Thad Snow: A Life of Social Reform in the Missouri Bootheel

201 Pages·2003·0.532 MB·English

by  Bonnie Stepenoff

T h a d S n o w
A Life of Social Reform
in the Missouri Bootheel
Bonnie Stepenoff
University of Missouri Press
Columbia and London
Thad Snow
Missouri Biography Series
William E. Foley, Editor
T h a d S n o w
A Life of Social Reform
in the Missouri Bootheel
Bonnie Stepenoff
University of Missouri Press
Columbia and London
Copyright © 2003 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 07 06 05 04 03
Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the
Library of Congress
ISBN 0-8262-1496-7
TMThis paper meets the requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.
Designer: Jennifer Cropp
Typesetter: Crane Composition, Inc.
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Typefaces: Palatino and Wade Sans Light
Frontispiece: Farm building at Snow’s Corner,
Mississippi County, Missouri. Photograph by Bonnie
Stepenoff.
To Jerry, Samantha, and Hannah,
and to Thad Snow,
“...who says he found central Indiana, where he
was born and reared, too tame and therefore set-
tled in southeast Missouri, cleared a thousand
acres, farmed it and made it pay. Along the way
he fought the Mississippi in flood and Army en-
gineers on flood control. His bookFrom Missouri
is a personal story and a sociological study of the
land and the people.”
—Indianapolis News,November 6, 1954

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. Snow’s Corner 9
2. The Big-Eye 23
3. Flood Culture 39
4. King Cotton 53
5. Out on Mr. Snow’s Farm 71
6. The Great Roadside Demonstration 89
7. Bootheel Planter 115
8. Missouri Pacifist 126
9. Ozarks Retreat 138
10. From Missouri 155
Epilogue 163
Selected Bibliography 165
Index 175

Preface
Well, he was kind of an odd kind of a guy.
—Nellie Feezor Stallings, Charleston, Missouri
He was thinking faster than most people. That was what his problem
was. He was thinking ahead of his times.
—Hunter Rafferty, Wyatt, Missouri
I got acquainted with Thad through my father. They got along pretty
well. But I wasn’t sure my father really knew how to take Thad. He was
quite a bit different from most hillbillies.
—George Burrows
On July 10, 1998, I went to Van Buren, a small town on the Cur-
rent River in the Missouri Ozarks, searching for information about
Thad Snow. Alan Turley, publisher of the local newspaper, the
Current Local,said he had no files on Snow, but suggested I go down
the street and talk to George Burrows.1 Burrows’s father, Emmett
Russell “Rip” Burrows, the postmaster at Van Buren, was a close
friend of Snow’s in the 1950s, when he lived at the Rose Cliff Hotel.
I found George Burrows working with a table saw in the drive-
way behind his house. He turned off the machinery and greeted me
1. George Burrows, a retired schoolteacher, died on July 4, 2002, at the age of
eighty-two. According to his obituary in the Van Buren Current Local, July 11,
2002, “He was a naturalist who enjoyed farming, hunting and fishing, and was
an accomplished guitar player.”
ix