuasive talents commensurate. He was a combination of Tom Sawyer, who could have me whitewashing a proverbial fence, and Mr. Haney, the character on the TV show “Green Acres,” who was always trying to involve...
A rather bizarre Willow Springs Republican newspaper article dated July 19, 1923, circulated on Facebook recently. Before, I had seen the story but was reticent to write about it without further research. Here as in other rural parts of Missouri, children whose parents died or could not take care...
The way I remember it, names were omitted to protect the innocent (me) in case I remembered something wrong. Loving horses the way I did, I was intrigued, several years ago, to see a young man often riding his large red stallion through Willow Springs. One day he rode up to my house to admire...
I remember this conversation as if it were yesterday, and it happened sometime in 1975 when I worked for a law firm in St. Louis. One Saturday morning, I got a phone call at home from an office secretary, a woman who was assigned to the senior partner of the firm. The partner, a lawyer nearing...
If you have spent much time in downtown West Plains, you may not know him by name but likely by deed. An iconic building he built in 1912, still in use, hasn't changed much in appearance since it was made. For much of the building's existence, it served as the home of his beloved Howell County...
Those of us old enough to remember the song “School Days,” with the words “readin’ and ritin’ and ‘rithmatic,” will recall the lyrics also include “hickory stick,” which is a metaphor for classroom corporal punishment. Principals had paddles, with and without holes. My Catholic friends tell tales...

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Howell County News

110 W. Main St.,
Willow Springs, MO 65793
417-252-2123

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