The Springfield News-Leader from Springfield, Missouri • 18

AC Tuesday Morning, January 24, The Daily News stsr: 'Anywhere I go, when I come home, Hartville, is still the best place on Emogene Fuge 4 1 Start PtV3tosKvin Manning A view of Hartville is seen (above) from the bluff at Steele Mansion. Emo- sits in her home the oldest in town under a print of Norman Rock-gene Fuge (right) a teacher in Hartville for 30 years and the local historian, well's "The Teacher." remain in Ha frontier lif rail races ov Gasconade River town paces its progress tiff s' 5T'3r i-. By Kevin Madden The Daily News HARTVILLE Where a rebel officer ordered cannons to open fire, a wooden figure of the Christ Child lies in a makeshift manger. Where the angry blasts of returning Union artillery shells exploded in the rebels' ranks, Christmas carols can be heard. Where a band of Confederate soldiers from Arkansas took a stand against a Federal army moving from Houston to Springfield on Jan.

11, 1863, a retired mailman almost 90 years later created a Nativity scene as a monument to the Prince of Peace. The gesture says something about Hartville. The Nativity scene with recorded carols and wooden jpiw, figures atop a bluff in front of the renowned 1890 Steele Man- sion has drawn thousands of visitors each Christmas since 1952 to the tiny burg on the f' Gasconade River. The Civil War battle in which Union and Confederate forces traded cannonballs by firing over and into the city was fought just a few years after the town was founded, said Emogene Fuge, 75, Hart-ville's unofficial historian. Hartville began as an overnight stopping place for wagon trains bound from Rolla, where the courthouse wall," Mrs.

Fuge recalled. "There were board sidewalks down the streets. Most of the buildings were frame buildings which later burned That's the way I recall Hartville a frontier town, really." As late as the years before World War you had to pay, $2.50 for a dusty ride on a horse-pulled hack from Hartville to Mansfield, where you caught a train to Springfield to shop or visit a relative, 87-year-old Reed Whitteker said. He got paid 50 cents to drive the hack one-way. Almost 70 years later, one thing has not changed: Hartville remains aloof from the mainstream of progress.

It seems the Frisco Railroad built its tracks south of the town in the 1880s, and the federal government repeated the slight in the mid-1920s with the construction of U.S. 60. The situation was only partially rectified when Hartville was linked to Missouri Highway 5 in 1926 and, years later, to Missouri 38. "It just left Hartville at a loss," Mrs. Fuge said.

So the commercial growth went to Johnny-come-lately towns in Wright County like Mansfield and Mountain Grove. As a result, "Hartville is not much different than it was many years ago," she added. That pleases Charles Armstrong. The 60-year-old Air Force veteran met his wife, Wilma, a Hartville native, when he was in the service, and the couple frequently visited her home town when he was stationed at Scott Air Force Base near Belleville, 111. "I liked the area," he said.

"The people are friendly, and so I decided this is where I wanted to retire. You can't find neighbors any better in the world than in Hartville, Mo. This is an honest town (with) honest people." Armstrong, a Virginia native, settled there in 1972. He serves as city mayor and manager of a 44-unit senior citizen housing complex. Currently, about 60 percent of Hartville's 570-some population is aged 65 or older, Armstrong said.

Most of the rest of the adults are kept busy working at one of the area's several saw mills or at the 250-employee H.D. Lee plant. Construction-wise, voters last year passed a $1.2 million bond issue to replace the city's high school and gymnasium, Armstrong says. And the city is preparing to build a new water tower and improve the city's water system. Things in Hartville are going at just about the rate Hartville folks prefer, Mrs.

Fuge said. Mrs. Fuge, who began teaching school in 1928 and who still serves as a substitute, belongs to Friendship Force an international exchange club that has afforded her the chance to see the United Kingdom, Korea, Germany and Mexico. Yet after seeing that much of the world, she still says: "Anywhere 1 go, when I come home, Hartville, is still the best place on earth!" Ozarks Byways appears on alternate Tuesdays in The Daily News. Look for our next report on Feb.

7. Charles Armstrong for The Steele Mansion (above) was built in 1890 and sits on a bluff overlooking Hartville. At left. Christie Lyles (left) and Hillary Huffman best friends and neighbors frolic in the snow. the railroad ended, to Springfield, Mrs.

