Sixty-four years a ‘come-here’

My family moved to Dallas County in August 1957.
That’s right. I’m not a Dallas County native. Nine years old when my folks bought a farm of the Dallas-Webster County line, I’ve lived 64 years with dubious acceptance as a “come-here.”
These days it doesn’t matter much. I doubt many people even know or care. But, when we were new to the county, it did matter. Throughout much of my youth I felt an outsider. It’s not that anyone was hostile or even unfriendly toward us. We had good neighbors.
But, I was just a boy starting fifth-grade at Fair Grove, a new kid in school with no “Mayflower family” connections, obviously not well-heeled, and younger than most of my classmates.
I never seemed to quite fit in at Fair Grove. I was a “new kid” well into high school.
Meanwhile back at the farm, it took some time to figure out where we belonged. Though living in Dallas County, we got our mail through Elkland in Webster County. I went to school in Greene County, and when we finally got a telephone it came out of Springfield, via the Fair Grove Exchange. Our electricity came out of Bolivar — to the last pole on the Southwest Electric Cooperative line.
Just across the road was a long distance telephone call, as was a call to anyone in Dallas County beyond the Fair Grove exchange
The kids I knew in Sunday School at Elkland United Methodist Church all went to school in Elkland or Marshfield. I saw them only on Sundays, and I had no contact with my Fair Grove classmates outside of school. In third and fourth grades at Republic I had walked to and from school with a cluster of friends. My only friend on the Fair Grove school bus was my younger brother.
As for family, both sets of grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles all lived in or near Springfield. None lived nearby.
Unlike our next-door neighbors, we never bought groceries at Woods Supermarket in Buffalo. A medical technologist at Burge Protestant Hospital, mom bought groceries at Consumers, our school clothes at Heers and our shoes at a store on Commercial Street in Springfield. The one evening Dad took us to get ice cream at the old dairy shop on US 65 in Buffalo we saw one rowdy customer pull out a rifle threaten to shoot another. That left made a lasting impression on a 10-year-old boy. Buffalo was a rough town. We never went back.
Dad, on the other hand, became a regular customer at Jim Andrew store, Gowers’ garage and other Elkland businesses. Though I felt a bit of an outsider, Dad never did.

Though on a state road, the farm was still a couple of miles off a paved highway in 1957, and seemed at the edge of a wilderness in contrast to our rented farm at the north edge of Republic. The two bedroom house had running water, but an ancient water heater that lasted only a couple of months and a shallow well. The bathroom was a drafty, wasp-infested shack 100 feet from the house.
Built years earlier of green oak, the barn was sturdy, but airy, and lacked electricity or water. The farm, itself, was choked with sumac and persimmon sprouts and lacked any decent fences. Before we could unload our milk cows we had to stretch hot wires between trees and random old posts.
Three school buses — Elkland, Marshfield and Fair Grove passed by our house daily. The latter stopped for me and my brother, Russell. Among the few other vehicles that raced by daily was Lee Morgans’ dump truck. We heard him coming from a mile away.
Needless to say, our situation on the Dallas County line in 1957 was unlike anything I could have imagined.
I thought it was paradise.
And, it was ours for the next 60 years.
Though not technically a “native,” of Dallas County, I rationalized years ago that any county draft board that sent me a notice, as they did in early 1971, would have to consider me one of its own. I figure I sealed the deal when I moved here as editor of the Buffalo Reflex 43 years ago, and I’m still here, tapping away on a keyboard for every issue.
I may not be a true native, but I’ve been a “come-here” longer than many folks who are.
Dallas County is my little corner of the Ozarks, and I’d be harder to uproot than that old hedge stump at the corner of my bit of Buffalo Head Prairie.

Copyright 2021, James E. Hamilton; email jhamilton000@centurytel.net. Read more of his works in Ozarks RFD 2010-2015, available online or from the author.