Woman Owns a Town

In the summer of 1927, Ada B. Clodfelter sold her property in Springfield (MO), where she had run a boarding house, and purchased the entire town of Garber, a tiny village west of Branson in Taney County with the idea of building it up as a tourist attraction. Located in the Shepherd of the Hills country, Garger was where J. K. Ross, the real-life inspiration for Uncle Matt of the famous Harold Bell Wright book, had his post office for many years, and it was less than a mile from his cabin. 

Shortly after Ada took over the town, an official of the Missouri Pacific Railroad visited Garber to arrange for the appointment of an agent and caretaker at the village. The railroad anticipated that the little resort community, which currently had but one store and about five residences, would become a busy place, and it planned to list Garber on its map.

Already the storekeeper by virtue of having bought the town, Ada was not only appointed the railroad agent for Garber, but she was also appointed postmistress and elected mayor of the little village.

Ada Clodfelter from Springfield Press.

Not long after Ada took over Garber, she had a rustic hotel erected, and in the summer of 1929, she started a publication called the Buzzer Magazine, which she put out singlehandedly. The magazine promoted both women's concerns and the Ozarks as a resort region.

Ada had big plans for Garber. She was an aspiring figurine artist and wanted to start a toy factory. She also wanted to establish a church and women's home at Garber. Indeed, an old folks' home (which was an expansion of the women's home idea) was constructed in 1931, but old people did not flock to occupy the home. 

Moreover, the town never took off as a resort the way Ada (and the railroad) had visualized. Its development was handicapped by a lack of good roads to reach the secluded village. For instance, the road from Garber to nearby Marvel Cave, which was already an established tourist attraction, was a mere trail unsuitable for automobile traffic. So, people who visited Garber had to arrive on foot, by horseback, or via the train, which only stopped at Garber if it carried disembarking passengers or if Ada flagged it down to pick up departing passengers. 

Ada died in early 1933 at the age of 58, and her dream of turning Garber into a booming tourist attraction died with her. She was buried in the Evergreen Cemetery at nearby Notch, which was also the final resting place for "Old Matt" and "Aunt Mollie" Ross. 

Waldensians Come to the Ozarks

The Waldensian religious tradition began in France and Italy as an ascetic movement within Western Christianity long before the Protestant Reformation. Like nearly all ascetics, Waldensians emphasized living a simple life of poverty, isolated from the mainstream of society. The Waldensians clashed with the Catholic Church in the 13th century for their refusal to recognize the prerogative of bishops to dictate what should be preached or who was fit to preach. 

The Waldensians were ostracized by the Catholic Church and were declared heretics. Because of their emphasis on the priesthood of all believers (which essentially meant they thought any believer was fit to preach) and similar reasons, the Waldensians more or less foreshadowed the Protestant Reformation, and they were, indeed, absorbed into the Protestant movement in the 16th century.

In the late 1850s, a French-speaking colony of Waldensians immigrated from the Piedmont region of northern Italy, which was under French control at the time, to South America seeking a place to practice their religion free from persecution and discrimination. After enduring hardship for about 18 years, the small group returned to Europe briefly before setting out for the United States. 

Under the leadership of the Rev. J. P. Solomon, a party of 49 Waldensians arrived at Verona, Missouri, on the evening of July 12, 1875, with a view of settling in the Verona vicinity. Accordingly, they proceeded to establish a colony about three miles south of present-day Monett (which did not yet exist) on forty acres of land granted to them by the St. Louis and San Francisco (Frisco) Railroad to be used for "the glory of God."