Fuge said. Travelers of the early 1830s took advantage of the spring, which now polluted still can be seen at the edge of town. "Somebody built a store there and then somebody added a blacksmith shop," she said. With a few more additions, the town of Hartville was founded in 1851. The community had a log courthouse that offered horse and cattle thieves swift frontier justice, Mrs.

Fuge said. The structure, on the banks of the Gasconade River, was owned by her maternal great-grandfather, William Reed Wynne a Virginia native who pulled up stakes in Tennessee and moved just south of Hartville in 1860 when the clouds of civil war were formed. Hartville, which became the county seat of Wright County, needed a more permanent courthouse, and a brick structure was built in 1890, Mrs. Fuge said. It burned in 1897 and was replaced by a second brick building that in turn was replaced by the present 1965 courthouse.

All three were built on the same sight in the middle of town. If you're curious, you can drop by Wright County Associate Circuit Clerk Wilda Cogdill's office and see ancient photographs of the former seats of government "When I was a little girl they came to town in wagons and buggies and horses and tied up their horses at 4 V- A -i- r. i "4 Hand-cranked phones hooked to fences rang up small bills Ozarks quotes By Hank Billings and that I had everything in place. I walked out to the mailbox and looking up at the carport, there hung two red bells proclaiming 'Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. "At first I thought, should I take them down or with two weeks already into the new year, should I just leave them up for the next Christmas.

Then my better judgment took over. I took them down and carefully packed them away to join the other decorations in the back stairs room for another 340 days." In the same West Plains daily, Earlene Hicks observes In her "Lilly Ridge" report "I'm thankful the metric system is not used too much. It's a lot more fun to write to a friend in Florida and report we have four inces of snow instead of reporting that 0.1016 of a meter fell today." Hank Billings, the regional editor of The Daily News, compiles Ozarks Quotes. Birdie Mannon, whose "Brown Branch" column runs in Ava's Douglas County Herald, has an uneasy feeling that telephone costs are going to escalate so she communicates a possible answer. "If telephone fees raise as it seems might be possible and many have their phones discontinued, someone should see if companies that manufactured the old hand-cranked phones yet had equipment for manufacturing them again.

"Those now out of date phones had lines running from tree to tree with a pole in some places. On prairies the phones were hooked onto wire fences and calls could be sent all over a community that way. With wire fences everywhere now, that could be followed again. Anyway it is an idea." Beulah Houk offers a semi-hopeful note in a mid-January "In Fairview" column for The Humansville Star-Leader. way of our mailbox.

I get carried away when looking at them and have two or three gardens planted from my rocking chair each time I look at them. "Strange, they never warn us about insects, dry weather and weeds. Somehow my strength never can keep up with my ambitions and I never get all the things done I want to." Meanwhile, there's the snow, which she also writes about: "Mr. and Mrs. Mike Kirk and Mr.

and Mr. Frank Brankel and Anlssa visited with ui Sunday afternoon. Anissa was wishing for mow. She got her wish but they still had school. "Monda Jefferys said her little boy prayed for it to snow.

I imagine I did too when I was his age for, like him, I loved to play in the snow. Schools were never closed for snow when I went to South Greenfield School. We wouldn't have wanted them to, for recess and noon found us with our sled on the big hills sleigh riding." Another garden fever victim is Mae Glenn, whose "Hillbilly Tidbits" column is found in The Webster County Citizen at Seymour "This reporter has almost got garden fever since the garden catalogs started coming makes a person about ready to rush the season. Then along comes these cold, snowy days and throws a damper on all our plans) "Well, I read the fine print on some of the things I had in mind, and they won't be delivered until September We can't win 'em all, I guess." Mrs. Ted Gilliam reports in her "Peace Valley-White Church" column for The West Plains Daily Quill: "The day after New Years I started from room to room taking down Christmas decorations and storing them carefully away in boxes in a back stairs room.

"Just as I was feeling real smug about it all. i "If you have cabin fever, hold on, there are better days ahead. We heard the geese going north last week. They must have gotten off course, but we can hope for a brighter future." Garden fever is described by Maurine Davidson in her "South Greenfield" report for The Greenfield Vedette: "I'm getting garden fever from all the seed catalogs that are winding their way to us by i Q' Huh 'foi' if'11'. 'i Tff jVl'L P.jlf'1 Wfj 1 n.

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