Rural Routes: Brazeau resident Joseph Barber talks life and history in rural Perry County

Editor’s Note: Rural Routes is an ongoing photo feature series about Southeast Missouri residents.

BRAZEAU, Mo. — Joseph Barber lives on the same piece of rural Perry County farmland that has been in his family since before the Civil War.

Born in Perryville, the Brazeau man has “always been interested in history my whole life,” including the history of his home county.

In 2002, he said he had his book, “The Settlement Patterns of Perry County, Missouri 1850-1900,” published. The book was about a decade-long endeavor to complete.

He was raised in the house where he now lives with his mother, Louella Barber — which was built by his father, Larry Barber, in early 1960s. His father died about three or four years ago.

Joseph Barber pauses while working at his family's home Thursday in Brazeau, Missouri.Jacob Wiegand

But Joseph hasn’t always been there. He spent time in Pennsylvania, worked in Illinois for the Center for American Archaeology and even was part of a dig at former President Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia.

In the late 1990s, he said he attended graduate school at Southeast Missouri State University where he obtained a Master of Arts in history.

The farm, Joseph said, has been in his family since the 1850s. On Thursday, he described some of the sights of the land while doing some maintenance outside one of the buildings.

There’s the bed of an old pickup truck he said he painted yellow for safety. The spot where a barn used to stand, but was destroyed in a tornado. A building that was a “1938 chicken house.”

“This is the old smokehouse,” Joseph said. “My dad added wings on it. And I used to raise poultry in there. And that’s what I’ll probably be doing again once I fix it up and wall off the back.”

Joseph Barber grabs a pair of shears from a building at his family's home Thursday in Brazeau, Missouri.Jacob Wiegand

He recalled attending Perryville High School in his younger years.

“The bus would come here and I’d go to Farrar, Crosstown, into Perryville,” he said.

It’s a 17-mile route Joseph said he ran once while on the track team.

“I started here and went to Perryville High School,” he said. “I was pretty tired.”

These days, he said he spends a lot of time reading and watching lectures on DVD.

Since getting his master’s degree, he said he’s “more into doing the reading and getting ready to write another book.”

Joseph mentioned the possibility of writing a book about the history of Brazeau, which he said celebrated its bicentennial this year.

“People go in Cape ... ‘Are you from an area that’s more animals than people?’” he said with a laugh when talking about Brazeau’s population. “That’s what they ask me. I go, ‘Yep.’”