Century Bank and Harlin family share colorful 130-year history

The Bank of Gainesville was opened in 1894 by Jim Harlin, left, and six other non-family stockholders. His brother, Tan, far right, was the bank’s first cashier. In 1908, Johnny Harlin, second from right, became bank president, a post he held until his death in 1955. In between Jim and Johnny in this photo are three more Harlin brothers: from left, Charles, Joe and Frank Harlin. Two additional Harlin brothers, Jarrett and Lacy, aren’t pictured. In the undated photo, the brothers are standing on the Gainesville square in front of the hotel on the northwest corner that was owned for a while by their maternal grandmother, Hannah Conkin.

This photo of, from left, Chris and Missy Harlin, with Chris’ parents, John and Linda Harlin, was taken in 2019 as the bank celebrated its 125th anniversary. Although John turned over the job as bank president to Chris in 1999, he continued as chairman of the board until shortly before his death in March 2023.

Hugh Tan Harlin was elected as Gainesville’s first mayor after the town incorporated in 1940. He was credited with several accomplishments, including getting Gainesville’s first streets paved. The streets were on the Gainesville square, shown here in this undated photo before the paving was done. In the picture, a Luna Truck Line truck is unloading feed into A. D. McDonald’s store. The bank is the building between the two stores with window awnings.

In 1912, Johnny and Clara Harlin built a three-story on what is today Harlin Drive in Gainesville. That same year, their youngest son Hugh was born. He's pictured here helping his dad drive the car. Clara is seated in the backseat with son Max, 3, and daughter Madge, 14. Seated in front beside Johnny is their son Mearle, 11. Harlin family descendants restored the Harlin house in the early 2000s, and it's now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Johnny Harlin had many other talents in addition to banking. For one thing, he was an avid sportsman who enjoyed hunting and fishing. His granddaughter Sherrill Harlin Hardcastle said recently that, even when he was hunting (or in this photo, fishing), “he always wore a suit and tie.”

Hugh Tan Harlin was elected as Gainesville’s first mayor after the town incorporated in 1940. He was credited with several accomplishments, including getting Gainesville’s first streets paved. The streets were on the Gainesville square, shown here in this undated photo before the paving was done. In the picture, a Luna Truck Line truck is unloading feed into A. D. McDonald’s store. The bank is the building between the two stores with window awnings.
Editor's note: This article focuses on the four generations of the Harlin family that have guided the Bank of Gainesville, now Century Bank of the Ozarks, through its 130-year history. The bank will celebrate its anniversary during an open house from 1 to 3 p.m. Friday, July 26, at the Gainesville office. The bank's branches in Ava, Bakersfield, Theodosia and Mountain Home, Arkansas, will celebrate by serving refreshments throughout the day July 26.
Next week, when Century Bank of the Ozarks celebrates its 130th anniversary, members of the same family that opened the bank in 1894 will be there, as usual, to greet their present-day customers and friends.
Those family members include Century Bank chairman and CEO Chris Harlin, who represents the fourth generation of Harlins to own and operate the bank, which began business as the Bank of Gainesville and underwent a name change during an expansion in 1995.
He and other members of the Harlin family welcome area residents to an informal drop-in reception to be held from 1 to 3 p.m. Friday, July 26, at the main office in Gainesville.
Refreshments will also be served throughout the day on July 26 at the bank’s branches in Ava, Bakersfield, Theodosia and Mountain Home, Arkansas.
The bank is marking its birthday two days after the actual date, July 24, when James P. “Jim” Harlin and six other stockholders started the Bank of Gainesville in 1894 with a total investment of $5,000 – $2,861.54 in cash and the rest in notes for capital stock. The bank’s first depositor was 17-year-old Clara Layton, who would later marry another Harlin brother, Johnny.
Chris Harlin, Clara and Johnny Harlin’s great-grandson, said last week he has been unable to find a record showing how much Clara Layton deposited, but the bank’s official statement at the close of its first day of business 130 years ago reported a total of $6,714.94 in deposits, bringing its total resources to $11,714.74. It was “a remarkable record for a remote Ozarks village and county,” former Times editor Ruby Robins said in the history of the bank she wrote for The History of Ozark County, 1841-1991.
