Leann

Mary and Henry Allmon owners of store at LeAnn

From Long Gone Leann by Mark D. Meadows

The Store
Although the Leann Store and its proprietors, Henry and
Mary Allmon, were not connected officially with the school,
they comprised a happy part of the experience of any Leann
School student. Henry told me that the original store building
had burnt down on New Year's Eve, 1899, a night when
the temperature was 30° below zero. Hence the store I knew
must have been built around the turn of the century. I think
Henry at that time was a young man living and working in
Oklahoma, Indian Territory. I wonder if anyone still living
remembers what year he bought the Leann Store. I know
that he was there in 1934 when my parents, with a grubstake
of five dollars, moved from Aurora to Shell Knob. They
stopped at Leann for gasoline. Daddy also bought a special
treat for them, a candy bar. That brand of candy bar
had a promotion wherein a couple of bars in each box had
a coupon in the wrapper entitling the purchaser to another
bar free. The location of the two coupon bars was the same
in every box, and Daddy, through previous trial and error,
had divined the position of the lucky bars. Henry normally
simply reached in and grabbed a bar at random, but Daddy
stopped him and said, "No, I want to choose which bar I
get." He picked a bar that he knew would grant him another
bar free. He always remembered how puzzled Henry had
been at his feat.
Leann Store was on Highway 39 at the foot of the hill,
which was crowned by the school. Henry Allmon's Leann
Store was the hub where families encountered each otherand old men sat and gossiped by the coal-fired iron stove in
winter and the cold stove in summer. The Leann community
extended into the hills a mile or two in all directions from
the store, and encompassed twelve or fifteen farmhouses and
their occupants. The names of most of those we might meet
there in the 1940's and 1950's are now carved in stone, either
in the Leann Cemetery or one of the other burial grounds
in the vicinity: Leonard and Nanny Suttles, Onus Swadley,
Noah and Dola Chaney, Carl Stewart, Sam and Gertrude
Hudson, Fred and Leota Gautney, Arthur Moreland, Walter
McCubbin, Ellis Hilton, Dobe Gilmer, Grant Hemphill,
Merton Chaney, Monroe and Jude Swearingen, and many I
have no doubt forgotten or never knew.
The dwelling house where Henry and Mary lived was
across the driveway to the south, and near it was the water
well with a hand pump. A barn stood to the west of the
house, and in it Henry and Mary kept a few chickens for
eggs. When I was a little tyke I heard my parents talking
about Henry's habit of retiring to bed early in the evening.
The expression they used was, "Henry goes to bed with the
chickens." I took this literally and visualized the elderly
gentleman squatting on a roost in the barn and dozing off
with chickens on either side of him doing likewise. I could
not imagine why he would prefer this eccentric form of repose
to sleeping in a bed.
Just behind the store was a weathered oak garage which
housed an old white Nash that Henry would drive about once
a year when he had to go to Aurora on some business. It also
contained a pile of coal Henry used to heat the house and
store. Just north of the store was a small building containing
burlap sacks of dairy feed, shorts, and corn. Feed came
in 100 pound bags in those days, and they did not seem to
weigh much when we picked them up. Now it comes in
fifty-pound bags, and they seem heavy

