Historium offers new way to visit Ozark County's past

Something new is waiting on Gainesville’s square to take Hootin an Hollarin visitors back to olden times. The Ozark County Historium, open throughout the festival, is becoming a place where Ozark County’s remarkable history is being preserved, cherished and enjoyed in appealing ways.

Located in the A. D. McDonald building, the Historium is the new headquarters of the 250-member Ozark County Genealogical and Historical Society (OCGHS) and is a nonprofit affiliate of the Ozark County Community Foundation (OCCF).

Step through the doors and into the past to enjoy entertaining video presentations and a mini exhibit corresponding to the OCGHS’s new book focusing on the 90-plus one-room school districts that operated in Ozark County in earlier times. The school book, as well as other books and merchandise related to Ozark County history, will be sold in the Historium’s retail area.

Video presentations share old-time scenes and reminiscences

Video presentations will run continuously while the Historium is open. One part of the video features early and mid-20th-century photographs from a photo album found in one of the old vaults at the Century Bank of the Ozarks (formerly Bank of Gainesville) as well as photographs of the area’s old general stores and other scenes captured by salesman Orvil Jernigan.

Morey Sullivan’s promotional trailer for his forthcoming documentary film about Hootin an Hollarin’s first 50 years also will be shown. The third video feature is GHS students’ interviews with several current, longtime Ozark County farm families.

The video interviews were completed this summer with H.K. and Judy Silvey, Calvin and Jean Watson, Jimmy Kyle, Howard and Virginia Plaster, and brothers Adron and Agene Hawkins. The students’ work is being funded by a place-based education grant from the Community Foundation of the Ozarks with the goal of recording local farmers’ memories of how agriculture in the county has changed during their lifetimes. More interviews are being added to the collection.

In one interview, H.K. Silvey talks about the machinery used on his family’s farm during his boyhood: a walk-behind turning plow, a double-shovel plow for planting corn, a single-shovel plow for “marking off the rows,” a spring-tooth harrow and a drag made out of seven-foot logs for smoothing out the soil. All were pulled by horses. “We had  a big team and a small team,” Silvey says, “ two big Percheron mares and a smaller team that I worked.”

Also on the video, Silvey, well known for his fiddle-playing talent, sits beside his wife of 65 years, Judy, and plays a waltz for his living room audience.

Calvin Watson describes how farming has changed since he moved to Ozark County from western Kansas in 1926, and how he developed a successful breeding program for polled Hereford cattle. He met his wife, Jean, when he stopped at a café where she was waitressing. Jean brought him a cup of coffee, he says, a twinkle in his eyes, “and she’s been bringing me coffee ever since.”

Agene Hawkins tells about his family’s huge “truck patch” and the food they laid by for winter, including butchering three hogs every fall, which they hung in the smokehouse to cure.

Howard Plaster, with his wife Virginia adding details and highlights, remembers how his family grew nearly everything needed during his boyhood. He would shoot rabbits and sell them for 10 to 15 cents apiece. “Money was worth a lot more then than it is now,” Virginia adds.

Plaster remembers how his family would “hook up the team to the wagon to go to the store,” where they would sell cream and eggs for the few items they didn’t raise themselves.

Jimmy Kyle mentions his 20 years of rodeoing, remembering he “used to have the fastest horse, the meanest bull, the best dog and the best woman. I lost the dog, but I’ve still got the best woman,” he says, referring to his wife, Mary.

The GHS project, coordinated by administrator Amy Britt with assistance by GHS agriculture teacher John Wilson, is being completed by students Kara and Kristin Hambelton, Kursten Suter, Logan Smith, Hailey Ratliff, Kara Lemons, Moriah Britt, Carrie Smith, Kyle Simpson and Sarah Warden.

For information about the Historium, call John and Susan Ault at 417-679-4253, or visit the Historium’s website, www.ozarkcountyhistory.org. Currently, dual membership in the Historium and the Ozark County Genealogical and Historical Society is $12 per year and includes a subscription to the popular quarterly newsletter, Old Mill Run. Mail membership checks as well as tax-deductible gifts to the Historium, to P.O. Box 4, Gainesville, MO 65655.

©Ozarky County Times