The first year must have been consumed largely just by efforts to survive, because Solomon did not get around to actually establishing a Waldensian church until over a year later.  On the fifth Sunday in July 1876, the Waldensians and their friends gathered on the colony grounds near Solomon's residence, and he organized the first Waldensian church in the United States, following "the time-honored customs of the Waldensian synod." The church's bylaws or guidelines were written in French, but after a break for a basket dinner, Solomon conducted the first Waldensian service under a nearby arbor in the English language for the benefit of friends of the group who did not speak French. Although the church had few members at first, more Waldensian immigrants were expected during the next few yea

Apparently, the Waldensians were received rather well by their neighbors if editorial comment from a Mount Vernon newspaper can be taken as an indication. The Mt. Vernon Fountain and Journal remarked at the time of the church's organization, "These people will no doubt make the best of citizens, and we should extend to them a hearty welcome."

 In 1877, the Waldensian colony south of present-day Lamar apparently receive an influx of new members. At any rate, several families, including five from France, two from the valleys of northern Italy and one from New York State, expressed their intention of joining the colony.

In the summer of 1879, when a correspondent of the Canton (MO) Press News visited the southwest Missouri Waldensians, the colony consisted of about 20 families. Most had come during the original migration in 1875, but a few families had arrived the previous year. 

Today, the Waldensian Presbyterian Church of Barry County is still going strong, The current church building, erected on a part of the original forty acres, was constructed in 1909. In the summer of 2025, the church celebrated its 150th anniversary, and it is still one of the very few Waldensian churches in the United States.

Urbanette, Arkansas

I've always been fascinated by little towns that flourished back in the old days but that have virtually disappeared or have become little more than wide places in the road in modern times, and the Ozarks seems to have at least its share of them. One that I was not really aware of until recently is Urbanette, located in Carroll County, Arkansas, about five miles northeast of Berryville on Highway 21.

The reason I was not previously aware of it is because I've never been there, or at least I don't think I have. Highway 21 north of Berryville is one of those roads that a person would almost never have cause to traverse unless you lived in the area or had some specific site you wanted to visit. And there aren't many sites in the area that would attract the average traveler (maybe Cosmic Caverns, which is about three miles northeast of Urbanette or four miles southwest of Oak Grove on Highway 21 and which I've also never been to).

Anyway, Urbanette was founded in 1902 by a man named Urban and a man named Bennett, and the town was named Urbanette as portmanteau of the two men's names. Urbanette came into being more or less as a railroad town, because Urban and Bennett built a store, a hotel, a livery, and a restaurant at the location to service workers on the railroad, which had been laid across Carroll County the previous year. Stock pens were built near the train depot, and Urbanette soon became an important shipping center for cattle.

The Urbanette Post Office opened in 1902, and a school was established in the community in 1907. The school consolidated with Berryville in 1948, and the town lost its post office in 1971. Today, not much remains of the once-booming little town of Urbanette but a few residences and a couple of businesses.