Today, the bank lists assets totaling more than $260 million.
Investor John R. Reed served as the bank’s first president. Jim Harlin was vice president, and his brother William Tandy “Tan” Harlin was cashier. A younger Harlin brother, Johnny, wasn’t initially involved in the bank during its first days, but that soon changed. When Jim and Tan moved to West Plains in 1908 to start a bank there, Johnny became Bank of Gainesville president. By then, Johnny had experience in a wide variety of other jobs, including the bank, and was more than ready to become the bank’s president. It was a position he held until his death in 1955.
Here’s a look at the four generations of Harlins that have guided the bank through the last 130 years.
‘Thank you, Uncle Johnny’
Johnny Harlin was a larger-than-life character in his family – and in Ozark County. He was born in 1875, six years after his parents, Union veteran John William and Abigail Conkin Harlin, migrated here from Monroe County, Kentucky, in a wagon train with the Conkin and Walker families.
Johnny was 4 years old when his father died unexpectedly of blood poisoning, leaving his wife, Abigail, to raise their eight sons, ages 2 to 17. (Their only daughter had died in infancy.) In his 38 years, John W. Harlin had set an example of public service for his sons; he held several Ozark County offices, including county surveyor, sheriff, collector and the combined office of circuit county and probate clerk.
Johnny, his next-to-youngest son, would take that example to heart, serving Ozark County in a wide variety of jobs and elected offices. He was a 19-year-old bachelor in 1894 when his oldest brother, James P. “Jim” Harlin, joined six other investors to start the Bank of Gainesville. Johnny wasn’t involved in the start-up, but in 1896, the same year he married the bank’s first depositor, Clara Layton, he joined the banking enterprise. Thirteen years later, in 1909, he would become the bank’s president at age 33.
He and Clara had six children: Madge (Brown), 1898-1998; Mearle T., 1901-1989; Gertrude, 1904-1909; Teddy Harlin, (died in infancy); John M., 1909-1943; and Hugh Tan, 1912-2000.
Johnny lived a diversified, colorful life that became the role model for how the future generations of his family would serve area residents through loyal community involvement and dependable banking support. Being bank president was just one of Johnny’s many jobs. A 1980 article in the now-defunct West Plains Gazette said that, before running the bank, Johnny also operated a Gainesville grocery store with his in-laws (Harlin, Layton & Son) and then on his own (Star Grocery). He was also “a school teacher, athlete, banker, sportsman, preacher, auctioneer and gifted public speaker. . . . He was county collector for 36 years, clerk for 8 years and treasurer for 4 years. In 1928 he was elected to the state senate . . . (where) he co-authored the schoolbus law and was instrumental in establishing the state highway patrol. He served a six-year term on the Missouri State Highway Commission and was largely responsible for getting the ‘million-dollar bridge’ built at Theodosia as well as bringing many miles of greatly improved roads and bridges to the isolated Ozarks.”
He was also a newspaperman, having been a part-owner of the Ozark County Times beginning in 1901.
Unofficially, as a seventh son, Johnny was thought by many to have a healing touch, and he was often called upon to remove warts, according to A History of Ozark County 1841-1991. The book quotes Johnny’s son, Hugh Tan, as saying his dad “never believed he had any special healing powers, [but] he always got a kick out of the idea that many people firmly believed he performed some act of healing for them.”
In addition to all these business and public service endeavors, plus his wart-healing reputation, Johnny was also known as an avid sportsman and a crack shot, able to “toss a green walnut into the air and peel it with a .22 before it hit the ground,” according to the Gazette.
His granddaughter Sherrill Harlin Hardcastle added, in a recent interview, “And if you ever saw a picture of him hunting, he always wore a suit and tie.”
Johnny also had a reputation as a talented auctioneer. His grandson, the late John Layton Harlin, told the Gazette, “It was a very common thing for Granddad to be working at the bank and have someone come in and say, ‘Uncle Johnny, I’ve got a wagonload of stuff out front, and I need your help,’ and he would step out on the sidewalk and conduct the auction,” John said.
A 2011 story about Johnny in the Old Mill Run, written by Mary Sparks, quoted a Springfield News & Leader story that said he was a “natural showman” who succeeded in selling Liberty Bonds during World War I “by standing on the Square at Gainesville and crying the bonds’ sale in a voice that his fellow townsmen swear can be understood clearly in the next county.”
