There’s nothing special or unique about Dallas County. With a relatively small population of about 17,000 Dallas County’s only real claim to fame is Bennett Spring State Park, which it shares with the neighboring county of Laclede. Buffalo, the county seat, is just to the west of the Niangua River, and about 30 miles from my hometown of Lebanon, in Laclede County. The Niangua flows through Dallas County from the south county line in a northeasterly direction through Bennett Spring State Park where it’s joined by the waters that pour from the spring. Then, much larger and stronger, it continues along the eastern edge and through the northeastern corner of Dallas County until it reaches Camden County and the Lake of the Ozarks.

Dallas County was, until this past year, a place totally foreign to me except for Bennett Spring State Park, Lone Rock Cemetery, and maybe Windyville. Windyville, where in the 1970’s my first husband and I played and sang county, bluegrass, and gospel with friends and family in a jam session/show on Saturday nights, in the old Baptist Church which was no longer being used for Sunday services. And the little town of Buffalo was, until the past few months, a place equally as foreign to me except for the airport, where my son learned to fly almost before he was old enough to drive.

Up until about a year ago, the word genealogy meant that I knew our Grandpa Dame’s parents were William and Sarah and we were somehow related to about everyone buried in the Flatwoods Cemetery near Bennett Springs. And I knew our Grandma Dame’s parents were William and Cora Hawk and that Grandma Cora’s maiden name was Wilson and that they were buried at Lone Rock, west of Windyville. I knew our Dad’s grandparents were Walter Lee and Jane Rowden and her maiden name was Burns. I knew our Grandma Rowden was a Smith, because she is the sister of the Uncle Rhoder Smith who married our Grandma Dame’s sister, Pearlie Hawk. That’s it! End of story!

Then one day, about two years ago, something happened to change that. While playing with my then new home computer, I discovered that just a few clicks on the mouse could deliver to my screen all kinds of information about my family. Then ironically, just a few days later while at my sister’s home in Lebanon, I found that she had in her possession many old photos that had been left in her keeping after the death of our grandmother almost 20 years ago. Most of the pictures were not marked with names or dates and we had not a clue as to who those people are. Right then I felt the desire to know their names and how they fit into our family history and I figured the best place to begin was in Dallas County.

I’m lucky; my sweetheart of a husband supports me in this effort. No, he doesn’t go with me to gather any information, but he occasionally drives down with me when the time comes to hunt down those cemeteries that have been just names scribbled in my notebook. After all, he waded through the tall, dew-drenched grass of a large McLean County, Kentucky cemetery one early October morning last fall, to help me find the headstone of my g-g-g-grandfather Valentine Dame’s brother, when he could just as easily have stayed in our nice warm dry pickup and let me find it on my own. He’s even beginning to get interested in his family history and wants to see more of his family’s pictures on the "Wall of Ancestors" we have in our home.

This isn’t a new stop for me; I’m practically on a first name basis now with the ladies who work the front desk. They greet me with a smile and give me their sign-in sheet for my name, address and phone number. There’s a space about 2" x ¼", where I’m expected to write the name of the family I am researching today. They say they need that information for their records, so they will know what genealogical resources are being used and how often. So I write "Dame" and "Rowden". And they smile, because by now they know that approximately 99.99% of my family forefathers either started from or ended up in Dallas County at some point in time.

I’m sure they wondered at first how I could spend so much time looking through indexes for just two names. When I would arrive at 9:00 and still be there at 4:30 they would peak in the door to check on me. Now, they know I’m not there to inquire about just one name, or even two. When I make a trip to the Dallas County Library, I’m looking for my family names of Dame, McClurg, Lemons, Randleman, Richardson, Davison, Conn, Chastain, Hawk, Wilson, Scott, Youngblood, Ford, Blackwell, Renfro, Rowden, Looney, Smith, Jennings, and Burns just to mention the main ones. I also keep a sharp eye out for the many, now familiar names of the families they married into. So many names, so little time, and why make the trip just to research one or two, when I can do my entire line of ancestors all at the same place? I mean, just how convenient is that?

On my last trip to Dallas County about a ago, I spent the entire afternoon viewing rolls of microfilm, looking through the 1882 editions of "The Buffalo Reflex", searching for the one with the article "Murder Most Foul" and any follow up articles covering the actual murder trial. Knowing the exact date of the article made it easy to locate, but finding a follow up was another story, and I still don’t have it. Those weekly editions printed articles from each little community in Dallas County; births, weddings, deaths and social gatherings, and reading through as many as I could was just too great a temptation for me to resist. It was then and there that I truly realized just how involved I had become with my Dallas County kinfolks! When you can scan through an 1882 newspaper and recognize most of the names and places mentioned, and you already know who married whom and where they were buried when they died…well, I can just hear my sister when she reads this�? "Geeez, Lois, get a life!" I had to make another trip for the follow-up to the murder trial, because there were two cemeteries I wanted to find for pictures that afternoon. I drove south of Buffalo a few miles to the Macedonia Cemetery and then north of town to the Louisburg Cemetery, before cutting back across to 73 and heading home.

