StateoftheOzarks: The Upper South


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5/3/08 Photo credit, J. Heston. The Dark Sunset. Location: Compton Ridge, Branson, Missouri

Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina contributed the majority of Missouri's [and the Ozarks'] first American settlers.

They followed the example of Daniel Boone and came west, down the Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers, then up the Mississippi, to Missouri.

By 1860, two-thirds of all Missourians were from the Upper South. Within 50 years, they had spread across the state and made their mark on the Missouri spirit.

Southern settlers predominated in Missouri before the Civil War, but there were not the only Anglo-Americans attracted to the state.

Immigrants from New England, Appalachia, and the Middle West came in increasing numbers to mingle with old stock from the Upper South and diversity the Missouri population.

— excerpted from the Missouri State Museum, Jefferson City, Missouri.

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Following the Civil War, the [African-American population] drifted out of the Ozarks....[Their loss] was unquestionably the gravest sociological loss suffered by the Ozarks region.

More than any other one component of frontier population the Negro had added depths and richness to the folk culture of the region and to its potential scientific and economic development.

George Washington Carver, born and raised a slave in the lower Missouri Ozarks, typified the magnificent Negro talent which, due to avoidable mass prejudice and degeneracy, has been substantially lost to the region.

The...exodus of the Negro served to restore isolation and to return the the frontier roads to an era of prolonged lapse.

The half-century following the Civil War was the nation's most definitive era of land travel and settlements along or by means of through roads. For the most part the Ozarks lacked the latter and in great part they were bypassed by the most historic of Westward migrations.

— pages 10, 11, Wilson, Charles Morrow, The Bodacious Ozarks: True Tales of the Backhills, Pelican Publishing Company, 1959.