John Layton summarized Johnny’s talents in the Gazette story: “It was said that all in one day he could work at the bank, preach a funeral, cry a sale and then go out and shoot a bushel of quail to feed a group he was speaking to that night. It’s hard to describe his impact on Ozark County and this whole region.”
In 1912, Johnny and his wife, Clara, built what is now known as the Harlin House on Harlin Drive in Gainesville. There they raised their four children. One son, Teddy, died in infancy in 1905, and a little daughter, Gertrude, died of diphtheria at age 5 in 1909.
In 1903, Johnny had bought the county’s first telephone system, which had been installed earlier in a limited area by B.W. and John Hogard. The system connected a few communities in the county but couldn’t communicate with the outside world. A story by Linda Gray Hannaford in A History of Ozark County 1841-1991 says Johnny built a telephone line between his home and the bank and later extended the system to West Plains “with connections at Hardenville, Tecumseh, Elijah, Arditta, and Southfork.”
After the phones were installed in the bank and in the Harlins’ home, it wasn’t unusual for them to ring anytime day or night with urgent news for a phone-less resident somewhere out in the county. Johnny was known to head out in all kinds of weather to deliver these messages to far-flung farms and remote, humble cabins.
Such acts of kindness engendered deep affection for Johnny around the area. An example of that gratitude was something his grandson John remembered from his grandfather’s funeral in 1955, recalling “one old lady who looked at the casket and said, ‘Thank you, Uncle Johnny, for everything.’”
Johnny’s wife, Clara, died in 1966.
Hugh Tan Harlin: custodian to chairman
Johnny and Clara’s youngest son, Hugh Tan, born in 1912, already had 25 years of experience in the bank when Johnny died at age 80, leaving Hugh in charge. As his own children and grandchildren would do in the future, Hugh and his siblings had grown up in the bank.
During his decades in the family business, Hugh held virtually every job at the bank, from custodian to chairman of the board. He began his career as a teenager, providing janitorial services, including building a fire in the heating stove in winter and cleaning and polishing the brass spittoons that stood in front of the teller windows. His first salary, he said later, was $15 a month.
In his growing-up years, Hugh earned a Boy Scout merit badge for riding his bicycle 50 miles in 10 hours; he and his friend Judson Luna rode to West Plains to accomplish the feat. In high school, he built his first car from cast-off parts scavenged from Model T Fords. His dad sometimes called him out of school to trouble-shoot problems on the phone line.
On April 1, 1934, Hugh married Billye Key, who had come to the Ozarks from Texas with her mother and stepfather two years earlier to look at land they were considering purchasing here. The couple lived in Gainesville in a small, two-bedroom house near the Harlin House until moving to a bigger home Hugh built on what was then U.S. Highway 160 on the hill east of town. Billye joined Hugh in working at the bank after their children, John Layton and Sherrill, were old enough to go to school. Eventually Billye became vice president and a member of the board.
After Hugh Tan’s death at age 88 in 2000, the Times published a profile that said, “During his years in the banking industry, his influence as a banker reached the state and national level, as well as Gainesville and Ozark County. He served as treasurer, vice president and president of the Missouri Bankers Association and as a member of the Governing Council of the American Bankers Association.”
In addition to his leadership in the banking industry, Hugh continued his father and grandfather’s legacy of public service. After Gainesville was incorporated, Hugh was elected the town’s first mayor and served from 1940 to 1948. During his tenure, Gainesville’s first street was paved (on the square), and the effort that led to the city’s first water system was begun, the Times reported.
Hugh was a tireless fundraiser during World War II, raising money “for war chest drives and the USO,” according to his family’s biography in A History of Ozark County 1841-1991. The bio adds that, thanks to Hugh Tan’s and Johnny Harlin’s efforts and the many patriotic people of Ozark County who supported them, “more money was raised per capita than in any other county in southern Missouri.”
Hugh was an organizer and charter member of the Gainesville Lions Club and a member of Robert Burns Masonic Lodge, elected master in 1940 and serving several terms as treasurer. He also held the title of Elder Emeritus of the First Christian Church in Gainesville.
