Ozarks Community Scholar Suzi Vause–What She did this Summer

Welcome back to Stories from the Field and a new post in our Show Me Folk blog. The blog is dedicated space for staff, student workers, traditional artists, cultural experts, consultants, and community scholars to share photo essays on an array of topics in Missouri’s traditional arts and folklife. Guest blogger Suzi Vause is a long-time friend of Missouri Folk Arts. In 1996, she apprenticed in walking wheel spinning with the late Elma Moss. Suzi excelled at spinning on the large wheel, and the very next year, she mentored her own apprentice in the tradition. Suzi is known by all as someone who leads a particularly active life and one that includes practicing or sampling many traditional arts. She is an accomplished old-time fiddler and has traveled around the state of Missouri, the Ozarks region, and the U.S. to participate in jams and festivals. 

Until recently, Suzi taught in the East Carter County School District. Now that she’s retired, she has even more time to enjoy all the traditional arts in the region and beyond. Additionally, Suzi participated in a Community Scholars Workshop that was presented by Arkansas Folk & Traditional Arts and Missouri Folk Arts in the fall of 2023. Since that time, she has actively been working on a project to document stories about a regional shivaree tradition, one that celebrates newlyweds noisily on the night of their wedding. Below, Suzi shares some stories and videos from the field.  

Community Scholar Project on Shivarees

I have been doing a lot of filming of various things. My progress on recording what the people in my area remember of Chivarees/Shivarees has been slow, but I know I have three more to record. I did record Viola Crites, our 100-year-old centurion.

Her nieces also requested a program that we coordinated at the Ellsinore Pioneer Museum titled “Wedding Dresses with a Story,” which was very well attended and had many stories shared. In addition to this project, I had a busy summer.

 

Eddie Mae Herron Center & Museum

In May, my Daughters of the American Revolution chapter and I visited with Pat Johnson and Ethel Tompkins at the Eddie Mae Herron Center & Museum in Pocahontas, Arkansas. Ms. Johnson founded the Center in a former one-room schoolhouse in Randolph County that served Black students during segregation. I want to share how excited I was to spend a few hours with Pat Johnson. She is such a remarkable lady and also invited her friend Ms. Tompkins, who works with Hoxie—The First Stand, to share her story of attending Hoxie, Arkansas schools the first year of integration in 1955, just a year after Brown v. Board of Education. Hoxie is also in Randolph County. I videorecorded Ms. Tompkins’ presentation and uploaded it to my YouTube channel. I strongly urge readers to visit the Eddie Mae Herron Center & Museum!

 

Ellsinore Museum

During the summer months, I was very involved with volunteering at the Museum, where we coordinated weekly Summer Saturdays programs from June 1 – August 28. We had classes on splint baskets, yarn-wrapped coil baskets, pottery with Dave Porter, and crochet.

We also hosted several demonstrations and presentations by local experts.

• The Poplar Bluff Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution came in period dress and shared information about Camp Followers and offered hands-on family activities. Camp Followers typically were the wives and families of the Revolutionary War soldiers who did the troops’ laundry and made bandages from bed linens donated by locals.

• Rick Mansfield portrayed Henry Schoolcraft.

• Aaron Hendershot updated visitors on the Ozark Chinquapin Foundation’s restoration progress and demonstrated how to make wooden treenware.

• We celebrated the 120-year-old Alcorn House and visitors had the chance to see Carter County School Records from rural one room schools.

We also organized a Sesquicentennial Celebration of Crommertown, a rural community that began with a sawmill that bought timber from early settlers, who were not connected to Grandin’s area of Missouri Mining & Lumber.  William Crommer and the local community built the sawmill about 6 miles outside of Ellsinore. The community that grew up around it became known as Crommertown and included a church that began on top of a hill before moving down by the school in 1904.  The school at the bottom of the hill may have been rebuilt, but we have no record of that so far. It appears that the CCC may have rocked the school building that now stands.  One person attending the celebration recalled that he knew for certain that the Civilian Conservation Corps did the rock work but has no written record.  Because of the Museum’s involvement in the celebration, we have had a number of community members step up to help with the continuing repairs, mowing, and financial support of this restoration.

