Northview

The Ozarks, like nearly every other area of the country, I imagine, has a lot of small towns that enjoyed prosperity many years ago but have since become almost ghost towns. Once such community is Northview, Missouri, located in Webster County along I-44 about halfway between Strafford and Marshfield. Actually, it sits off I-44 a short distance to the south on a hill and is not even visible from the highway. In fact, the construction of I-44, which bypassed the town, was one of several factors that contributed to Northview's decline.

I think I've only been to Northview once in my life, about fifty years ago, and even then there wasn't much left of the town. But once upon a time, it was a booming little community. When Northview first came into existence, about the time of the Civil War, it was called Bunker Hill, and there is still a road at Northview called Bunker Hill Road. Around 1870, the name was changed to Northview, when the railroad came through and railroad workers said the spot offered a good north view.

A library society was organized at Northview in January 1881, and the first Sunday school was organized in June of the same year. An influx of Germans settled near Northview in 1883. In the late 1880s, the town sported one general store, a blacksmith shop, and several residences.

A mining boom spurred the growth of Northview after lead, zinc, and perhaps other ores were discovered just south of the town in 1891. The community enjoyed its greatest prosperity, however, from about the beginning until about the middle of the twentieth century. During the early 1900s, Northview had a school and a number of businesses, including a bank and a canning factory. It also had a town baseball team that competed against surrounding towns, like Niangua and Strafford. In 1930, the Northview bank closed, as did a lot of small-town banks during the Depression. The bank failure was perhaps the beginning of Northview's downward arc. With the coming of automobiles, the number of passengers arriving and departing Northview by rail declined drastically, and many people started driving to larger surrounding towns to do their shopping. The construction of I-44 was one of the last nails in the coffin, as automobiles no longer passed through the town along Route 66, as they had in the past.

In 2005, 96-year-old Eva Lena Cruise, who'd grown up in Northview during the 1920s, remembered the place as a "bustling little town," but by the time I made my one and only visit to Northview in the late 1960s, its heyday was already long past. Today, there are still a few residences at Northview but not much else, as far as I can tell without actually visiting the place.