Jerico Springs, Missouri

First, a welcome to new followers Grandma Swift, Tony Benson, Laraine Eddington, and Debra Ann Elliot! I am glad you are along for the ride.


Friday was a gorgeous day. However, before the day was over, the air turned way, way too hot for the first of April. But in the morning with a nice day and a weekend promising rain and storms, we took off a few hours for a short ride. It was so worth the time and gas spent. Not a cloud in the sky and the earth looked freshly washed from snow melt. Overhead trees were bare with infinitesimal buds trying to break out, but the grass was as green and lush as expensive carpet. Rivulets of water whispered into creeks with winter run-off; cattle and goats dotted the fields heaving their own sighs of welcome to spring. Hawks soared like teenagers on skateboards, the air currents their own ramps for wheelies.

We headed north on Highway 71 and turned at Route C. This time last year we turned west to visit an Amish farm for a community breakfast. This day we turned east to find Jerico Springs, Missouri. The nice thing about where we live is that we can experience several types of terrain in only a few miles in many directions. As we headed up the highway and then on for a few miles east, we saw flat black dirt, rich and productive fields for farming row crops. Then we drove on to an area of rise and fall, Missouri knobs if you will. The verdant grass land spooled out like a green sheet fluttering in the wind. Timber thickets, punctuated with redbuds, hugged creeks and even a few May apples were beginning to show. The earth looked like it was exalting Creation. Here and there along our path, groups of jonquils and daffodils waved in the breeze, a tribute to some farm woman who had lived on the land many years previously since there wasn’t even a foundation left to see now.

I have never been able to find out much about my family background. For one thing, no one talked much! On one side, a maternal great-grandmother’s parents both died young, and she and her brother were absorbed into an uncle’s family, leaving her not much history of her own. On the other side, my paternal great-grandfather was picked up in Topeka in a buckboard and raised in southeastern Kansas by a family that I now think was his uncle. The last names are not the same, and it was confusing for years as I was a kid; was I a McCarty or a McKinney? I have learned recently that John McCarty came straight from Ireland. He raised James McKinney in Crawford County, Kansas, who I suspect might have been John’s sister’s baby.

While searching, I learned that my great great-grandfather Brandon Lafayette Brasher and his wife Sydney moved to Jerico Springs, Missouri where he worked in a bank. When the bank closed, he took his family (including my great-grandfather Claude Brasher) to Joplin where he worked on the railroad. Makes sense since Joplin was a busy, booming area at the time. However, it was all news to me since I thought all my “people” were from Kansas and Oklahoma. When I came to live in the Joplin area, I had no idea I already had such Missouri roots.

So I wanted to see Jerico Springs which is an hour, give or take, from here. We saw the town sign with a population of 259 as we approached a hilltop. The verdant area was gorgeous, and spread away from this knob was farm land that must have been dotted with wagons, barns, and draft horses in the 1800’s. Turning into the town, I saw only a berg of neglected homes and businesses. What must have been a thriving little frontier town at some point, was now very forlorn looking. Homes in disrepair, cars up on blocks, shattered and boarded windows, a flea market that had long been silent, and a bleak looking business center all contributed to the looks of a ghost town. There was a little city park and a lame looking post office that suggested hidden folks somewhere still called this place home.


It was sad and someday maybe I will go back and check again. I did not find the cemetery, and I would like to look there. We drove on through other small places in the road on our ride: Arcola, Plew, Red Oak, Avilla, and Irwin. It was sad to see all those towns and the stories they held fading away, returning to Mother Earth.