If I claim to know much about the Ozarks farm landscape, I’m kidding myself.
When I drive the county roads near Brookline and Republic – the neighborhood of my kids today – I see only remnants of the farms I remember from my youth.
When I was a boy in the third and fourth grades at Republic in the mid-1950s we lived on an old farm at the north edge of town. An artificial inseminator for the Curtiss company, Dad hauled me with him over much of the area, making calls on mostly small dairy farms.
I recall herds of Jersey, Guernsey and Ayrshire cows on clover pastures, big barns with stanchion milking parlors and cavernous haylofts overhead. Fewer, but common, too, were whitewashed concrete block grade A-dairies with some of the first Holstein milk cows.
Not too many years ago I could still recognize some of those familiar barns and fields around Republic, but few remain today. For example, when I drive Hasletine Road on the west side of Springfield today I am dismayed by the sprawling communities of tract houses overtaking acres of once-green pastures. It’s the same throughout the Ozarks, especially near metropolitan centers. Cookie-cutter subdivisions have engulfed countless farms. Gone is country living as we once knew it.
Small trading center towns – like Elkland, near the county-line farm my folks bought in 1957 – have all but evaporated. The MFA exchanges and mom and pop stores of my youth are long gone. In their places are Dollar General stores and the like, if any at all.
Still, rising from among the rural subdivisions are a few random old barns, ghostly reminders of Ozarks agriculture’s former glories. Sure, hundreds of big round hay bales still cling to the prairies and rolling hills, but year by year I’ve watched hayfields being cut into streets and stick houses replace cattle, corrals and clover fields.
It’s called progress and prosperity, but all I see is people – lots and lots of people where farming once reigned supreme.
I know a growing population needs more homes. I concede the need, but I don’t have to like it.
I loved the Ozarks I knew in the 1950s. Maybe as just a boy I couldn’t see the big picture. But, I liked that corner of Greene County before I-44 cut across it and James River Freeway brought Springfield to Republic’s front door. I liked Highway M before it was Republic Road. At age 8 I lived on an old farm at Rt. ZZ, and the Wilson’s Creek battlefield was just something folks talked about, rather than visit. I confess, I do appreciate today’s national park. But, did they have to build a massive high school so close?
I suppose all of this is just an old man’s lament – my grieving for the loss of so much of the country landscape, culture and character I once took for granted. I imagined it would always be as I knew it as a boy. I know change is inevitable, just as was my brown hair changing to white. But it seems to have happened overnight.
I moved from Republic when I was just 9 years old, and I didn’t return until I was grown. But even as recently as 20 years ago, when I frequented the area to write farm stories, it wasn’t so different as when I was a boy.
It’s not easy for me to grasp the reality that the 21st century is nigh a quarter over, when my heart won’t leave the 20th behind.
When I drive country roads, I still see the little brown cows, manicured pastures (not a stem of fescue) and quaint farmsteads I’ve always seen – though only in my mind.
And with the car window down, somewhere in the distance I hear a “Johnny Popper” hard at work.
Copyright 2025, James E. Hamilton, P.O.Box 801, Buffalo, MO 65622
A former feature writer for Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, Jim Hamilton is a retired newspaper editor/publisher. Hamilton was reared on a small dairy farm in Dallas County, Mo. Contact Jim at [email protected].
