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Ozarks Notebook: Stoking the Fire of Community [1]
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Date: 2025-03-12
Community can mean a lot of different things in today’s world, with social media groups and virtual chats and connections with people whom you may never know in person. Those links are very different from ones long-held in rural spaces where neighbors were paramount to one’s generally close-to-home existence.
Many of those places have faded in today’s world, and skeletons of these places exist across the Ozarks, where literal and figurative signs remind folks they’ve reached a community that today largely exists in hearts, memories, and fading black-and-white photographs.
But there are places where tiny settlements still exist, kept in the present by still-significant travel times and by people who see their value – and for reasons beyond the barter-and-trade variety. And perhaps, in our over-connected yet distracted and distanced world, they’re more important than ever before.
This is why, today, I’m taking you to Champion, Missouri.
This Community of One is tucked deep in the rural Missouri Ozarks and largely centers around a small general store. It’s located about 30 minutes from the nearest Dollar General and offers a touchpoint for goods and gatherings with friends.
A few weeks ago, folks gathered at that store to celebrate Betty Henson, its proprietor who turned 78. She didn’t grow up in the Ozarks, but has spent much of her life connected with the store after she married into the family that owned it.
That legacy began when Betty was in her 30s and began helping at the store. Later, she and her husband ran it together. Then he passed away. And since 2002, it’s “been hers,” as she puts it.
Despite her age, Betty still runs the rural store solo six days a week.
“I just like people being around all the time,” she told me. “It saves them a trip to town, especially if they just need a few items.”
Friends and food packed the small store that Saturday afternoon. A table was laden with potluck fare including baked beans, hot dogs, sweet mini cornmeal pies, cookies, and, of course, a birthday cake.
“Thank you, Lord, for Betty and her place here that we can come and visit and fellowship,” prayed a local man, hat in hand, who gave a blessing to start the festivities. “Lord, we thank you for blessing her with another birthday tomorrow, Lord willing.”
Visitors of all ages attended Betty’s 78th birthday party, which was held at the store in mid-January. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
The Unexpected “Pockets of Community”
I absolutely love finding pockets of community where you least expect them. My friends know I’ve even tried to come up with a word to describe these places. (I’m still working on that.)
But I have concluded that you generally need one of four things for a community’s existence to continue beyond name only: a school, a post office, a store, or a church.
Fundamentally, you need a place to gather.
While they vary in role, those places offer a common theme of bringing people together to form connections – even at one rural church I visited with just four members, bound by a promise to their late minister to keep the congregation going.
Those relationships are something that were built in for past generations. In the rural Ozarks, folks didn’t travel that far from home and relied on neighbors for things from work parties to laying out their loved ones after death.
Things are different today. We don’t have to come together in the way they did – but I think we need to make an effort to really know one another.
Those connections are found at Champion where, most times I’ve stopped in, there have been people together around the stove or on the porch.
Similarly, links are found at other general stores, like Gentryville – another rural Missouri community where the native Ozarker owner paints for pleasure, and neighbors come in and play cards, and Bill’s Store in tiny Peace Valley, run by Velma Collins, an elderly widow who has continued her own small rural store after her husband died.
Monday-night music gatherings have long been held at McClurg, a tiny place in rural Taney County, Missouri. The gatherings began decades ago and are held in a former general store. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
Members of the Nimble Thimbles, as the club is known, have long quilted weekly in a former one-room school deep in rural Ozark County, Missouri. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
There are quilting circles and music parties, too.
Like in McDowell, where musicians recently revived a Saturday night music party that had been closed since Covid. Or in McClurg, another faded town where a former general store is the site of a long-running Monday music party and potluck. Both of those places are communities that exist today in name only, aside from their namesake gatherings.
Quilting is another draw, with women gathering in church basements, community centers, and former one-room schools across the region.
“Most of the guys all go to the sale barn, so at least we’ve got something to do,” said Audrey Turner, a quilter who gathers weekly with friends in a former one-room school. “I think most of us look forward to Wednesdays.”
Regardless, if we live in the woods or on the busiest street, we need connections today.
Champion, Missouri, is a tiny settlement in rural Douglas County. Today, basically all that remains is its church – housed in the former rural school – and its Henson Store. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
Back in Champion
Which takes me beyond the blacktop and back to Champion.
Few today remember when there was more in Champion because there’s never been much more than there is today. Once upon a time, it did have a rural school, which consolidated with a down-the-road district in 1959.
Today, that building is the Champion Church of Christ. It still has a service on Sunday afternoons, reportedly to accommodate dairy farmers who have set milking schedules.
Just four people regularly attend church at Twin Knobs Chapel in rural Douglas County, Missouri. Before their longtime minister died, the members made a commitment to keep meeting for as long as they could. That was about a decade ago. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
One of the folks who remembers its school days is Doug Hutchison, whose feet have long crossed the store’s wooden floorboards from his home about a mile away.
He sits near the stove during Betty’s birthday celebration, recalling times like the days when he could get a bottle of pop and a candy bar for 15 cents.
“Back when I was a kid, I liked to come down here on a Saturday afternoon,” Hutchison said. “Why, I bet there would be 30 to 40 people here and a dozen kids to play with.”
Despite the passage of time and the kids who grew up, those afternoons at the store remain constant. It’s a place “To keep up on the local happenings,’” he said, citing good-natured ribbing from friends.
“Of course, I get ‘abuse’ all the time,” he said.
But there are practical benefits, too.
Gathering around the old wood stove is a common pastime in Champion. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
“The way it is, I’ve got a mile (to Champion),” he said. “And the other way, it’s 20 miles to town.”
My visit to Champion for Betty’s birthday party is only one of many I’ve been fortunate to make over the years. I began visiting in 2016 after I learned of this rural store in the middle of nowhere and went off to find it. And, once I found it, I kept finding my way back there.
On those leisurely afternoons spent in plastic chairs or the couch in back, I see some folks come by to simply visit. Others stop for a sandwich, which Betty makes from deli meat and cheese she pulls from a fridge. She still has a box of credit books next to the scale, the latter has been used to weigh local babies born at home.
Champion is a glimpse of a past that you thought had disappeared. Yet you know that, at some point, the spell is likely to be broken.
Because what happens when Betty is gone?
“I don’t know what we’d do without her,” said Wilda Moses, who writes the local news items for the newspapers and also publishes them online as the Champion News. “She’s the center of the community.”
Looking Forward
I dread the day when Betty isn’t at the store, because I fear that my memories of Champion will be all that’s left of the community. The idyllic afternoons around that stove or on the porch, where it feels like time moves just a little slower could slip away.
It’s also a greater concern for me when I think about generational rural spaces. Many of the remote gathering spots I intersect with are a combination of longtime locals and a few folks who have come into the region more recently.
As the folks with the “institutional memories” fade into the past, will these places continue as they have? It’s entirely possible. But I also see that in our segmented and fractured world it’s not a given.
Kaitlyn McConnell is the founder of Ozarks Alive, a cultural preservation project through which she has documented the region through hundreds of articles since 2015.
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