Maramac Spring and its old iron works is comparable to Palmer. Prehistoric and more recent artifacts including mining, timber and agriculture joined with the beauty of the place make this park in Phelps County a multi-layered experience.
Unlike Maramac, however, most everything has been removed from Palmer. Or fallen down or grown up. You have to be somewhat of a detective to appreciate Palmer. The more you learn, the more you appreciate how life has always been a good struggle for most people in this region.

The Mark Twain Forest has some interesting resources on the area, such as a short history of the town written by Anne Cooper of Caledonia several years ago and a paper written on a Depression era self-help project in Palmer, but little more has been written on the community.

It may be as old as Potosi and communities further east in the Bellevue Valley, which date to the late 1770s. Once the town was known as Webster and located on the old White River Trace which the Trail of Tears followed in the 1830s. My focus was on more recent history.

Dollye Cole Blount was the first person I met who knows any of the history of Palmer. She was taking a walk early one June morning on a road to Palmer checking over her fence rows along pastures by Courtois Creek. She and her late husband Howard Blount farmed and ran the store and post office for the community of Brazil due west of Palmer.

Brazil had 32 families during the Depression, when a lot of railroad ties were made and several moonshiners helped bring cash into the area. Now five families live in the Brazil area.

In those days everyone had it hard, but not many people moved out from the city to try to make a go of it in this part of Washington County, she recalled.

Her father, the Rev. Dollison Cole, was a circuit riding Methodist minister who served Palmer and other churches in this area -- Belgrade, Council Bluff, Joseph Chapel, Marler Chapel, Sugar Grove and Sunlight. Born on a farm near the village of Courtois, Mrs. Blount remembers Palmer as being the major community in the area, which included communities such as Enough, Goodwater, Quaker, Shirley, and Viburnum.

Britz Halbert's store and hotel were the main attractions in Palmer but there was also a blacksmith shop, many homes for miners and buildings associated with mining companies. The Halbert Store was taken down in the early 1970s.

"People felt bad when it was torn down because it had so many memories for people. It was probably the largest store in the area and had things others didn't." Her brother's business at nearby Courtois was the last country general store in this area to go out of business, she speculated.
For Zelma Banta, a Potosi resident, the church at Palmer holds the strongest memories. Mrs. Banta celebrated her 94th birthday this August and has an excellent memory of her first teaching job, just after she was graduated from the Potosi High School in 1915.

That fall she came to Palmer to teach. She was 17 years old and had 65 students in the first through eighth grades.

"People said there was a rough element of people that lived out there. They were lacking in education, but they were good hearted people, I would say. My father got this school for me, and I'm going to teach it," Mrs. Banta recalled of her determination to be a teacher.

"They said it was the best school they had in years. I knew how to control children. I taught them manners, courtesies, and they were all seemingly happy over my success."

Up until the 1940s, when a second school house was built at Palmer, the Palmer Church served as both a community church and school. At the end of Z highway in southwestern Washington County, the Palmer Church is one of the larger wooden buildings in this part of the Ozarks.

Some people say it is close to 200 years old and it may be close to that. Both schools closed in the '50s, and the newer building exists only as a concrete foundation on the ridge above the old church.

Hazel White and Gladys Compton, two sisters now living in Potosi, grew up near Palmer and recall Mrs. Banta as being a teacher the whole community respected.

"Palmer was the kind of place where people did everything together. Nobody had anything so we all just helped one another," Hazel White recalled. There were a number of black families who also farmed and mined, as did most other families there at that time, and though their children did not go to the Palmer school, they were included in other social activities and the church, the sisters said.

The girls and their parents moved to Frankclay so their father could get a job in one of the St. Joe mines and the girls could go to high school. They recalled leaving their farm was one of the saddest days of their growing up.

"I remember at the auction Father had to sell our team of mules, Kit and Dine. We just cried and cried, because one of the miners bought our friends, the mules."

"They were going underground in the mines and we knew it would then be a hard, short life for those animals," Mrs. Compton said. "Those mules were friends for all the kids up and down Hazel Creek when we were little."

Palmer had a reputation as a rough town because it was a mining town where people could get rich quick, if they were lucky. Several people said in interviews that fortunes were found in a day and lost overnight in card games or bets. Flossie Welker, who lives north of Palmer on highway 8 with her husband Steve, recalls her great uncle was one of those who discovered a valuable deposit of barite but lost it in a card game.
Barite, used for many purposes in oil, paint, medical and other industries, was, along with lead, the main product at Palmer. Almost 100 mines, or "diggings" as they are called locally, have been catalogued in the area.