The Store Building
The store building had a drive-through porch on the east,
facing the highway. It was supported by two cedar poles on
concrete bases; and an island between those poles held the
two gasoline pumps. Before electricity reached that area in
1949, the gas pumps were hand-operated. A vertical pump
handle had to be pushed and pulled, back and forth, to pump
the orange-colored gasoline up into a ten-gallon glass canister
with gallon and half-gallon markings on its side. The
gasoline then fed by gravity into the automobile gas tank.
Those manual gas pumps were likely a nuisance to adults,
but we kids liked to pump them. Against the wall under the
porch was an old oak bench where Henry and Mary liked to
sit in the shade in nice weather. It was carved with initials
and designs by previous schoolboys trying out their pocket
knives. For one period of several years, the fluffy white little
dog Tip lay nearby or wandered about the premises. At least,
he should have been white, but to Henry's mild annoyance
he was always splotched with black grease from crawling
under the cars of customers.
The entry door was under the porch, to the left of Henry's
bench. The screen door bore the slogan, "Colonial is good
bread." The store was typical of the small general stores
that used to abound. Standing inside the front door, one
would see the iron coal heating stove at the other end of the
room, surrounded by three or four assorted chairs. A coal
shuttle rested beside it on the concrete floor, and also a pan
of ashes to receive a stream of tobacco juice from customers
equipped to send one. Waist-high wooden counters ran
most of the length of the store on either side. The counter
on the south side of the store was burdened by a post office unit which stood nearly to the ceiling. It had pigeonholes
on the side behind the counter. The front side had little
doors with combination dials, so individuals could retrieve
their mail from the pigeonholes. It even had a little barred
window in the center for selling stamps. Leann had lost its
post office status in the 1930's, so Henry used the pigeonholes
for account books, catalogs, and the like. Under the
counter below the post office unit was a small iron safe.
Next along the counter was a glass case, possibly five feet
long and a foot deep, containing candy bars, penny candy,
and chewing gum. The back of the case had sliding wooden
doors. The section of wall shelves behind the candy section
displayed an incongruous assortment of school supplies and
tobacco products: tablets, pencils, Crayola crayons, paste,
mucilage, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and loose tobacco
in cans and bags for filling pipes or hand-rolling cigarettes.
Next to the candy case was a dispenser with a big roll of
brown craft paper; and on the wall behind the counter was
an iron holder bearing a cone of cotton string. Old storekeepers
had a penchant for wrapping things with paper and
string. I knew that under the counter there were various
sizes of brown paper sacks, or "pokes," as Henry called
them. On the end of that counter was a beautiful Toledo
scale with a thick glass pad to place items on for weighing.
The upright part of the scale was encased in glass, front and
back, so the mechanical parts could be seen moving when
Henry weighed something. Behind this south counter the
wall was filled with shelving full of all sorts of domestic
comestibles, such as canned vegetables and fruits, syrup,
sugar, and flour. At the end of the counter was the back
door through which Henry and Mary went to and from their
house. To the right of that door was a floor scale for weighing
heavy items. It was hardly ever used anymore. Some
equipment remained which was never used: an egg scale
from the days when Henry bought eggs and a tobacco plug cutter which had been used when chewing tobacco sold by
the inch. Henry still kept a few nails and hardware items,
but any serious hardware shopper had to go three miles
south to Ben Zinn's hardware store in Jenkins.
The north side of the store was the dry goods department,
which was fairly well defunct by the time I knew
the store. Henry still offered some clothing items, such as
gloves, that sold fairly well. He used to carry some standard
clothing and shoes, but by the 1950's there were too many
sizes and styles to carry a stock diverse enough to profit
from the investment. One time Henry got down some aged
boxes from the top shelves and showed me some unsold
stock brand new pairs of high button shoes.
At the east end of the north counter, near the front door,
was a freezer for ice cream and a cooler for soft drinks, or
"pop" as we called it. It was a novelty to have ice cream
available, since electric power was still of recent vintage in
those parts. Henry offered ice cream bars, popsicles, fudgesicles,
and other forms of iced treats. He had vanilla ice
cream in little paper cups with a pressed in paper lid which
could be pulled out by a little tab, and on the wall hung
strings of paper-encased flat wooden spoons. If a customer
bought a cup of ice cream, he received one packet, torn from
the string, so he could eat the ice cream. I hated eating with
those wooden spoons, as their rough feel on my tongue made
shivers run down my spine. The drink cooler was little more
than a zinc lined box containing refrigerated water in which
bottles of pop were placed. During the time I knew Henry,
the price of pop went from a nickel to a dime, which meant
that the wholesale cost went from three to six cents. Henry
felt adamant that the price of pop ought to be a nickel, and
for some time he continued to sell it at that price, losing a
penny on each bottle. In time he compromised to the extent
of selling it for six cents a bottle, just breaking even.

The School
The schoolhouse for Leann District 34 still sits, sturdy and
staunch, on a hill looking eastward over Missouri Highway 39
at Leann, Missouri. Leann was a thriving little settlement in
the days when transportation was poor. Then every farm community
had to have a local store to supply items that could not
be grown or made at home. The onestore, threehouse town
was named after a girl called Leann Thomas, who would be
forgotten if there were no town named after her. The town
still has two or three houses, but no post office nor even the
old store, which used to house the post office in one corner. It
still has a sign at the city limits reading LEANN in bold black
letters. There is probably a regulation that populations fewer
than ten are not posted, so the sign boasts no population figures.
As I write this in the early twenty-first century, the sign
comes and goes in a ghostly fashion, as people steal the sign
and the highway department replaces it.
At one time there were 113 one-room schools in operation
in Barry County, Missouri. By 1960, all were closed and their
districts consolidated with schools in cities and towns. Some
of the schoolhouses have burnt or been torn down. Others
were converted to hay barns or storage buildings or now stand
empty and derelict. The lucky ones were preserved. Star Schoolhouse was sold and moved from Flat Creek to the College
of the Ozarks to be viewed by tourists as an example of
its genre. Some schoolhouses were remodeled and converted
into dwelling houses, while others became churches. Leann
Schoolhouse is now used as a church and community center.
If you glance westward at the right instant, as you rush
through Leann on the highway, you will see the white clapboard
schoolhouse looking resolutely over the valley from its
perch. That porch which faces you is concrete with four brick
columns to support the roof. It is a fancy porch, and in fact,
the Leann schoolhouse was fancier in most ways than its fellows
in the area, such as Ozark School, Liberty School, Victory
School, and numerous others. Nearly all one-room schools
are simply rectangular in configuration with the entrance in
one of the short walls. As you enter those standard schools
you pass through a vestibule with coat hooks, then face the
teacher's desk and blackboards, which are at the other end of
the rectangle.