Additionally, a future project has come to surface as we are the only place holding our county’s historical artifacts, which includes records from our one room schools.  The community would like a map of where those schools were located.  I have new people donating artifacts, and I discovered that at one time there were around 25 different rural schools in the county. There is no map existing that we know of to pinpoint their location.

Our community is also interested in installing placards to visually show where Ellsinore’s original buildings were located on Cleveland Street. Almost every building on Cleveland Street had burnt down at least once, including the Livery Stable that stood where the Museum now is located. For instance, the train depot, which no longer has a trace visible, stood at the bottom of the hill and was the whole reason the town of Ellsinore was formed.  The Museum holds original objects from the depot, including the clerk’s chair, pictures of the depot, and pictures of many of the old buildings that once lined what was then Ellsinore’s main street.

My Summer Travels

Beyond the Museum, it was a very busy summer. In June, as an example, I visited the Rolla area to meet with my Felting Ladies, who meet each month. We make felt from colorful wool, turn the products into something fun, enjoy an always delicious potluck lunch, then decide on the next month’s project.

Next, I attended Foraging Event #1 with my friend Bo Brown over in the rural Wayne County area and did two hours of a 3-hour foraging walk. They actually did not walk far, but ever since my injury from a fall 10 years ago I do not balance or walk very well without the use of my cane. I took lots of notes, so I grabbed downtime in the shade to recollect my notes and make better ones. My friends took videos for me, and I followed up with Bo about identification. This was my first official foraging walk.  Sad thing is that as a child, my dad had taught me to recognize so many plants and trees by both their bark and leaves.  It’s “snooze you lose” because I never needed that information until now at 74 years of age. The “granny ladies” of Carter County had taught me medicinal plants but only the ones I needed like plantain, dandelion root, and the Black Cohosh to make tincture for menopause.  I do not remember them ever talking about eating anything but dandelion greens and poke salat.

The next day, I drove on to Springfield to spend part of the day with a friend before ending up in Fordland, at a nonexistent town with a 100-year-old grocery store that serves somewhat as a community center.  Kaitlyn McConnell, our fellow Community Scholar who authors Ozarks Alive, put on one of her Folk Lure Exchange programs with Rachael West of Eating the Ozarks.  I had not met Rachael yet, and she was a pleasure to meet. She is young, fun, and funny!  I immediately fell in love with her style of doing things and knowledge. Rachael is also a forager, who has teamed up on numerous occasions with Bo Brown and my friends Cara & Michael Snyder who are Missouri’s Mushroom gurus. As a state we have a unique thing happening in the area of foraging and learning to survive off the weeds of our land but not only that.  They have learned the combinations of pairing things together to make things very gourmet in the offerings, and it is simply heaven when it comes to taste.  They are becoming a much sought after trio nationwide.

I headed back home for the Museum’s Summer Saturday program featuring the Poplar Bluff Chapter of the DAR. I was exhausted after that and too tired to go look for green walnut hulls to make Nocino, Italian liqueur that a friend told me how to make according to how his Italian grandma had taught him. That Tuesday, I left for Champaign/Urbana area to meet up with my old-time string band friends Paul & Christine Bren, and friend and fiddle mentor Billy Mathews.  We celebrated my 74th birthday by having a great meal together and playing tunes that night before heading onto Kalamazoo, Michigan to play old-time music for a whole weekend.

July and August ended up just as busy with the second great-grandbaby of the year making his arrival, family vacation, and assisting with the local 2-day Labor Day Festival that included bed races! You can see I am staying very busy and appreciate all of you and the projects you are doing.

 

Published September 16, 2024