OLDn’NEWS FROM AROUND THE COUNTY

We hit the jackpot last week. Guy Wright got a photo of the store at Hubbard, Randolph County, MO from Jim Palmer along with a little history of the town. This is the only picture that we have of anything there. The George W Sears family owned and operated the store from 1906 to 1916, so the picture was taken in that time period. George W Sears, daughter Blanch Sears Rice and Elizabeth W Sears are pictured in the photo. The big sign says HARRISON’S TOWN AND COUNTRY PAINT – All Colors / All Good – Geo W Sears – Hubbard.

You can hardly get any further northwest in Randolph County than the place that William H & Alva R Hubbard bought from Asbury Summers in 1886. But it was important to the people of the northwest part of the county in the later part of the 1800’s and the first half of the 20th century. There is mention of the village of Hubbard in one of the real estate abstracts in 1888. Besides the store, there was a filling station, an icehouse, a telephone office, a feed store, postoffice and a public scale. The store was the last building and it was torn down in the 1950’s.

QUICK NOTES

You may know that Gene Autry (one of my childhood heroes), in his later years, was the owner of the Anaheim Angels baseball team. They just won the Baseball World Series. I don’t know if Gene was ever in Moberly, but it’s quite a coincidence that a native of Gene Autry, Oklahoma, Les Gilliam, will be performing in Randolph County the same week that Gene’s team won the Series. If you’ve been to Branson in the past month, you may have gone to see one of Les Gilliam’s 60 some different Western music shows. Les is an historian, comedian, a singer and guitar player, a Western music expert and has been named the Oklahoma Balladeer by the Oklahoma Legislature. Now where can you beat that for five bucks. He’ll be at MACC Friday night at 7:30.

If you have been reading the paper or listening to the radio stations recently, you probably know that there is a real water and sewer problem in Moberly as well as in hundreds and hundreds of other towns across the country. Now I don’t have time in this column to tell everything I can about wells and cistern water systems and out house sewage disposal. I’ll save the detailed descriptions for later, but I can say that I think that water and sewer problems were simpler when I was growing up. We had a cistern, a well, an outhouse and two large crockery jars. The jars were inside the house and were like little indoor toilets that could be carried outside and emptied into the outhouse. The only time you could use one is if you were really sick. Zero weather didn’t even help. There were water and waste maintenance problems then, too. I remember that the leathers on the well pump wore out once in a while, the cistern pump always had to be primed and the pit under the outhouse did fill up after a few years and someone had to clean it out or dig a new hole and move the out house to the new hole. And many of those pretty indoor pots that we see in antique stores today have cracks and some don’t have lids, so that might have been a problem, too. Anyway, I hope we get all of our water and sewer problems fixed. They say it costs in the thousands of dollars to drill a well and I sure as the world don’t want to have to fool with any more outhouses.