Times Past

This photo of a vehicle crossing the Little North Fork of the White River at Hammond was taken during the winter of 1946-47 by the late Orval Jernigan, a sales representative for the Milligan Grocery Co. Jernigan took the photos of the stores he serviced throughout Ozark, Douglas and Taney counties. He typed a description on the bottom of each photo and mounted them into a photo album that is now owned by Christy Voliva of Ava. The late Kenneth Brown scanned the photos into digital format, and Ms. Voliva agreed they could be shared with the Ozark County Historium. Jernigan noted on this photo that it was taken while he was standing on the footbridge that spanned the river there.

Until it was demolished in the 1980s, this three-story house, built in 1906 by Tesley Luna, stood at the top of what is now Harlin Drive near the first Gainesville water tower. Luna and his wife, Anna Arnold Luna, sold the house to Tesley’s brother, Everett Luna, who later sold it to their sister, Agnes, and her husband, Dr. Herbert “Doc” Pace, grandparents of former Ozark County Sheriff Raymond Pace. In later years, it was known as the Wolverton house. It’s believed those standing on the lower-level porch are, from left, Hazel Luna (Blair) with her mother Sarah Patrick Luna, an unknown child she’s holding on the railing, and Anna Luna and her daughter Virginia. The person standing on the second-floor porch is unknown. The photo is from an album owned and shared by family descendants Fedra Williams Baker and Beverly Williams Schweppe.

Loggers work in the timber in this photo near the community of Biggs, which was located just southwest of where Indian Creek meets the North Fork of the White River north of Twin Bridges, just over the Ozark County line in Douglas County. The undated photo is from the collection of the late Noble “Skeez” Barker and was shared by his grandson, David Barker, with the Dora Historian Facebook page curated by Mary Collins. Noble’s note on the back of the photo indicates the machine pulling the double load of logs is a 20 hp Case steam tractor, circa 1912. The men in the photo are George Tooley, Alvis Pierce, Henry Slate, Charley Briggs and Amos Virgil Barker. The Biggs post office was named for lumber mill operator Monroe Biggs and was open from 1894 to 1920.

These photos show two of the three Ozark County Courthouses that have stood on the Gainesville square since the first one (left) was completed in 1874 at a cost of $1,825.28. The small block building with a tin roof was added in the early 1900s to house and protect the county records. When the courthouse burned in 1937, only the records that had been put in the records building were saved. A bandstand stood just beyond the records building. The Times Past items below give a glimpse of how some county residents advocated unsuccessfully for a new courthouse for nearly 40 years before the fire. After the loss of the first courthouse, the county bought and moved into the Christian Church building on the east side of the square. (A small portion of the church can be seen on the left edge of the photo.) It was available because the congregation was moving. In 1937, the former church building-turned-courthouse also burned, and county offices operated out of several rented quarters on the square until the current building (photo right) was completed in 1939. It cost $43,000 and was paid for by a county bond issue and a 55 percent matching grant from the Federal Works Project Administration. This photo of the building under construction is shared from the State Historical Society of Missouri.