Preserving our past: A note of introduction

Joining The Branson Globe as a historical writer is a privilege, and I am truly grateful for the opportunity to share this space with you.

My deep love for Ozark history comes from spending my life immersed in it—from guiding tours through the depths of Marvel Cave to serving with the Stone County Historical Society. But beyond the geology and archives, our history belongs to the people who built it: the quiet grit, everyday triumphs and roots planted across these hills and hollows.

My goal is simple: to listen, research carefully and honor these local stories with respect and care. A community’s history belongs to everyone. If you have a piece of regional lore, a family story, or a historical detail to share, I would be honored to hear it.

Thank you for welcoming me to the paper. I look forward to learning alongside you.

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The road to ‘Red gold’: Axes, ties and steam in the Ozark canneries

In the hollows around Reeds Spring, post-rain strolls often uncover tiny, rusted tin disks stamped with a center hole. To local elders like eighty-nine-year-old Thomas "Unk" Hawkins, sitting on his Galena porch, these discarded caps are historical tokens of a lost Ozark era.

"Long before tomato vines took root, these hills belonged to the broadaxe," Hawkins recalls. In the late 19th century, timber men known as "tie hackers" swarmed Stone County. With broadaxes and crosscut saws, they felled virgin white oak to hand-hew heavy wooden ties for the expanding Iron Mountain Railroad, hauling them down steep hollows by mule team.

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Photos submitted by John Larance

This backbreaking labor paved the way for the agricultural boom that followed. Tie hackers cleared millions of cross-ties, leaving sunny, stump-dotted clearings along the flinty slopes. Farmers soon realized these newly opened ridges offered ideal drainage and fertile soil tailored for tomatoes.

"First came tie hackers with broadaxes for the railroad, and right behind came tomato vines in the soil they cleared."

"That’s the cap off a number-three tomato can," Hawkins explains. "My mother peeled forty buckets a day through the heat of 1937 for the Powell brothers to buy my first leather boots. You smelled like scalded acid and copper kettles through October, with fingernails stained deep red. But when we smelled that cook-stove steam, we knew the valley was eating."

For decades, Stone County ran on tomato time. Though outsiders viewed the Ozarks as unyielding rock, these cleared, flinty hills produced the nation's sweetest, fleshiest tomatoes—known as "Red Gold."

With fresh tomatoes perishing quickly on rough mountain roads, canneries set up directly at the source. The Powell Brothers Canning Company in Reeds Spring became a community heartbeat. During harvest peak, morning steam whistles echoed off bluffs as local families camped in tents outside the plant.

Inside tin-roofed sheds, women peeled on wooden crates for five cents a bucket while young boys carried water across pulp-stained floors. During World War II, Powell Brothers and many other canning factories shifted full capacity to feed Allied forces overseas.

By the late 1950s, modern highways and California corporate farms ended the Ozark canning boom. Today, mossy foundations and old tie-cutter stumps remain near Reeds Spring—quiet testaments to the hackers who cleared the land and the canners who harvested its red gold.