Man writes 400-page history of Bloomfield

BLOOMFIELD, Mo. -- There's more to Bloomfield than the Stars and Stripes Museum and Library. Much more, according to Robert H. Forister.

His 400-page book on the small Stoddard County town, "Bloomfield, Missouri: Highland in the Swamps," began appearing on Southeast Missouri bookstore shelves last week.

"Southeast Missouri, for one reason or another, has been neglected by historians," Forister said. "There's a lot of history here, and you keep scratching and you keep finding more."

With Bloomfield being on Crowley's Ridge, it was an important commercial center with trade making its way north and south along the ridge.

"Bloomfield goes back before the state of Missouri was formed," Forister said, noting that when Bloomfield was established in 1835, there was no Sikeston, no Charleston.

"Bloomfield in the early years was the most prominent town south of Cape Girardeau and Fredericktown," he said

Although the research was conducted in 2001 and 2002, "I've been working on it since I moved here in 1965," Forister said.

Forister used both primary and secondary sources for the book, digging through old newspapers, courthouse and school records as well as interviewing older residents, "mostly to get a flavor of the times," he said.

Even so, with so much material to cover, it reads more like "encyclopedic source text" than a story, he said.

This is the third history Forister has written. "History of Stoddard County" was written 1971, and "Complete History of Butler County" was written in 1999 for that county's 150th anniversary.

Forister graduating from Scott City High School in 1951 and taught in Blodgett and Bloomfield after getting his degree from Southeast Missouri State University.