The Alleged Murder of Gus Leftwich

   When Gus Leftwich, editor of the Gallatin (MO) Democrat, and his wife, Bertha, were poisoned on Saturday morning, February 12, 1898, by arsenic in their coffee, it was thought at first that both victims would recover, and the poisoning was considered an accident. But after Gus Leftwich took a turn for the worse and died the next day, rumors began to circulate that the poisonings were by design, and a coroner's inquest into Leftwich's death on Monday found that he had come to his death by arsenic poisoning "administered by some party or parties unknown."
   The complete findings of the inquest were not revealed until a day or two later. Those findings revealed that, according to one of the rumors, Gus had called Maria, his fourteen-year-old daughter by his first marriage, to his bedside shortly before his death and accused her of having put poison in the coffee, and the girl ran crying from the room.
   According to the rumor, Leftwich did not want this fact known publicly, and he asked that no investigation into his death be made. However, after he, in fact, died, the supposed confrontation with his daughter leaked out, and it was brought out at the inquest. Maria herself was called as a witness at the inquest. She admitted that her father had questioned her about putting poison in the coffee, but she was not grilled on whether or not she had actually done so, probably because of Leftwich's request that his death not be investigated, thus accounting for the indefinite finding of the coroner's jury.
   Suspicion, though, quickly settled on the daughter. It was thought, however, that she had meant only to poison her stepmother and that Leftwich's poisoning was accidental. Mrs. Leftwich was in the habit of arising early and eating breakfast and drinking her coffee alone, but on the fateful morning, her husband had taken breakfast with her and had drunk more of the coffee than Bertha. "Unhappy family conditions" had apparently existed in the Leftwich home for some time, as Maria and one or more of her siblings did not get along with their stepmother. Maria, in particular, was considered a "wild and willful" girl, and her relations with Bertha were "not at all cordial."
   Many people around Gallatin demanded a more thorough investigation of the matter and suggested that a grand jury look into Leftwich's death. Shortly after Gus died, his brother Dr. Morris Leftwich, superintendent of the masonic home in St. Louis, visited in the Leftwich home. Unswayed by the rumors, Dr. Leftwich came away convinced that Gus's death had been nothing but an accident, pure and simple. He said the accusation that Gus had accused Maria of giving him poison was a canard. Morris took Maria and her 18-year-old brother, Austin, back to St. Louis to live with him.
   In April, a Daviess County grand jury indicted Maria and Austin for the murder of their father, but they were allowed bail of $2,000 each. When their case finally came up in December 1898, the prosecutor decided to drop the charges, saying that there was insufficient evidence even to say for sure that Mr. and Mrs. Leftwich had been poisoned on purpose, much less evidence to prove who did it. The prosecutor said the case had been investigated thoroughly, and that any one of the Leftwich household members might have poisoned the coffee but that there was almost no evidence to suggest that a particular family member actually did so.

The Murder of Wilfred Gerald Brown

On Wednesday morning, November 25, 1964, Mountain View (MO) resident Joseph Brown, after not hearing from his father for several days, went to check on the older man, who lived alone in an expensive home in a secluded area a few miles north of town. Joseph found the body of his father, Wilfred Gerald Brown, lying on a bedroom floor and clad only in underwear, with his feet bound and his hands tied behind his back. 

Authorities who investigated the murder estimated that Wilfred Brown had been dead about a week, not just because of the state of the body but also because all the days of a wall calendar had been marked off up until November 18. Investigators found that about $2,000 worth of guns were missing from the home. Also missing was Brown's billfold, which was thought to have contained about $500. Investigators theorized that whoever had killed the man was familiar with the area, because the Brown home sat at the end of a dead-end road and was not visible to casual passers-by on the main road. 

Because of the body's advanced state of decomposition, a cause of death was not immediately determined. However, after an autopsy on Friday, a coroner's jury ruled that Brown had died of shock, brought on by a blow to the head while he was struggling to free his trussed body. Authorities announced, also, that they were seeking four teenage boys who were suspected of having stolen some property from Brown about two weeks before the murder. It was thought that they might have returned to rob him again and ended up killing him. 

A break came in the case when the Mountain View marshal received an anonymous letter with the names of several of the suspects pasted on a plain sheet of paper, and six youths were arrested in connection with the robbery/murder. A crude diagram was drawn on the paper indicating that George Montgomery had struck the fatal blow. Montgomery, David Holly, and Wayne Conley, all of whom were from Belleville, Illinois, and all of whom were 18 years old, were charged with murder, while another 18-year-old and two 17-year-olds were charged with burglary in the case. One of the 17-year-olds, James Davis, had reportedly gone to school at Mountain View the previous year.   

At his first-degree murder trial in September 1965 in Carter County on a change of venue, Montgomery pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of robbery in a plea-bargain deal and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Conley also took a change of venue to Carter County, where he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in another plea-bargain deal and was also given 25 years in prison. Montgomery's conviction was later overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court on the grounds that he could not be convicted of robbery when he had not been charged with robbery. In other words, the prosecutor had put the cart before the horse.

I have not traced what happened at Montgomery's second trial or even whether he had a second trial. Nor have I found any information about Holly's case except a reference to his having filed a motion to vacate the sentence he received (whatever that sentence was). 