Nowadays, when I visit Dallas County, I don’t just try to get there as fast as I can without attracting any local or county cops. Now, when I drive down Highway 73, I catch myself studying the land and trying to visualize how it might have looked back in the 1800’s. There were probably more wooded areas and less open farmland. Would that have been a tiny log cabin across that little creek, over there, where that pile of rocks indicates the remains of a chimney? Or was it a large farmhouse with many barns and other outbuildings? And how many graves might be there, hidden back in the brush, unmarked and unkept, and totally forgotten?

The northeast corner of Dallas County is where our Jennings/Gennings, Burns, Woodcock, and Conn families lived, our great-grandmother Elizabeth Mahala "Lily" Jennings who married George Smith. George and Lilly lived in that area west of Bennett Springs and north of Windyville, near the Plad community, and that’s where our Grandma Amanda Smith Rowden was born and raised.

My Aunt "Janie" Dame married Elmer Conn just after 1900 and they raised their family on the large river bottom farm they owned, on the west side of the river south of Hwy 64, where the Sand Springs Resort is now located.

Our Burns family owned riverbottom land further down and on both sides of the Niangua River and closer to the Ho-Hum Camp Ground area. This is where my great-grandparents Jane Elizabeth Burns and Walter Lee Rowden raised their family, and where my grandparents Lloyd and Amanda Smith Rowden lived when my father was a young child. The Burns land on the west bank of the Niangua is still owned by Burns cousins and is presently the site of NRA (Niangua River Oasis), a canoe rental and camping ground facility.

My Dame family came to Missouri around 1840 and settled in the flatlands south of Bennett Springs, in a small community, which would later become known as Flatwoods. Our great-great grandfather Pleasant Dame was the first in the community to file claim on his homestead in 1848. When the big smallpox epidemic struck the community around the time the Civil War began, he donated a portion of his land for a cemetery in which to bury the many victims of that cruel and deadly disease. Flatwoods, where the Dallas-Laclede county line jogs back and forth across State Road OO, sometimes making it hard to determine exactly which county is where. The Flatwoods Cemetery is on the Laclede County side and is the burial site for the Dames and their related families including Chastains, Phillips, Dismangs and Richardsons. Along State Road OO north of the Flatwoods Cemetery and still in Laclede County, is the land that was owned by our great grandparents, and where until just a few years ago one could still see remains of the old log cabin in which my grandfather and then later my mother and uncle were born. The house my grandfather built for his family in the 1930’s has pretty much fallen in, and the old farm now grows only pine trees. People drive there every year, from all over the central part of Missouri, to Cole’s Tree Farm to cut their Christmas tree from the land once owned and farmed by our Dame family.

Bennett Springs holds many warm memories for both our Rowden and Dame families. As far back as I can remember Bennett Springs was always the place where our family met for picnics in the summer months. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s it was the small town of Brice, Missouri. Brice was a place where farmers came from as far away as the town of Lebanon, with their wagons full of corn or wheat to be ground at the mill, which was in the area just downstream of the dam and bridge. Brice boasted a post office and store and was a favorite place for social gatherings and family picnics. There were baptisms, also, as people from all around came to attend the camp meetings held by the Bolds, a family of ministers affiliated with the Anderson Indiana Church of God movement.

The historical display just outside the park store/office holds a picture of our grandmother Nellie Hawk, her sister Inez and a friend, taken around 1920. Our grandfather’s Aunt Susan Dame always accompanied the family on their trips to the mill, carrying the family laundry downstream to a quiet pool, where she scrubbed all their clothing clean and spread them on the bushes to dry. That quiet pool of water where fishermen now cast their line for rainbow trout, carries her name, "The Suzie Hole". Our gr-gr-gr Uncle Sam Ford was converted at the very first Church of God camp meeting held at Brice and later became a very powerful minister in the Church of God movement. After the Bennett family sold their land to the State of Missouri in 1926, the State contracted with our grandfather, Everett Dame, to supply the logs needed to build the first dam at the new state park. Our grandpa cut the logs on the family farm and transported them to the site of the future dam. We have a treasured snapshop of our great-grandmother Cora Hawk with Sister Louie Bennett taken back in the late 1940‘s and our dad is the proud owner of an original postcard bearing the picture of Paul Bennett and his Ozark Mountain Boys. Joan and I were both baptized in the 1950’s in the leg-numbing frigid waters of Bennett Springs downstream of the bridge near where the old mill stood.

