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A little ways to the east of the Springfield city limits, in a pastoral, wooded setting, is an old white church, which still holds services every Sunday. The current Mt. Pisgah United Methodist Church was built in 1888, just over two decades after the Civil War ended and 50 years after Springfield was incorporated.

In the days of segregation, African Americans had to refer to The Green Book to find places to safely stay overnight when they traveled. And a three-story, Victorian house in central Springfield was on the list.

He said his name was Omar Palmer, although he answered no questions about his past. It’s been said he arrived by train in Crane Missouri around 1929-1931, then made his way about 10 miles east through Stone County to the very small farm community of Oto, to establish the first of 3 medical clinics in the area.

In the Ozarks, caves serve as geological landmarks and a testament to the region's Karst topography. But some caves in the region are woven into the legends and folklore passed from one generation to the next.

A woman’s alleged horseback ride through a small Ozarks boomtown in 1913 caught the attention of newspapers throughout the Midwest.

As we continue our series “Mysteries of the Hollers,” we now travel to Roaring River State Park, where a so-called Mountain Maid once resided in a cabin tucked away in the woods.

Near a winding, country highway, an old cemetery is nestled between a pasture of cattle and a corn field a few miles southeast of West Plains, Missouri. The Howell Valley Cemetery, originally known as the Langston Cemetery, dates back to shortly after the Civil War; several relatives of President George Washington are buried beneath these towering Oak trees.

About 20 years ago, historian Lou Wehmer bought a collection of old negatives from a longtime photographer in Willow Springs. The negatives were each four-by-five inches, from an antique, large format camera.

This is the story of a mysterious man, a pianist and music teacher by profession, who showed up in the small Northwest Arkansas town of Cincinnati in Washington County in the 1870s. He went by the name of Edwin Dolgoruki—sometimes reported as “G. Dolgoruki,” but usually as Edwin. But to this day no one is sure of who the man was, where he actually came from, or what was his real story.

Former Springfield News-Leader columnist Mike O’Brien wrote in May of 2001 that in 1946, a publishing house in Kansas put out a 32-page booklet called “True Stories of Peculiar People and Unusual Events in the Ozarks.” It was written by former Kansas City newspaper reporter William R. Draper.

Welcome back to our Sense of Community series, "Mysteries from the Hollers."

Eighty miles southeast of Springfield, deep in the Ozark Mountains lies a secluded getaway spot that draws people from all over the world. It boasts a river stocked with Rainbow Trout and a restaurant that makes one heck of a cobbler—but the town of Rockbridge, Missouri also has a gem of a past.

Welcome to our Sense of Community series, "Mysteries from the Hollers."

George Washington Carver, famous for his many contributions to agriculture as a chemist at the Tuskegee Institute, was born into slavery sometime in the 1860s (no one knows for sure) on the farm of Moses Carver in Diamond, Missouri.

Smallin Civil War Cave near Ozark has a rich history, dating back to right after the last Ice Age. It was also a sacred space for the Osage tribes. But after the Osage moved to Kansas and Oklahoma, it became a community spot for pioneers and townfolk.

Smallin Civil War Cave outside of Ozark, Missouri, has more history to it than its name would suggest. KSMU’s Claire Kidwell went there to explore its ancient past—which includes a fascinating element surrounding the winter solstice.

Although much of the culture of native tribes has been lost in translation, scholars and archeologists have pieced together a retelling of the Midwest’s native people. They’ve done so though artifacts, journals and a sheer motivation to know more.

On a cold winter week in 1925, two babies were born in a hospital in West Plains, Missouri. They shared the same doctor and even the same first name. But one would grow up to stroll the red carpets of Hollywood, and the other would retire as a horse farmer in one of the most rural places in the Ozarks.

Tucked away off Highway 76 just north of the entrance to Silver Dollar City is an old one-room clapboard building. Next to it, a two-story house, which must have been quite grand in its day, sits abandoned. The roof of the porch has caved in, and ragged curtains hang at the windows. There’s also an old smokehouse on the property, a building that was constructed several years after the other structures and the remains of a trail ride that operated there in the 1980s and 1990s.

A tiny town in south-central Missouri was once a refuge for bank robbers and outlaws. 92-year-old Dick Deupree remembers when Dora had its fair share of bandits.