He served on the Missouri 4-H Foundation board of trustees for 26 years. His obituary noted that, “As chairman of the Missouri 4-H Foundation and the Missouri Bankers 4-H Builders Fund, he led the effort to raise in excess of $300,000 to benefit the 4-H clubs of America.”
Also, he served on the Ozark County Extension Council for several years, and “he was active in the planning and opening of West Plains Memorial Hospital [now Ozarks Healthcare] and served on the original board of directors,” according to his obituary in the Times.
And just as his father had led the effort to build the bridge over Bull Shoals Lake at Theodosia, Hugh Tan led the effort to get Highway 5 north of Gainesville rebuilt in the late 1960s.
Among Hugh’s many interests and talents, he was an author. His book, The Harlins in Ozark County, recounted in colorful detail not only the history of his family but also stories of Ozark County and the bank. Hugh Tan was also a licensed pilot and, as mayor, he oversaw the establishment of Gainesville’s airport. Plus, he was a skilled woodworker and an avid Ham radio operator.
Hugh Tan died Sept. 25, 2000, at age 88. His wife, Billye, died June 18, 2003, at age 87.
‘John’s president of the bank now’
Hugh and Billye’s first child, a 10-pound son they named John Layton, was born Jan. 8, 1937, in West Plains. His sister Sherrill (now Hardcastle) was born two years later. She weighed 9 pounds.
Both John and Sherrill attended all 12 years of school in the old school building on what is now Elm Street in Gainesville. Every day after school, they walked to the bank in its 1929 building on the west side of the square, where their parents or their granddad, Johnny Harlin, usually had some little job for them to do.
As they got older, John and Sherrill sometimes joined the teller line, cashing checks or making deposits for customers. The whole family gathered after business hours on the last day of each month to prepare the monthly statements ready to mail.
Johnny Harlin’s death in 1955 meant their dad, Hugh, was in charge of the bank. But despite their family’s banking tradition and their own experience in the bank, both John and Sherrill said repeatedly that there was never any family pressure for them to go into banking.
After their high school graduations – John in 1954 and Sherrill in 1957 – both of them enrolled in Southwest Missouri State College, now Missouri State University in Springfield. Both of them would leave school before completing a degree – and both would work in banking: Sherrill for 10 years, John for a lifetime.
In August 1958, Sherrill left college to marry her high school sweetheart, Joe Hardcastle. After her marriage, Sherrill worked a decade in banking Kansas City, North Carolina and Springfield – wherever they lived, including where they were posted during Joe’s 18-month Army tour. She left banking to raise their two children, Lisa and Brad. Later, when the family lived near Lebanon, she opened her own business, Monograms Unlimited, which she owned and operated for 30 years before she retired. She and Joe now live on a picturesque farm near Richland.
John majored in speech and dramatic arts in college and also worked for KYTV, producing live shows and managing a boom-microphone for shows including the nationally broadcast “Ozarks Jubilee.” On Sept. 14, 1957, he married a fellow student, Linda Fleenor, who had completed two and a half years as a music major. After their marriage, Linda left school to begin married life, and John, then a junior, left school to enlist in the Air Force.
In the military, John served as an Air Policeman and then worked in finance. In 1962, he won the Air Force’s worldwide talent contest, performing a comedy routine that featured celebrity impersonations. The resulting attention launched his sideline career as a professional comedian.
He was honorably discharged a few months later, and he and Linda returned to Springfield, where he finished his bachelor’s degree – in finance, rather than speech and dramatic arts. He and Linda didn’t think they would ever return to Gainesville and go back into banking. But that’s what they did – after a few years in West Plains, where they owned a dress shop and John worked for First National Bank. They moved to Gainesville in February 1966, settling into the little two-bedroom house on Harlin Drive where John had spent the earliest years of his childhood.
He joined the bank’s staff as vice president in 1966. Their son, Chris, was born in 1969.
John served the bank in some capacity the rest of his life – until his death in March 2023 at age 86.
Bank officers basically have to know everything about the bank, Chris Harlin said last year. “You might be making a loan one minute and then you step into the teller line and take a deposit the next.”