Appalachian Decoration Day

    When I was growing up in Fair Grove in the 1950s, nobody I knew used the term “Memorial Day.” Everybody called it Decoration Day.
    I knew the holiday was a solemn occasion, but I didn’t know it was intended to honor those who had died in service to our country. In my family, that wasn’t how we observed it.
    Instead, it was a day to remember all of one’s deceased loved ones. The holiday was more a family occasion than a patriotic one, and it was especially important to my dad, because his parents were deceased.
    So, every year, on the last Sunday morning in May, my family would pile into the old ’51 Chevy and set out from Greene County headed to Bloodland Cemetery, inside Fort Leonard Wood, eighty-five miles away, where Dad’s parents were buried.
    Dad had grown up in Bloodland, but the small town had been demolished when the fort was built in 1940-1941. Bloodland and several other villages were erased from the map. About the only landmarks left were the cemeteries. People living within the fort’s boundaries had to move, but they could return to visit the graves of their loved ones. 
    Former Bloodland residents made a special effort to come back for Decoration Day, to pay their respects to their deceased loved ones but also to renew old acquaintances. Decoration Day was a time of reunion and solemn remembrance, infused with a picnic atmosphere.
   When my family reached Bloodland, it was usually mid-morning, and a makeshift table with outdoor fare like baked beans and coleslaw would already be set up at the edge of the cemetery grounds. Mom always brought along a dish or two, which she added to the buffet. By the time we decorated my grandparents’ graves and Dad paid his respects to other folks, living and dead, it was usually time to eat. There was always a prayer first and sometimes a hymn. Despite the informal air, a spiritual quality imbued the proceedings.
    About mid-afternoon, Dad would say his goodbyes, and we would load up for the trip home. I was always ready to leave, because I hardly appreciated the Decoration Day tradition at the time.
    In the summer of 1969, though, when I took basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, I found myself looking back wistfully on those boyhood trips to Bloodland Cemetery. It had been almost thirty years since anyone had lived at Bloodland, and many of the former residents were now dead themselves. The tradition of gathering there for Decoration Day was already dying out. But during that hot summer of 1969, when we trainees would march south from the barracks at Fort Leonard Wood to the firing ranges where Bloodland had once been, I would glance over at the cemetery as we passed, and I would remember.
    Dad died in 1970, and he was buried at Greenlawn Cemetery in Springfield. Afterwards, our family tradition of visiting the cemetery on Decoration Day moved to Greenlawn. Even though Dad was a World War II veteran, our trip to the cemetery was still more a personal remembrance of a loved one than a patriotic observance. But the gatherings at Greenlawn had none of the atmosphere of picnic or homecoming I’d witnessed as a boy.
    Eventually, I began to think of the holiday in late May as Memorial Day rather than Decoration Day, and I learned it was formalized shortly after the Civil War as a day for remembering those who’d lost their lives in service to the country. The change in how I referred to the late-May holiday roughly coincided with the adoption of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established that Memorial Day and certain other holidays would always be observed on a Monday.
    The new law not only helped “Memorial Day” displace “Decoration Day” as the generally accepted term for the late-May holiday, but the three-day weekend provision of the act also gradually caused many people to view the holiday as the unofficial kickoff of summer—a time for going to the lake and having fun. Many Americans today scarcely consider the holiday as a time to honor the deceased.
    I’m not one of the lake-goers, but I’m also not among those who reserve the day for honoring our dead war heroes. Although I long ago adopted the term “Memorial Day” and have come to understand the holiday’s patriotic purpose, I still think of it as a time to remember all my deceased loved ones.
    Since I took basic training, I’ve rarely been back to Bloodland Cemetery. It’s now been almost 85 years since anyone lived in Bloodland, and the tradition of returning to the cemetery for Decoration Day is a faded memory. Yet I still occasionally think about those long-ago family trips to Bloodland, and I get even more nostalgic than I did 55 years ago marching through Missouri’s hot July sun past my grandparents’ graves.
    Only recently did I learn that celebrating “Decoration Day” as a time of reunion and remembering one’s loved ones, as we did at Bloodland, is a tradition that can be traced to Appalachia. Predating even the Civil War, Decoration Day is still practiced in many Appalachian communities today.
    Appalachian Decoration Day got carried to the Ozarks by early settlers, and it flourished here for many years. However, the ritual has melded over time with the more northern tradition of Memorial Day and has been weakened by the secular spirit of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act so that it scarcely exists as a separate, distinguishable tradition.
    But it still lives in the hearts and minds of many of us Ozarks folk who have always thought of Memorial Day not as a day for honoring our military dead but instead as a day for getting together to celebrate our families and remember our loved ones who have gone before us. That doesn’t make us unpatriotic or unappreciative of those who have died in service to America. It just means we’re following a different tradition.

