Zinc Ore Built the Southwest Ozarks
By Bryce Martin
Charles E. Wood was in the right place at the right time.
His area, catering to Webb City and Carterville during the decade from 1907 to
1917, was an especially prosperous niche for a hardware store owner and a
beehive of activity. During this time frame zinc ore hit an all-time high of
$135 a ton, and the district had the richest such deposits in the world.
It wasn’t just the steady pour of miners who were attracted
to the diggings; it was the speculators with their moneybags and all the
multifold and related industries attracted to the region, such as machine
shops, foundries, carpentry units and a list that went on and on.
Just as Joplin ran into Webb City without much clear
distinction of boundaries, a streetcar viaduct joined Webb City and Carterville
over the railroad track of the Missouri Pacific. A.H. Rogers established the
interurban system in 1893. The lines reached from Carthage to Galena, Kan., and
later extended to Picher, Okla.
During the early 1950s I often walked the old carline track that
took me deep in the woods heading west on 21st Street near our Short
Street home in Spring Grove. It was an elevated line covered with gravel. The
iron tracks and wood ties had been salvaged long before.
…
My grandfather Martin had been a member of the Odd Fellows in
Short Creek as far back at least as 1903, as indicated by his old paid receipts.
Membership in some of the fraternal groups required strict standards and guidelines
for entry. The Masons and Odd Fellows were steeped in religious rituals. Others
were secular and more accepting. A joke at the time concerning exclusivity of
the Knights of Pythias was that that they would take anyone who could pyth.