In addition to the bank’s day-to-day operations, John and his dad, Hugh Tan, were constantly thinking of the future and considering ways they could improve the bank to serve their customers better. That led to a new bank building that was completed in 1969 at the bank’s current site on the northeast corner of the Gainesville square. There, one day in 1971, Hugh summoned the bank staff and told them, “John’s the president of the bank now.”
John (and the rest of the staff) might have been shocked at the way his promotion to president occurred, but he was prepared to take over the role. As president, he practiced the kind of leadership his dad and grandfather had modeled: a calm, friendly demeanor, rarely, if ever, allowing anger or frustration to show. And with his Harlin humor, John loved to laugh.
Dyana Wooden Crawford, great-granddaughter of John R. Reed, one of the bank’s 1894 founders, worked for John at the bank for more than 18 years. In a profile of John the Times published last year, she described him as “a heck of a boss and a very good people person. We all loved him,” she said, remembering especially how, whenever things seemed to be stressful or dull at the bank, “Here he’d come, walking across the lobby with his Walter Brennan limp, saying something to make us all laugh.”
Among other accomplishments, John expanded the bank into other communities, lobbying for legislation that allowed it to open a branch in Theodosia in 1978 and then another one in Bakersfield in 1983.
John’s wife, Linda, joined the bank’s staff in 1994 as marketing director; although officially retired now, Linda is still a daily presence at the bank. These days she oversees landscaping and interior decor in the bank’s Gainesville office as well as some of its branches and affiliates.
One of the Harlins’ most notable community activities began in 1964, when Gainesville’s Hootin an Hollarin organizers asked John to help emcee the new festival. A little later, Linda was invited to organize, stage and direct a Hootin an Hollarin queen pageant. The Harlins’ work with Hootin an Hollarin would continue for decades, as Linda directed the annual pageant and John served as festival emcee. Years later, when the emcee job was turned over to the late Don Sullivan, and Linda stepped down as pageant director, they both continued to serve on the Hootin an Hollarin committee, helping to raise funds, plan activities and serve in other ways. Linda continues in that role today.
John helped with the Gainesville summer ball program, and he and Linda were active in the Gainesville Lions Club; both served terms as president, and Linda continues as the club’s long-serving secretary. John served on the Gainesville Cemetery board for many years and was an early and steadfast supporter of the Ozark County Historium. In 2016, John and Linda were honored with Ozark County’s Barney Douglas Citizen of the Year award. A few years earlier, they had been named Hootin an Hollarin parade marshals.
John remained active in the bank and continued to serve as chairman of the board until his health started declining in 2016. With Linda’s help, as long as he could, he continued to visit the bank every day, even after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a couple of years before he died at their home on March 15, 2023.
In last year’s Times profile, Chris said his dad “worked every day on behalf of Ozark County and its people. He truly put the community first.”
Chris Harlin: the fourth generation
Like his dad and his Aunt Sherrill, Chris Harlin grew up in Gainesville and walked to the bank every day after elementary school. But Chris was a visitor at the bank, rather than an unpaid family employee. “I’d check in and then do my homework,” he said. He remembers one day when a friend came along, and they worked on their homework together in the bank’s basement. “When we came upstairs later, the lights were off, and the bank was locked. I guess no one knew we were down there,” he said. “Mom thought I was with Dad, and he thought I was with her. I panicked for a minute, and then I realized the bank had a telephone . . .”
Throughout his childhood and teenage years, “there was never any pressure whatsoever” from his parents to plan on joining his family at the bank when he grew up, he said last year.
His Aunt Madge Brown, however, had other thoughts. The sister of Chris’ granddad, Hugh Tan Harlin, Madge would say, “You’re going to be coming back to run the bank,” Chris recalled. He always answered, “No way.”
“In fact,” he added, “in high school I was voted ‘most likely to leave Gainesville and never come back.’”
He was interested in banking, he said, but thought he would probably end up working and living in some big city. Chris said his parents never expressed disappointment in his plans. “Dad never mentioned me coming home to work in the bank,” he said.
But, like his dad, that’s where he ended up.
After his high school graduation in 1987, Chris attended Rockhurst University and later transferred to what is now Missouri State University in Springfield. He worked part-time at Boatmen’s Bank, where his jobs mimicked the ones his dad and family had performed on those long, monthly-statement nights a half-century earlier in Gainesville. “I did statement-stuffing and envelope licking, and I ran checks through the counter,” he said.
