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From: "Rosemary Kenney" <>
Subject: [ARIZARD-L] URL for Ozark Publication
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 20:04:36 -0600


I downloaded the following article from a publication called OzarksWatch
from a URL that Beth Peck Cooper posted for us this afternoon:

I didn't copy it all - it's too large. And it has some great pictures! I
think all of you will enjoy it, too.

I got to it from:
http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/


- Click on "Local History" (right side)
- Click on Regional Periodicals

**********************
OzarksWatch - Vol. I, No. 4, Spring 1988

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The Widow Harris Cabin Site - A Place in the Ozarks - by James Price

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James and Cynthia Price have conducted extensive archaeological and
historical research at a frontier habitation site in Ripley County, on the
eastern edge of the Missouri Ozarks. Their goal has been to discover and
explain settlement and subsistence strategies of Ozarks pioneers. Their
efforts have provided us with an intimate glimpse of a family and its life
in another time.

To the casual observer walking trough the underbrush on a hill overlooking
Harris Creek Valley in Ripley County the place would look like many others
in the Ozarks. This particular place, however, is the habitation site of an
early Ozarks pioneer family whose members came to the Ozarks Border in 1814,
fleeing the disastrous effects of the New Madrid Earthquake of 1811 and
1812. Micajah Harris, his wife Sally, and three children came to the site
from Little Prairie on the Mississippi River where he had lived on a Spanish
land grant of 200 arpents. The earthquake's epicenter was located at Little
Prairie and the land he occupied soon became the middle of the Mississippi
River. For their new home, the Harrises chose a site over-looking the valley
of Six-mile Creek, later to be called Harris Creek, above a large spring. It
was but 75 feet from the Natchitoches Trace, the great over-land trail that
passed from Cape Girardeau, Missouri to Natchitoches, Louisiana, and
ultimately into Texas.

Micajah was something of a "shaker and doer" on the Ozark frontier. Prior to
his death in early 1821 he served as Justice of the Peace for the Current
River Township in the County of Lawrence in the Arkansas/Missouri Territory,
as a county road commissioner (1816, 1818, 1820), and as captain in the
militia. He was active in the affairs of the county court, and territorial
elections were held in his cabin in 1817 and 1818, and in the home of his
widow, Sally, in 1821.

Exceptionally vivid descriptions of the cabin site and family are preserved
in accounts of Henry R. Schoolcraft, and John Bell of the Stephen Long
Expedition who visited there in 1819. The best account is provided in the
writings of George W. Featherstonhaugh in 1834. After riding for hours
through a large forest fire and suffering from a severe headache
Featherstonhaugh reached Widow Harris' in the afternoon. His hostess offered
him "bad fried bits of pork, with worse bread, and no milk." He and his son
helped the Harris family fight the forest fire and save their buildings. He
described the widow's cabin as being a double cabin, a two-cribbed
structure. In a summation of his visit he stated, "Take them altogether they
were an amiable and good family of people, and not without the means of
living comfortably if they only know how to set about it." Such was the view
of an English gentleman toward a family and a place in the Ozarks, a world
he little understood. Actually, the Widow Harris was above average in her
net worth based on the number of livestock she and her family owned.........

Continued on website at
http://198.209.8.166/sheproom/periodicals/ozarkswatch/ow104b.htm


Rosemary Gillihan Kenney
Jonesboro, AR

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