Ozark cultural archive goes digital

VAN BUREN, Mo. -- A cultural archive that contains more than 500,000 pieces of Ozark history is getting a digital face-lift.

A database created by the Ozark National Scenic Riverways tracks the people, places and times preserved in artifacts and oral histories collected over the last four decades.

The collection becomes more accessible each time parts of the archive are added to the reference guide, according to museum technician Tricia Miller.

"This isn't the park service's collection. It's the public's collection," Miller said of the effort she began three years ago to shed new light on a vast collection encompassing early, rural living, and the natural world surrounding the ecosystems of the Jacks Fork and Current rivers.

Details of the Leeper community namesake, a Civil War guerrilla fighter, can instantly be found among the memories shared in an hourlong interview with a former Van Buren community leader. Every species of fish in the Jacks Fork River can be tracked to jarred samples stored in the climate-controlled archive facility.

All of the equipment needed to set up a mid-1900s fishing camp -- including a 24-foot commissary boat carved from a single log of pine -- can be traced to a donation of equipment from the Bales Boating Co.

The database catalogs each instance individuals, communities and lifeways are captured in the documents, photos and historic items.

About 95 percent of the collection is indexed into the database and an effort is underway now to make hundreds of hours of oral histories part of that.

A volunteer from the national Student Conservation Association will spend the time between now and Christmas transcribing interviews, most from Ripley and Shannon county residents. Recordings of oral interviews date back to reel-to-reel equipment, and volunteer Angelo Rolando now has the task of transforming these into indexed, transcribed documents.

"We don't know what's in those oral histories until he writes it down," Miller said of the recordings, which range from one to three hours and date back to the 1970s.

In their own words, residents such as the late Leo Andersen of Van Buren, an early advocate for the national park, and the late Anne Cooley of Eminence, Missouri, whose family had hundreds of acres of land near the Jacks Fork and Current River junction taken for the park, share their stories.

About 10 percent of the Riverways collection is housed within the Cultural Resources Curation Facility, a nondescript metal building just outside Van Buren. It sits in the heart of the Southeast Missouri forests that defined the lives of many of the inhabitants immortalized within.

Documents of Civilian Conservation Corps activities, school books from the early 1900s and a moonshine still once operated by the park service at Alley Mill are included in the collection. Clear Ozark streams produced the best moonshine, according to an archived letter from a former park superintendent.

"I've worked at nine national park sites ... but I've never worked with something like the Ozarks collection," said Miller, who is the first Riverways staff member with museum training to manage the collection.

Management of the collection was previously collateral duty for other positions.

"Tricia's personal goal is not just to make this more accessible to the park service, but to the public, and to make the public more aware of what is here," said Dena Matteson, management assistant and public information officer.

For now, the database is accessible only to Riverways staff, but Miller can use it to fill requests for information from the public.

More volunteers also are needed to continue transcribing oral histories and projects to scan and index historic photographs.

The early days of organizing the collection were overwhelming, admits Miller, who immediately began creating the database and gathering the legal releases for each oral history and donation, another large part of her work.

But it also has been rewarding.

"I grew up on a farm in New Jersey. A lot of the material in here, it's like I'm playing in grandma and grandpa's cupboards," Miller said.

The collection includes nearly 470,000 archaeological items, more than 4,500 historical items, almost 37,000 biological items and about 40,000 archival items.

"The Ozark National Scenic Riverways has the largest biological collection in the Midwest region," said Miller, adding the Riverways are home to species found no where else in the world, including a new species of trechine beetle found in Branson Cave and the saddled darter fish of the Current River.

Not all items are stored by the park service. Other items are held by 31 institutions and universities across the country.

The collection continues to grow, both through the work of NPS staff and donations from area families. One of the more recent donations, Civilian Conservation Corps records found in an old trunk by an Ellington, Missouri, family, have been accessed on a monthly basis since they arrived, Miller said.

Miller can be contacted at 573-323-8047 or tricia_miller@nps.gov.

Pertinent address:

Van Buren, Mo.