The Grisham family’s Century Farm is being recognized this year

The land being honored this year as a Missouri Century Farm by the University of Missouri Extension Service is now the home of the fifth-generation descendants of the couple who bought the farm in 1925. Christy and Alaska Kibbe Grisham’s great-great-grandsons Wylee, 5, and Waco Grisham, 2, live with their parents, Wyatt and Kiya Head Grisham, in the house Christy and Alaska built soon after they bought the 160-acre property along Highway 181 near the Caney Mountain Conservation Area. 

The official Century Farm presentation will be made on the main stage before the Hootin an Hollarin parade at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 20.

Christy (1898-1976) and Alaska (1903-1983) raised their three children on the farm: Virginia (Kastning), Bobby and youngest child Larry, who now owns the property with Sonja, his wife of 60 years. Virginia Kastning died on her 93rd birthday in 2022. Bobby lives in Gainesville.

After attending one-room grade schools, the Grisham children graduated from Gainesville High School: Virginia in 1947, Bobby in 1951 and Larry in 1962. Larry and Sonja were married in 1965, shortly after Sonja’s GHS graduation. 

For a few months after their wedding, Larry and Sonja lived in Springfield, where Sonja attended cosmetology school. Then they moved back to Ozark County, where Larry worked for Amyx Auto, and Sonja worked as a hairstylist, first in other beauty shops and then in her own shop on the Gainesville square. In 1970, Larry bought the MFA (now Shelter) Insurance agency from John R. Sims. 

In 1975, 50 years after their parents bought the land, Bobby and Larry bought the family farm when Christy and Alaska, then in their 70s, retired and moved into Gainesville. “Bobby took the land on the north side of the creek, and I took the south side,” Larry said. Bobby later sold his bottomland along Caney Creek and the house there where he and his wife, the late Imogene Hampton Grisham, lived before she died in 2017. 

Through the generations, even when they had jobs in town, the Grishams always ran cattle on the family farmland. “And still do,” Larry said. He and Sonja retired in 2015, after Larry had worked in insurance 45 years (Doug Hawkins now owns Shelter agency), and Sonja had operated her shop for 24 years. 

Sonja and Larry raised their sons Keith and Ray in the house Christy and Alaska had built in 1946. Later, they bought the adjoining land and built a new house on top of the hill overlooking the original Grisham property; they still live there today. 

Their son Ray and his wife Missy raised their own sons, Lincoln and Wyatt, in the old house. Later, Lincoln lived there awhile before moving elsewhere. Wyatt and Kiya moved into the old house shortly after they married in 2018. And now their two boys are carrying on the family tradition of living on the family land alongside Caney Creek. 

Although Wylee and Waco are the fifth generation to live on the farm Christy and Alaska Grisham bought in 1925, they’re the seventh generation of Grishams to live in Ozark County. Their five-times-great-grandparents, Martin Van Buren Grisham (1840-1916) and Mary Grisham (1844-1892), arrived here in the late 1880s. Notice of their final homestead “proof” (for property elsewhere in the county) was published in the Sept. 19, 1889, edition of the Ozark County News. 

Martin and Mary’s son Charley Grisham (1898-1976), who was elected sheriff in 1916, and his wife, Effie (1882-1943), were the parents of Larry, Bobby and Virginia’s father, Christy Grisham, who moved away from the original Grisham homestead onto the different piece of land where he and wife Alaska established what is now being honored as a Missouri Century Farm.