Steve Welker who says he is called "The Great White Hunter" for good reason, knows this territory as well as anyone, several people confirmed. Though he is closing in on his 80th year, Welker has not slowed down and still chases turkeys whenever they are legal game.
He grew up in Grassy Hollow, to the east of Palmer, went to Seed Tick School and settled with the rest of his family in Palmer as a boy. Steve's brother, Merlin and his wife Mildred are the last residents in the immediate Palmer area.
Much of Steve's life has been spent working in the tiff industry, the common name for barite mining. The diggings and washing plants, smelters and other facilities associated with the minerals have been owned by a variety of firms over the years, many of which employed Steve at one time or another.

The tailings ponds left by these operations are one of the most important resources from the mining days, he believes. These ponds have gradually grown up with vegetation along their banks and now provide environment making for good hunting and fishing.

"I'd like to see these lakes be improved if possible," Welker said. "This area has changed a lot over the years. Hazel Creek used to have more water in it and a lot more fish. I'd like to see the government do more to control poachers and those kinds of hunters who take sound shots when they think they hear game."

Bob Runner, a long time Salem resident, also remembers Palmer from the early days. He recalls staying at the Palmer Hotel in the fall of '28 as part of a timber cruising crew from the S.L. Culler Lumber Co. of Salem. The firm had just purchased a 10,000 acre tract of virgin Ozark Yellow Pine south of Palmer from the J.W. Hughes estate.

"My job was to count trees. I had just been hired on as an apprentice lumberman. I was 14 years old," Runner recalled.

"The hotel was large, but not very busy then. It was hard times. We had our meals there, and I remember the big China pitchers and basins in each room. There was no running water in the place."

The firm did not begin cutting this tract until a year later because in February 1929, the bottom dropped out of the timber market.

"By June of that year we didn't have any orders at all for our milled lumber," Runner said. Mr. Culler's crew took three years to cut the Hughe's ground, then it was sold to the Forest Service to the best of my knowledge."

A lumber camp with some 20 buildings was put up near Palmer, he said. Fifty men worked on the job, one of the last large tracts of virgin pine to be cut in the Ozarks. The firm sold 12"x 20" posts 2-feet long, and longer for special orders, cut from these pine.

"The 10,000 acres wasn't all pine, but where it was pine, nothing else grew. The forest floor had no underbrush and was so open that the tiff miners could drive their teams and wagons through the pines to dig wherever they wanted," Runner recalled. "The Hughes family apparently didn't care to collect royalties on what was dug from their ground. There were holes everywhere."

These aspects of Palmer's history, the timber and mining -- are important historic topics that would likely interest people visiting the area. Oliver Crocker grew up near Palmer and now works for the City of Potosi and travels on the back roads exploring his old haunts whenever he gets the chance. Crocker remembers the Depression well.

The Forest Service, in conjunction with other government agencies, worked to help people who were without resources, homes or the possibility of jobs. The then recently abandoned Berryman Civilian Conservation Corps camps was torn down and local men were hired as carpenters to build houses from the lumber for people in the Palmer area who had nowhere to go, according to Crocker and Steve Welker.

The government plan called for a community garden to be organized along Hazel Creek near the town cemetery. Steve Welker was a supervisor for part of that operation. A community canning shed and an artesian well were built nearby. Remains of these are still in the woods.

Both Steve and Oliver know many fascinating places in this area. Up in the woods on Forest Service land to the west of Hazel Creek is the foundation of the Mallow School, built in the '40s but closed in the '50s because of consolidation. Oliver was only able to attend school there for a few years because gasoline rationing during World War II made it necessary for him to drop out of school and help his father run the farm getting in enough hay to fuel the draft animals.

Across the creek from the former Mallow School, Oliver pointed through the woods to the roof of an old sharecropper's cabin built on the ridge.

"Sharecropping used to be common in this area," he said. "It was one way a young family could start saving a little money so they could eventually buy their own place. Or larger families or an individual could stay on if they were not able to buy their own ground. That doesn't happen much anymore."

Many more features of life in Palmer seem gone forever. They deserve further investigation.

For example in the Forest Service's Hazel Creek Campground, the remains of a large stone dam and lead smelter merit examination and protection.

