Missouri Memories

Big Barren Community 

Big Barren is nestled in a valley in the southern Missouri Ozarks where I like to go visiting in my mind quite often, though not nearly often enough in the flesh.  There never was a store that I know of, or anything that could make it anything other than a community.  There were several farms once, a one-room school house and a church with a cemetary beside it.  There are still a few farms there but not many.  They are gone now, like the open stock range and acorn fed hogs that were once the norm.

Big Barren church overlooks a rocky, sometimes dry, creek for which it's named.   It was the social center of the community for generations of hard working farm families. 

It is silent now, a small whitewashed wood sentinal observing the changing times with dignity. Church services are almost never conducted here now but the memories of times past live on as long as the people who made them come home to visit.  Someone, the Heaven family probably, have thoughtfully provided a book for visitors to sign and they do, filling book after book with their name, their family name and the name of the place they migrated to after leaving here.

So many of the people who once met here every week have passed on to whatever awaits on the other side. 

The following was written by my Aunt Connie in 1979

Big Barren Church 

Connie Bridges Reddin, 1979

There's so many days I remember

At the church at the foot of the hill

It was there I accepted the Savior

And the memories are fresh with me still

If the weather was cold

We built a fire in the old wood stove

If it was too warm we used cardboard fans

From the funeral home

Once a year we had homecoming

Folks would come from miles around

After the morning worship

We had dinner on the ground

We sang and prayed and read God's Word

That inspired writers wrote

And we played the old piano

We didn't mind if it missed a note

Going to church at night we rode

In a wagon pulled by old Harvey and Jack

And if we weren't too sleepy

We would sing all the way back

My Daddy sang bass, Mommy high soprano

Leta, Lester, Vesta and I joined in on the songs

We've all scattered now

And raised families of our own

Mommy and Daddy and my husband have now all gone on

When God's through with me here

Do not for a burial plot search

Just bury me beside the others near Big Barren Church.

Aunt Connie shared this poem with her nieces in 1979.

Bridges, Davis, Heavin, Stevens, Reddin, Hurt, Buffington, Lewis, Pigg, Grindstaff, were some of the families who lived here. 

Younger generations moved to St. Louis, Poplar Bluff, Doniphan, Springfield and Columbia in search of jobs.  Others moved farther afield, the automobile factories in Flint, Michigan and fish canneries in Oregon, coal mines in West Virginia.  California, Texas, Arkansas and Tennesse are some of the states that offered wages.  Some would return "home" when they retired, though most have not.  Even though they cherish their years in this remote wilderness,their children have grown up in a different area and that is where their roots are now.  Mine are in Texas now but Big Barren owns a part of heart and it always will.

Some of the houses have rotted and fallen down, the land reclaimed by forest.  But a few old farm houses, unoccupied for years, still stand here and there...their wood gray and weathered, topped with a sheet iron roof. 

From a distance the Stevens home place seems little changed, having withstood the passing of time amazingly well.  I wish I could say I have weathered the passing of time so well.