Autumn in the Ozarks is a time to celebrate harvest, cooler weather and the beauty of the changing season. Ozarkers have celebrated this season with enthusiasm for generations. Every year, The News Leader gathers a compendium of festivals large and small in the city and throughout the region. Research for each of our books regularly uncovers little-known facts or events that may have faded from memory. One such discovery for James Fork of the White was Springfield’s grand, even exotic, 1906 Fall Festival—a six-day extravaganza in October of that year.
Real photo postcard, postmarked October 17, 1906. Springfield merchants organized a six-day Fall Festival featuring a parade sponsored by a different organization every day. This postcard shows the Elks and Traveling Man’s Day – “Grand Wrap Up of the Gala Week.” Handwritten on the face of the card: “Had a different parade every afternoon and night for a week. This is a part of the Elks parade.”
Progress was the catch phrase of the day but old timers’ recollections about old times were popular newspaper features. Long before Silver Dollar City, Springfieldians were fascinated with a version of the primitive past that was more than nostalgia, less than history. A 1906 Fall Festival parade expressed this developing image of the Ozarks. Progress was the catch phrase of the day but old timers’ recollections about old times were popular newspaper features. Long before Silver Dollar City, Springfieldians were fascinated with a version of the primitive past that was more than nostalgia, less than history. A 1906 Fall Festival parade expressed this developing image of the Ozarks.
The carnage of the Battle of Wilson’s Creek now behind them, soldiers representing the North and the South stood peacefully on a float, their hands on the staff of an American flag. The next float themed Ozark karst geology—“The Onyx Cave of the Ozarks with its Glittering Stalactites.” An account of a well-attended fiddlers’ contest in the October 9, 1906 Springfield Republican linked a survival of pioneer culture with the rugged White River hills:
The fiddlers were there for the fun and those who went to hear the contest went there expecting to have a jolly time listening to those old-time tunes that are heard only “way down in the hills.” There was nothing classic about it, it was a fiddlers’ contest and not a violin recital. There wouldn’t have been any fun about a violin recital and there was a lot of fun at the fiddlers’ contest.
It was an eclectic event – an Airship Ascension, the Hon. William J. Bryan visited, Grand Electric Illumination and Captain Jack, the Missouri Horse That Thinks, Figures, Plays Music and does Everything but Talk. “Take the children to See Him!”
James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, page 136
Our forebears certainly knew how to put on a show!
Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.