These are only a few of the stories heard over the summer. My tapes have been summarized and final report accepted.

Talking with people who know Palmer, one quickly learns they have intense feelings for the past. Their memories haven't faded much over the years in part because Palmer attracted strong willed people who look back on their connections to this area and time with pride.

All their work and struggles are not completely gone. A rock walled town spring across from the old church still attracts visitors who must wonder how the stonework came to be here in the middle of the forest.

The huge timber growing around this spring, in the cemetery and by the old wooden church gives a sense of what Indians and the first settlers saw. Maintaining the wild quality of Palmer is at least as important as the area's history, many people indicated in interviews over the summer.

This combination of almost forgotten history, mining ruins and Ozark wilderness, makes Palmer a perfect haven for ghosts.

What happens next will probably evolve slowly. That seems to be the nature of the place. At least some of the Palmer's story is now preserved as oral history, as well by ghosts.

Alex Primm lives in Rolla and specializes in writing on the environment and Ozark history.

The following is copied from a page printed October 15, 1874, in the magazine MINES, METALS, AND ARTS. It was recently given to me by Ann Delashmit Buckley.

The4 washed clean mineral passes through the screen into the hopper into a box beneath the jig, is ready for the furnace.
The coarse mineral falling on the floor near the wash trunk is put into the latter and washed in the common way.

A CAMERON PUMP, 12 inches stroke, sucks the water from the race and supplies all parts of the works.

A NO. 5 STURTEVANT FAN of Todd & Co., St. Louis, a cornmill and Elliot's cornsheller, a saw, &C., complete the main division of the works.

THE AIR FURNACE Built by EMELAUER, is of the same pattern as that of the Ohio and Missouri Lead Company near Potosi. Dimensions given in Vol. 1, No. 26 of MINES, METALS, AND ARTS. I is at present only used for smelting smittum.

ECONOMY is proven by the small number of hands which do all the furnace work as, I smelter, 1 engineer, and 1 backhand.

FUEL. There are two coal sheds. The charcoal is made of oak on the Palmer lands, and costs seven cents delivered at the furnace.

MINERAL RECEIPTS AND SHIPMENTS OF LEAD. Palmer received over 90,000 lbs. of mineral. From an examination of returns I perceive that, with the exception of a few months during the crisis, the receipts have been rapidly increasing from month to month. Some of the best miners are now sinking for deeper runs opening good prospects, temporarily affecting incoming receipts. I feel sure that they will come up with totals of 100,00 to 200,000 lbs. per month within the next quarter. The prospects, the work and management warrant it. The total shipments of pig lead from January 73, to August of the present year, amounted to 13,170 pigs, of which some 500 pigs of slag lead, the rest soft Missouri No. 1 The latter are branded "Palmer", the former "Courtois", and weigh, respectively, 85 and 74 lbs.

OTHER ITEMS. I am assured that the proprietor of this tract will leave nothing undone to prove the character of mineral deposits below the hitherto average depth of gophering in this county. I am convinced that the present condition of affairs pays expenses and a fair interest on the cost of the property to its present owner. This surplus, by the latter's orders, is devoted to prospecting purposes until more permanent prospects in single shafts shall have been developed.
The property includes, besides the furnace, the superintendent's house, office, the hotel, livery, store, warehouse, carpenter and blacksmith shops, 2 patent forges in the mines, a Cosmopolitan church, school house, barns and other outbuildings besides 85 dwellings for farmers and miners. Farmers commence mining after crops are laid by; miners who get their house free of rent with garden spot must give their whole time to mining on this tract or quit. They have fuel for the chopping and hauling. Miners receive powder and fuse free of charge when they sink through solid rock with no lead to pay. The superintendent further, supports energetic miners by taking one-third or one-half interest in sinking deep shafts. In such cases, the share of interest is equal in both expense and earnings. Miners get for mineral one-half the price of pig lead in St. Louis markets, minus the expense of hauling to Potosi which is $2.50 per gross thousand.

THE VILLAGE Is occupied by 21 tenants. The village store is kept by J. Block & Co. and under the management of Mr. Schwartz. It does a large trade in general merchandise for miles around. The total population on the Palmer tract is estimated at 300.

RAILROAD PROSPECTS. A railroad from Salem to Potosi via Palmer is being agitated. It would open a valuable mining region of lead, iron, and lumber.