P. S. Last time, I mentioned that I'd started building an author website for the first time and that it was a work-in-progress. I didn't realize just how much of a work-in-progress it was. For instance, I didn't know that you had to format the darn thing especially for mobile devices separately from how you format it for desktops. Anyway, it's still a work-in-progress, but I have made a little progress since last week. Here's a link for anybody who wants to check it out: https://www.larrywoodauthor.com/.

Joe Silvers and His Caged Bird

Around the first of November 1872, 28-year-old Joseph Silvers of Sedalia learned that a young woman was being held in the Missouri State Penitentiary and that the only way she would be released any time soon was if she were to become married. Strange as this might seem, it was apparently true, and Silvers, actuated primarily by concern for the young woman's welfare, promptly wrote a letter to the warden of the prison asking for the woman's name and that of her father's. 

On November 5, a representative of the warden, in the warden's absence, responded that there was indeed a young woman in the state penitentiary, serving a life sentence, with the exception that she could be released upon marriage. The respondent enclosed a picture of the woman and described her as "handsome and intelligent." He said the woman was well educated, and he thought she would make a good wife. He didn't know who her relatives were, although she told him she had a stepmother who caused her to commit the crime that got her incarcerated. 

A week or so later, Silvers appeared unannounced at the Jefferson City prison and asked to see the lady in question. He said he'd come all the way from Sedalia with plans to marry the woman and that he did not intend to leave until the thing was arranged. 

The woman, who was allowed to receive Silver's in the matron's room, was described by a newspaper reporter at the time as "very pretty" with hair done up in "gorgeous style." Silver agreed, later describing her as "handsome as any woman he ever saw." 

Silvers proposed marriage, and the woman agreed and promised to be a good wife, with the stipulation that he never "throw up" to her the fact that she had been in prison. Stating that he was not wealthy but that his love was strong, Silvers promised never to use her imprisonment as a cudgel.

The only thing left to do to consummate Silver's matrimonial plans was to get Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown to pardon the young woman. Thus, he wrote to the governor from Jefferson City on November 13, asking for said pardon. He said he had seen the young woman and that he "loved her on sight." Silvers said he thought he would "go crazy without her love," if Brown refused his request. 

Silvers planned to stay in Jeff City until he had an answer, but knowledge of his strange request soon leaked out, and he quickly became an object of ridicule, among friends and strangers alike. All the publicity surrounding his effort to marry the imprisoned woman so disgusted Silvers that, without waiting for an answer, he returned to Sedalia, where he was met with "taunts and jeers." 

So unbearable did the teasing become that Silvers gave up his plans to marry the woman and left Sedalia to become a "wanderer upon the face of the land." 

On a personal note, I recently started building an author website. I've never had one before, because I was never convinced that it would really do me all that much good, but I decided to give it a try. It's still very much a work in progress, but I went ahead and went live with it, with the idea of tweaking it as I go along. For the curious, the link is www.larrywoodauthor.com.