Local nursing home residents and staff enjoy visit with Journey Stagecoach

The residents of the Gainesville Healthcare Center enjoyed a unique visit last week by the Journey Stagecoach, several crew members and two of the crew’s horses, Boone and Swag.

“It was a big hit. There was lots of participation with the residents,” said GHCC activities director Tammie Loftis. “They had a ball.”

The stagecoach owners, “Cowboy Rick” and wife “Arkansas Bev” who reside in Ozark County, were accompanied by several members of their crew, dressed in big smiles and their usual traditional western wear. 

The group unloaded the stagecoach, giving residents an up-close look at the 142-year-old wagon. Some residents even took their turn to sit inside the stagecoach, giving them an idea of travel conditions in the 19th century. 

Boone and Swag were also a popular attraction, and many residents were excited to have the opportunity to feed them carrots and stroke the gentle animals.  

In keeping with the theme of the Journey Stagecoach, which has been used for years to deliver hand-written letters to school children and other residents across the country, the crew provided penpal letters from writers in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Missouri.

The Journey Stagecoach has an upcoming May 22-27 journey through Ozark County, which will begin at Glade Top Trail and end in Gainesville, traveling along sections of the Old Salt Road. 

Talented photographer Dennis Crider, whose photos accompany this article, is part of the crew and will be documenting the journey. The Ozark County Historium is helping promote the event. 

Along with a handful of real cowboys, the Hambys have experienced stagecoach journeys across Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California, Nevada and Arkansas. Their school children pen-pal travels began in 1999, founded on their deep passion for the Great American West. 

Traveling in the authentic 1880 stagecoach, drawn by four magnificent bay horses, the ten-person crew continually seeks out historic trails and sites, delivering mail from children. Dozens of schools nationwide have participated in The Journey pen-pal program. Thousands of children have been touched by the project, with some adults still in touch with their childhood pen pals to this day.

History of the Journey Stagecoach

Traveling through three different centuries, discovered hidden away two different times and undertaking multiple chapters of service, The Journey Stagecoach has touched the lives of many thousands of people in its more than 140 years of existence.  It’s created many-a-memory – still vivid today. 

Originally built in the 1880s in Concord, New Hampshire, by a 19th century custom-built carriage company, the “Concord” coach was sent west to work on the Overland Stage Lines delivering mail and passengers. 

It was retired in southern Arizona in 1905 and shipped back to New Hampshire where it was carefully stored, complete with packing blankets, for half of a century.

That’s when the owners of an upstate New York frontier park purchased it to entertain their guests. 

In 1960, the Herschend Family, founders of the 1880s theme park Silver Dollar City in Branson, purchased it from the frontier park for their Butterfield Stage Line. 

The coach was retired in the 1970s - and believed to be lost. 

But as Cowboy Rick Hamby tells in his own words below, the story comes full circle when he rediscovers the treasure he’d first seen as a child, having ridden in the grand old coach some 50 years earlier at Silver Dollar City.

“So many nights as a little boy, I would lie in my bed dreaming of Daniel Boone and his coon-skin cap, the Alamo and ole Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed with a tin pot on his head. I would dream of riding with the legendary Sioux leader Sitting Bull or of the Texas longhorns and the cowboys… and I would always dream of riding on a magnificent old stagecoach as it kicked up dust heading westward,” Hamby said. “These are the names, images and deeds that helped to build our nation and create a dream in a starry-eyed little boy’s mind. My name is Cowboy Rick, and I was that starry-eyed little boy. I never met Daniel, Davy or Sitting Bull. But I did meet one of my real-life heroes when I was only 5 years old, and my hero was nearing 80. She was eight feet tall with four beautiful yellow wheels and a bright red carriage nestled in leather straps. She had already traveled from the east coast to the places of my dreams … the Great American West.”