Tunas, Dallas County

Continuing the theme I've established the past couple of weeks of writing about small towns I passed through on my recent trip to Jefferson City, I thought I'd look at Tunas this time. It's a small community in Dallas County (MO) about 15 miles north of Buffalo on Highway 73. 

I've written about Tunas previously on this blog. Specifically, I wrote about the controversy that arose in 1972 when the Buffalo School District proposed, apparently without consulting the residents of Tunas or officials of the Tunas School District, to take in the much smaller Tunas district.  

However, I've never really written about the town and its origins. Perhaps one reason for that is that information about early Tunas is scarce. However, this time, I was able to come up with a few interesting tidbits.

Tunas came into existence about 1893 when James A. Taylor applied to the federal government for a post office to be located there. I've seen several sources that say the origin of the name Tunas is a mystery, but the post office application offers a hint, because in a couple of different places on the application the name of the proposed post office is spelled Tunis rather than Tunas. This suggests that perhaps Tunas was named after Tunis, the capital of Tunisia in North Africa. 

At any rate, the name Tunas soon became the accepted spelling, and by early 1894, Taylor's application had been approved, and he had established his post office, which served about 200 people in the surrounding vicinity. The town itself, however, amounted in May 1894 to not much more than Taylor's store and post office, one other store, and a residence or two. By the fall of that year, two more houses were being built.

As suggested by my mention of the school consolidation dispute, Tunas became a somewhat thriving little town in the early 1900s, but by the middle part of the twentieth century, it was already struggling to maintain viability. After the town lost its high school in 1972 (by consolidating with Skyline, not Buffalo), it continued its decline, and today it is little more than a wide place in the road.