OAK RIDGE RETURNS TO DAYS OF OLD

OAK RIDGE -- Charlie and Lynn, Pete and Pat, and Beck and Kate were tearing up a field next to Oak Ridge High School Sunday afternoon, just to show folks how it used to be done.

But draft horses and mules still are part of life in this farming community once known as Lizard Lick.

Oak Ridge showed off its historical roots Saturday and Sunday during the first-ever Living History Days, an event organized around the ongoing Mississippi River Valley Fall Drive.

Charlie Mangels owns Charlie and Lynn, Pete and Pat belong to Grover Sachse, and the mules -- Beck and Kate -- are Earl Amelunke's. They use horses and mules to plow gardens, drill wells, rake and haul because they don't pack down the ground the way a tractor does.

"This county was farmed by mules," said Mangels, who trains and sells horses and also shows them at fairs.

Sachse allows, "For me they're pretty much a hobby."

Together, the three own enough antique implements to work a farm, but Sachse said good harnesses are especially hard to find.

Oak Ridge's Miller family once boasted Missouri's largest mule farm, and provided mules to the U.S. Army. A descendant still maintains the farm at a smaller size.

One visitor to Living History Days pointed out that mules even have influenced the local patois. "Gee" is the mule-driver's command for right; "haw" means "left;" to say you don't "gee-haw" with someone means you don't get along.

Also on hand Sunday was Bert Seyer, who grew up in Uniontown and moved to Oak Ridge when she married in 1960. Seyer, dressed in pioneer clothing, had mixed lye with hog lard and water to make a soup that eventually would become lye soap.

The soap, which people used to claim was especially good for poison ivy, set in the kettle or a mold overnight before it was cut into chunks and allowed to dry for three months.

Oak Ridge initially was called Lizard Lick's for a natural salt deposit that attracted wildlife and two Indian tribes. Settlers moved in in 1852, and the town was incorporated in 1869. Five years later, Cape Girardeau County's first high school was established here.

Jo Ann Hahs, an elementary-school teacher who was the primary organizer of Living History Days, put together a display from the school.

There was her mother's 1930 cheerleading costume pictures of the drafty gymnasium -- actually a converted barn -- that finally was torn down and replaced in the early 1950s.

"You could see outside through the weather-boarding, and it was heated by coal stoves at each end," recalled Hahs.

William Lang, who graduated from the school in 1934, was a member of the basketball team that called the gym home. "We put on brown cloth gloves to play sometimes," he remembered.

The school display included a collection of yearbooks dating back to 1917, and senior class rings to 1924. Only two years' worth of rings were missing.

Hahs was making corn husk dolls on Sunday, and her women's extension club was selling home-made pear honey. Though the first event was purposefully small and not particularly well attended, she said townspeople already are planning next year's demonstrations.

"We're greenhorns," she said.