Walking to School
My family lived a miles east and a quarter mile south
from Leann on what was known as "the old Nathan Thomas
place." My parents, Lester and Lorene Meadows, bought
the farm from Tom and Esther Suttles, who had bought it
from the heirs of Nathan Thomas after his demise. Daddy
was proud of being only the third owner of the farm since it
was homesteaded.
We Meadows children walked a mile and a quarter
to school. To a small boy, the most impressive feature of
those walks was the suspension footbridge spanning Jenkins
Creek. We called it "the swinging bridge." It was similar to
those in jungle movies, except that ours was made of wood
planks supported by steel cables instead of vines; and we
were never pursued by angry aborigines who tried to cut the
bridge down with us on it. At each end was a six-foot ladder
to climb up onto the end of the bridge. We enjoyed crossing
it in clement weather, holding tightly to the hand cables as
we walked the planks, but after a downpour, when the creek
raged with angry brown water, we were not about to set foot
on that bridge. Daddy would drive us in the car or truck as
far as the flooded stream and make as many trips as there
were kids, leading each of us across the bridge; and he would
meet us there after school to lead us back across.
My friend Jean Fincher told me that she went to a
one‑room school in Texas. She had two older boy cousins
who walked to school with her and took care of her. At one
point the road ran along a river and across a bridge, then
back on the other side for some distance before going on
towards the school. A path through the woods led to a footlog
over the river, which could save a pedestrian over a half
mile of walking. The farewell words from Jean's mother every
morning were, "Now you kids go on to the bridge, and
don't you cross that foot-log!" Every day they crossed the
foot-log.
Walking to school in the fall we sometimes spotted large
wasp nests high up in trees. Some seemed almost as large
as dinner plates, and I never see them so large nowadays.
We would throw rocks at the nest until we either knocked it down or stirred up the wasps and had to run for it. On crisp
winter mornings as we walked along the creek we sometimes
found weeds with clusters of hoarfrost on their stalks.
Being children, we ate the frost. It tasted something like a
non‑alcoholic frozen celery daiquiri.
Before the mid-1950s, schoolgirls always wore skirts or
dresses. My sister Shirley tells about how cold her legs got
on the icy winter walks to school: "I had on knee socks below
and my skirt above, but by the time I got to school, my
legs were so cold and numb that I could hardly walk, and
actually stung as they thawed out."

The Teachers
Since the academic side of life at Leann School has
slipped my mind, so have most memories of the teachers.
I had teachers named Wilber Eden, Miss Adda Hogue, Bill
Vanzandt, and Helen Braun, and I can visualize their faces
with varying degrees of vagueness. My sister Anne was my
teacher in the year 1953-1954, and I cannot forget her face.
Dr. Bill Vanzandt retired in 1996 from the faculty of the University
of Arkansas. Mrs. Braun, who drove an airplanenosed
Studebaker, was born December 28, 1902, and I think
of her every year on that date. Mrs. Braun retired to Texas
to be near her daughter, and spent many years thereafter
transcribing books and magazines into Braille. In 1992 her
daughter solicited letters from former students for a ninetieth
birthday celebration, and I contributed one. Mrs. Braun died
a few years later.

The Old Order Changeth
In the early 1960's Henry and Mary became too frail
to keep the store open. Once they closed it, nobody ever
opened it again. In modern times, a little country store is not
a profitable venture.
I was away at college when Mary died on February 23,
1964. She had turned eighty-seven the month before. I was
at home for the summer five months later when Henry followed
her on July 19 at the age of eighty-six. It was customary
then for men of the neighborhood to gather at the cemetery
and dig a grave by hand with picks and shovels while
discussing the deceased and dredging up pleasant memories
of him. Daddy and I participated in that ceremony.
Henry's funeral was held on July 22, 1964, in the Leann
schoolhouse. Henry's open casket stood at the north side of
the room, near the stage, and Henry's head was to the left or
west. After the service, the casket was shut and secured, and
the pallbearers picked it up. Daddy and I and other mourners
followed them as they carried the casket out the east door,
down the steps, and made a U-turn to the left, to carry the
casket around the north side of the building and west to the
cemetery. When they made that U-turn, it put Henry's head
to the east. They carried the casket to the grave and set it
down to be lowered into the grave. This meant that Henry
was buried with his head to the east, rather than the west.
All the rest of Daddy's life he was troubled by the fact that
Henry was not buried with his head to the west, as tradition
said should have been done.
When I stood some thirty-five years later looking down
on those grassy graves, I thought not of how Henry and Mary lie, but of how they lived. I thought of their kindness
to children and remembered Jesus' words: "Inasmuch as ye
have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye
have done it unto me."
March 1997