Buffalo was the home of our Randleman and Lemons families. The three Randleman brothers who were raised in Illinois. The three Lemons children, two sisters and their brother, who were orphaned as very young children around 1820 in North Carolina, parceled out to different foster families and then eventually reunited in Illinois after the oldest sister married one of the Randleman brothers. A second Randleman brother then married the younger Lemons sister and Mary Randleman, the daughter of the older Randleman brother, married the Lemons brother, William Jason. These families left Illinois about 1837 and when they reached Missouri, they settled on what is now the eastern edge of Buffalo. Our gr-gr grandparents, William Jason and Mary Randleman Lemons, lived about one mile south of Buffalo. Our gr-gr Uncle Martin Christopher Randleman donated a large portion of his land for the newly established county seat and town site of Buffalo. He later moved his family a few miles east to the banks of the Niangua River, where he ran the Old Water Mill (gristmill) and a blacksmith shop during the Civil War.

Last but not least is the area most saturated with our family ancestors, that southern portion of Jasper Township around Windyville. This area includes the Lone Rock Cemetery to the west and then east from Windyville across the Niangua River to State Road OO and the Flatwoods community. This is where our gr-gr-grandfather Hedgeman Wilson met and married his second wife, Dianah Italy Youngblood, whose family came up from Carroll County, AR in the late 1860’s. The Scott families, Hedgeman’s older half-siblings who arrived there from Putnam County IN around 1850. Their mother, our gr-gr-gr grandmother Prudence Wilson who, after the death of her second husband Benjamin Wilson in 1854, brought Hedgeman and his younger brother Benjamin from Indiana to join her older children.

This is where Peter Hawk married Malissa Ford and where they raised their four children. Peter and Malissa’s only daughter, Sarah Susan married John W. Keller, the son of Jacob and Margaret Keller. Peter and Malissa’s first son, our great-grandfather William Hawk, married Cora, the oldest daughter of Hedgeman and Dianah Italy Youngblood Wilson. Our great-grandmother’s half-siblings, the Wilson children from Hedgeman’s first marriage, lived in Dallas County, one granddaughter from that family marrying into the Bennett family who came to the United States from England around 1880, not to be confused with the Bennett and Brice families who first settled the land now known as Bennett Springs.

My great-grandparents, William and Cora Wilson Hawk, lived on the west side of the Niangua River near what is now the Moon Valley Crossing. Our Uncle Ivery first attended school at Eberhart, but by the time my grandmother was old enough to go to school, they were attending at Flatwoods. Every school day, be it sunshine, rain, or snow, they walked alone to the Niangua River and crossed in an old boat. The children then walked the remaining miles up to the Flatwoods schoolhouse, reversing the process to get back home each day. After Grandpa William died in 1911, Grandma Cora moved her young children to the Dallas County part of the Flatwoods community north of the Flatwoods School and close to the Dame family.

Our Ford family came from Tennessee, some migrating to Cedar County with Elijah Rowden in the 1840’s. Our branch of the family, our gr-gr-gr-gr grandfather William D. Ford, moved his family into this part of Dallas County in the mid-to-late 1850’s. He settled down close to Abednigo Rowden, who had been a close neighbor throughout the years in Tennessee and had moved to Missouri in the 1840’s. Abednigo and Catherine Rowden moved away from Dallas County before 1860, leaving their daughter Nancy Elizabeth and her husband David Lawson, David’s parents William and Mahala Lawson, and David’s sister Mary Polly Lawson and her husband El Cana Hamlett, living next to our gr-gr-gr grandparents, James and Sarah Ford.

These families lived as neighbors along or near the road that runs from Windyville east across the Niangua River and up to the small community of Flatwoods. This is believed to be the area where the ambush and murder described in the article "Murder Most Foul" took place. Our gr-gr-gr grandparents, Valentine and Nancy Dame, lived somewhere along this road during the Civil War. Stories passed down through the generations tell about the pot of gold coins Valentine reportedly buried in his yard to keep it safe from the marauding bushwhackers.

And so my love affair with Dallas County gets deeper and more involved with each trip I make to the library and the courthouse and the cemeteries. I keep adding names and family connections and pictures and our tribe grows larger and larger with each visit to this county that is so very rich in our family history.