‘Souder Memories,’ describes rural life a century ago

Donna Walker’s latest book, “Souder Memories,” describes life in a remote area of Ozark County during the first half of the 20th century – and gives perspective on the challenges Ozark Countians faced back then, usually without thinking of them as hardships.

The 194-page book is a collection of Donna’s reminiscences about growing up in the Souder and Almartha communities, with several short stories and vignettes from other publications added in.

She writes about how her parents, Lyle and Faye Gardner Murphy, were  married in 1925 when her mother was 15. She remembers her earliest years living on her grandparents’ farm in a two-story house built of lumber that had been milled at Rockbridge.

Donna, now 92, remembers the night when she was a little girl and her family was visiting Gordon and Vada Bennett, and Vada was cooking their supper, frying sausage over a big fire in the fireplace. “Dad had to spit, and he spit ‘at’ the fire, missed and spit in Vada’s sausage,” she wrote. “He was embarrassed, but he told Vada, ‘I think I spit in your sausage.’”

She describes the homes and names the families who lived in them in the Souder-Almarta area – and then describes how so many of the homes, including her own family’s, were destroyed by fire.

“I was only 2 weeks old in the fall of 1927. The house caught fire up in the attic. Mother tried but could not extinguish the flame. She carried me outside and lay me on the ground then she tried to get help from a man who was working in a bottom field. (It was Clarence Morgan, who was very hard of hearing.) She yelled and screamed, but he could not hear her. As the smoke billowed up into the sky, it was seen by neighbors who came as quickly as they could, but it was too late.”

Very few of the family’s belongings were saved – and her dad had only 50 cents to his name, she wrote. 

They converted a nearby chicken house into living quarters, papering the interior walls with newspaper and pages torn from magazines. 

The Souder Church of Christ and the Souder School “were the center of the community” at that time. The church was built in 1912, long after the adjoining cemetery was established. In fact, the cemetery holds what are believed to be five Native American graves that were there before the Civil War. 

A Job School that operated at Souder for just a couple of years in the late 1920s had closed by the time Donna started school at age 5, but she remembers seeing, as a child, “horses tied to trees nearby as some students rode horses to school to obtain high school credits.”

Donna remembers riding a horse herself to Waid and Gladys Gardner’s store at Souder on the day of her eighth grade graduation. She wanted Gladys to fix her hair for that evening’s ceremony to be held in the Gainesville School. 

She writes about the first time she heard a radio when she was 6 years old and had accompanied her dad to Noble to a blacksmith shop to get some farm equipment repaired. While there she was invited into a home where, “near the fireplace was a talking box. I had never seen anything like that before.”

In January 1936, her parents took over operation of the store at Souder, which had a radio. “On Saturday nights, many of our neighbors and customers would come to the store, and all would listen to The Grand Ole Opry.” Later that election year,  she said, “we kept the dial turned to speeches made by candidates.” 

Franklin Roosevelt was running that year, she wrote, adding, “You may not believe this but it’s true. People wanted ‘old Rosey’ beat.”

In 1937, Donna and her parents left the store and moved to a small home “up by the school house.” There was no well, so they had to carry water from a spring. Her brother, Max, was born in 1938, and she remembers “That old house was so cold we had to all sleep in the living room next to the heating stove to keep warm.”

Although Donna’s book focuses on Souder, she shares stories of the surrounding area, including her days at Gainesville High School before she graduated in 1944. (She points out that the large school, then located on what is now Elm Street, didn’t have a parking lot. It wasn’t needed, she said, because very few students drove cars, and teachers could simply park on the street.)

And she describes the cultural and farming traditions of that era with brief chapters devoted to canning factories that operated throughout the county, to her friend E. J. Hampton’s family’s displacement from their farm in Ocie when Bull Shoals Lake came in, and to such things as razors and shaving mugs, timber work, hand-dug wells, Prohibition, and trapping and hunting practices.

There were no large ponds in the area in the earliest part of the 20th century, she said, because there was no heavy equipment to dig the holes to create big, deep ponds. 

Still, innovative farming ideas were practiced. For example, she describes the state-of-the-art barn built by George Gardner “sometime around the 1939-1940 era.” The barn, still visible alongside Highway 95 near the bridge over Spring Creek, was built on “tiered land … so that the loft could be entered from the ground level and a milking chamber could also be reached from the ground level on the other side.” The barn was restored a few years ago by present owners E.J. and Faye Hampton. 

Donna grew up in a family that milked cows. There was no market for whole milk at that time, but many farmers sold cream. After being separated from the milk (usually with the aid of a DeLaval Cream Separator), the cream was placed in large cream cans, and on Saturdays, the week’s cream was taken to local stores to be sold. “It had to be tested for butterfat content,” she wrote. “The higher content brought a better price.”

The left-behind milk was usually fed to the hogs, she said. 

This practice ended, for the most part, when “milk routes” became common in the late 1930s and early 1940s. These route drivers picked up the whole milk and hauled it to the Carnation Company plant in Ava – or to cheese plants around the area. The 10-gallon milk cans were identified by numbers painted on the side. “Dad and Mom used two sets of cans,” she wrote, “one for the milk that was milked at night and one for the morning’s milk. This way there was less sour milk. The plants would not buy sour milk. It was sent back to the farmer.”

She remembers one time when the plant returned a can of sour milk to her parents, and “Mother sanitized our washing machine and the sour milk . . . was ‘churned’” into butter.

Today those times of churning butter in a washing machine are far behind her. Donna, who for a brief time owned the Ozark County Times with her husband, the late Russell Walker, now enjoys living in a comfortable home in Ava near her daughter-in-law, the former Sandy Welch, and her granddaughter, Faunlee Smith, who operates the Douglas County Abstract Company there. Another granddaughter, Heather Walker, works for the U.S. Postal Service in Benton-ville, Arkansas. Russell died in 2003. Their son, Gerald, died in 1998.

“Souder Memories,” Donna’s third book, includes dozens of color and black-and-white photographs of the people and places she describes. It’s available for $30 (plus $8 for postage, if mailed) by contacting her at donnawalker27@hotmail.com or 417-683-3548. 

Only one of her two earlier books is still available. Her first book, “The Way It Was,” is a collection of stories (many of them written by her late husband Russell’s parents) about the Caney-Brixey-Romance area. It is $20, plus $8 postage if mailed. Her second book, “Almartha Memories,” despite three printings, is now out of print.