In the process, his thinking about his future changed. He began considering coming home. He talked to his dad, who advised him to get another bank job somewhere “and then come home,” Chris said.
Following that advice, after he graduated with a degree in marketing and business in December 1991, Chris moved to Jefferson City and worked at what is now Hawthorne Bank. He describes his job there as “a floater – I worked as a teller, a new-account officer, kind of an assistant branch manager, a safe-deposit person. I kind of did it all.”
In October 1992, Chris married Missy Workman, and they settled into their life here. At the bank, “Dad helped me learn and take each step. He was extremely easy to work with and very supportive,” he said. Chris also appreciated guidance from bank employees Pat Funk, Bill Trivitt and Corey Hillhouse.
When Chris officially joined the family business, he worked alongside both his parents, just as John had done when he had joined the bank 40 years earlier. Although retired, Chris’ grandparents, Hugh Tan and Billye Harlin, were also in the bank daily, and they served on the bank board until their deaths.
As time passed, Chris took on additional duties, including head of operations. Instead of suddenly announcing that his son was president, as his own dad had done, John guided Chris in gradually transitioning to the role.
“In January 1999, I was president, and Dad was still CEO and chairman of the board. Then, in 2000, he retired,” Chris said. “And once he did it, he truly stepped away from a supervisory role, and I took the CEO title too. He stayed on as chairman of the board.”
During this time, John and Chris, along with Norm Hannaford and Pat Funk, “formed a group that acquired the Bank of Plato,” Chris said. That led to the opening of Legacy Bank and Trust, which now operates branches in Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma with Chris serving as chairman of the board of both Legacy Bank and Century Bank of the Ozarks.
More recently Chris led the opening of Century Bank’s loan office in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
The Harlins have been active members in the Missouri Bankers Association for four generations. Johnny Harlin and his brother Tan are memorialized in a photo that hangs in the MBA building in Jefferson City. Although Johnny was important to the organization, he never held the honor that the next three generations of Harlins were voted into. Hugh Tan was president in 1963, John was president in 1994 and Chris was elected to the position in 2011.
In the early 2000s Chris and Missy, with other family members, bought the three-story house on Harlin Drive that Chris’ grandparents had built in 1912. The house was in total disrepair, but the Harlins restored it to a showplace that they used for the Old Harlin House cafe, which Missy managed. The house is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Despite its popularity, the Harlins closed the cafe after several years, when they wanted to spend more time with their daughters, Abbi and Faith, during their high school and college years. Both daughters worked summertime jobs as Century Bank tellers before their high school graduations (Abbi in 2012, Faith in 2018). They attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where they both still live. Abbi, a freelance graphic designer, and her husband, Alex Martin, vice president in charge of the Century Bank loan office in Fayetteville, have one infant son, John Brooks. Faith works with children with special needs in the Fayetteville school system and is pursuing her master’s degree in teaching.
For a while in recent years, Missy operated another popular business, Splendid Graze, which made and delivered creative charcuterie boards to individuals, businesses and events around the area. Missy is in between projects right now, spending extra time on her new role as John Brooks’ grandmother.
Besides banking and business, Chris and Missy have continued the Harlin family’s role as devoted supporters of the community. Missy was elected to three terms on the Gainesville school board and organized several large community events to raise money for veterans groups. Like both his parents, Chris has served as president of the Lions Club, and he continues to serve as treasurer of the Hootin an Hollarin board, helping raise funds and also helping with setup and tear down for each year’s event. He’s also a supporter of the DOW Camp charitable organization.
“I think if you’re going to call yourself a community bank, you have to be involved in the community,” Chris said. “Now it’s a little more complex than it used to be because we have branches in several communities, and we encourage our employees in each of those communities to be involved.”
Despite the added complexity of being part of multiple communities, Chris has enjoyed opening those branches outside Gainesville. “One of the exciting things for me has been expanding the bank and growing it in new markets,” he said. That expansion gives the bank the opportunity to do more of Chris’ favorite thing in banking: “Working with customers to help them access their dreams,” he said. “Whether it’s a small business or someone buying land or some other type of thing, that’s my favorite part of the job.”