Times Past

The Deupree Store in Dora In this undated photo, W. R. “Ray” Deupree stands on the porch of Dora’s first store, which his parents bought when they moved to Dora from Oklahoma in 1912. The store was started by Anton Fisher sometime after he bought land there in 1878. Fisher established a post office and named it for his daughter, Dora. According to the writings of Dora merchant and historian Bess Cropper (1898-1987), other store owners after Fisher were U. L. Winkler, D. L. Harlin, Joe and Frank Harlin and then Ray’s parents, Edwin and Mattie Deupree. Ray Deupree worked with his dad in the store and post office and eventually took over the store and ran it until his death at age 86 in 1967, when the store closed permanently. Ray and his wife, Alta, had two children, Elizabeth Deupree Toler, whose adult life was spent in California, and well-known Dora-area farmer and horseman Dick Deupree (1925-2024). The photo is from the collection of Mary Collins, curator of the Dora Historian Facebook page.

Remembering Udall Postmaster Beryl Davis Above: Udall postmaster Dolly Beryl Dean Davis, left, and Eva Mitchell Reynolds stand on the porch of the Udall post office in this undated photo. Udall post office was established as St. Ledger in 1848; the name was changed to Udall in 1885 by postmaster Riley Compton when he moved it into his store. Beryl Davis served as Udall postmaster 44 years, from 1950 until her death in December 1994. A story in the March 12, 1986, Times reported that she had accrued 3,000 hours of unused sick leave. After her death, her granddaughter, Lisa Davis, served as postmaster until post office closed a few months later, in April 1995. Today the building is a private residence. This photo, which was shared on the Dora Historian Facebook page curated by Mary Collins, is from the collection of Dana Davis Taylor.

This photo of the Zanoni village was taken by an unknown photographer positioned near a large, hillside spring that originally powered the large mill below by flowing onto the overshot water wheel shown in the foreground. The spring was once measured as producing 226,000 gallons of water daily. The first Zanoni mill operated before the Civil War and has been rebuilt several times by its owners, who were members of A. P. and Alpha Bet Morrison's extended family from 1905 until 2005, except for a few years when it was owned by the St. Louis-based Gramex Corp. The post office there was established in 1898. The photo also shows the other buildings A. P. Morrison constructed on the property, including a barn, two houses where the Morrisons lived, and the store, pictured left of the mill, which housed the Zanoni post office until July 1970, when it moved to a new building two miles west on what is now Highway 181. Zanoni also had a cotton gin and a blacksmith shop for a while. In February 2016, the U.S. Postal Service closed the Zanoni post office permanently. The undated photo, credited to the State Historical Society of Missouri, was reprinted in the spring 1984 edition of the West Plains Gazette.

This week’s 1912 Times Past item from the Dawt community items saying the cotton gin at Dawt had turned out its 100th bale of cotton reminded us of this photo reporting what happened at the Dawt cotton gin 10 years or so later. In the August 2010 edition of The Old Mill Run, Donna Langston Milstead wrote about her grandparents, Jesse Allan and Mary Small Langston, who bought a small farm near Tecumseh shortly after their marriage in 1902. In her story, Donna reported that one year in the 1920s, her grandfather took 3,000 pounds of cotton to the cotton gin at Dawt to be baled into two 500-pound bales. “Cotton was 7 cents per pounds that year, and there weren’t any buyers,” Donna wrote. “Most people left their baled cotton on the ground around the gin (as shown in this photo from Donna’s collection). Instead, her grandfather took his bales home and stored them in his barn. The next summer, cotton prices had gone up, and he was able to sell his two bales for 15 cents a pound for a total of $150, “a lot of money in those times,” Donna said.