Truman Lake, Warsaw, Missouri

Press Releases

Plate 1. Stockton Lake, Warsaw, Missouri. October 30, 2007.

“Developer Joshua Heston explains, ‘I grew up with books like the Foxfire Series and magazines like National Georgraphic. I fell in love with the Ozarks back in the 1990s but there really was not online information about the area — at least not the kind of information I was looking for.

“‘It is time people started focusing on the web for this type of information. The intenet is seen as high-tech but it is really just a great communication medium. This type of information — culture and history and heritage — is something we should celebrate and preserve. I am just glad the idea has been so well-received.’

“‘I hope we get to be the Wikipedia of the Ozarks,’ says Heston. ‘But more importantly, I hope people visit State of the Ozarks to be reminded that we have an amazing culture made up of amazing people; that we still have a beautiful region here; that despite the economic issues and crime and concerns we face, there is still a lot of good in this world.’”

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Preface

"In earlier years I first viewed and pondered Ozarks places and peoples as a newspaper reporter and intermittently as a writer for magazines and reviews. Most of my published work was factual. Most of my editors accepted or rejected it as such. My primary interest was in the individual and mainly rural people of the Ozarks. Here again my editors employed free choice of acceptance or rejection.

A few, including the lucidly pompous Ellery Sedgewick, late editor-publisher of The Atlantic, and my long-time boss on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the mellowed by brillian realist Paul Greer, had chided me for the habitual favoring of rural Ozarkers. ‘You’re much too damn sweet with your fellow hillbillies,’ Greer had shouted. ‘You’d sweet talk the devil himself if you chanced to find the Old Persuader going around in patched overalls held up by a single gallus buttoned with a bent nail…’

From The Boadacious Ozarks: True Tales of the Backhills by Charles Morrow Wilson, 1959

State of the Ozarks

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Celebrating & Preserving the Ozarks