Sleeper, Missouri

   When I was growing up, one of my dad's best friends from his youth lived at Sleeper, Missouri, located about seven or eight miles northeast of Lebanon in Laclede County. Our families occasionally visited, and I remember going to Sleeper at least two or three times over the years. My impression of Sleeper at the time was that the name of the place was fitting, because the community, what there was of it, seemed always to be asleep. In truth, Sleeper never amounted to a whole lot, as far as population is concerned, and it still doesn't today.
   The first settlers in the vicinity of Sleeper came about 1840, but a community or place known as Sleeper did not come into existence until a few years after the Civil War when the railroad was being extended from Rolla to Springfield. The roadbed was built by contractors who were responsible for small stretches of the road of just one or two miles each. One of the contractors was named Sleeper, and a railroad siding and switching station were built on his section of road with a spur leading to a coal chute. The place at first was called Sleeper's Switch, but the "Switch" part was later dropped. Another, less credible, variation on how Sleeper got its name says that the contractor wasn't actually named Sleeper but that he had a reputation for sleeping or being sleepy a lot and Sleeper or Sleeper's Switch was a derisive name given to the place because of the man's drowsy habits.
   A post office was established at Sleeper's Switch in 1879 (one report says 1874), and the post office name was changed to Sleeper in 1883 as a small community continued to grow up around the railroad station. In 1889, the businesses of Sleeper amounted to two general stores and a blacksmith shop. When new coal chutes were built at Sleeper around the turn of the twentieth century, the little town perked up. Town lots were sold, and new residences constructed. In 1907, a Methodist Church moved into Sleeper from an outlying area. The town was incorporated in 1911, and a school district was formed. About 1914, Sleeper got its first telegraph office, and a new train station was built.
   By 1920, Sleeper was a thriving little village. It had three mercantile stores, one hardware store, one bank, one lumberyard, two blacksmith shops, two corn mills, one canning factory, a railroad section crew of eight men, and a coal chute crew of eight men.
   But that would be the little community's peak, because the coal chutes were removed about this same time (1920), and the town began to decline. A fire destroyed all the businesses on one whole side of the main street in 1930, and the Sleeper bank consolidated with a bank at Stoutland about the same time. In 1932, when a history of Sleeper appeared in the Lebanon Laclede County Republican, Sleeper still had a combined store/post office, a grist mill, a blacksmith shop, a church, a schoolhouse, and a train depot. But even most of those businesses and institutions were destined to disappear over the next twenty years or so. Sleeper lost its post office in 1955, and the Sleeper School was consolidated about the same time. Today, one store, a couple of churches, and a volunteer fire department are about the only going concerns in Sleeper, and a few people still live there.