FATHER, DAUGHTER DONATE ORAN FARM TO SOUTHEAST

Lynn S. Bollinger and daughter Nancy Friend Bollinger Adams wanted to preserve their 260-acre farm near Oran.

They couldn't keep it in the family so they donated it to Southeast Missouri State University with the stipulation that the school continue operating it as the Friend Family Farm.

In all, the father and daughter donated more than $375,000 in cash and land to the Southeast Missouri University Foundation to support the school's Center for Regional History and Cultural Heritage.

The farm land is valued at nearly $326,000. The farm is run by a tenant. Income from the farm will help fund the history center, Southeast officials said.

In addition to the farm, Bollinger and Adams made an additional cash gift of $50,000 to finance student scholarships and other program improvements at the history center.

Nancy and her husband, Neil, have no children. "I am the last one of the family," she said Monday in a telephone interview from her Godfrey, Ill., home.

"It had always been a dream of my mother's that the farm would stay in the Friend family name and be a farm," she said.

Nancy Adams' mother, Virginia Friend Bollinger, died in January 1996. Adams' father, who lives in a retirement complex in St. Louis, is 93 years old.

As part of the donation, the records of the family farm have been turned over to the university.

"We have given all our family papers and pictures to the archives at the university," said Adams, a retired high school English teacher.

She said the family has ties to the Cape Girardeau area and Southeast Missouri State University.

Her father grew up in Cape Girardeau. Her mother grew up in Oran and attended Southeast Missouri State where she obtained a teaching certificate.

A number of family relatives also attended Southeast over the years.

Dr. Frank Nickell directs the history center at Southeast. Nickell said the donation is the largest in the 20-year history of the center.

"It will enable us to do things that we have not been able to even think about before," Nickell said.

Among other things, the center plans to buy new recording equipment and record more oral histories in the region.

The money also will be used to transcribe oral histories that have already been taken as well as new ones.

"We have a lot of oral history interviews that I have done that are still in the cassettes and have never been transcribed," Nickell said.

The center also plans to use the money to publish books concerning the Southeast Missouri region. "We are sitting on five or six manuscripts right now," he said.

Nickell said he visited with Bollinger and Adams about a year and a half ago. He obtained records of the family farm at that time, but the actual donation of the farm wasn't finalized until last week.

Nickell values the business records of the family farm. The farm has been in the Friend family since acquired as a land grant from the U.S. government in the 1830s.

"It is really a fine collection of historical materials -- receipts for grain sales, purchases of oil and tobacco and food stuffs," Nickell said. The documents include photographs of the farm.

Nickell said the university doesn't have any other agricultural records of this kind.

The Friend and Bollinger families are two of the oldest families in Southeast Missouri, Nickell said.

Virginia Friend Bollinger was the granddaughter of John Friend, who was the first settler in the Oran area, Nickell said.

Lynn Bollinger was in the first graduating class of Cape Girardeau Central High School in 1921. He left Cape Girardeau in 1922.