Stotts City, Missouri

Stotts City in Lawrence County has the rise-and-fall arc of a classic Ozarks mining town. Settlement started in the early eighteen seventies under the names Pax and then Belle Plaine. The man who gave the place its permanent name was Captain Greene Casey Stotts, a Union Army veteran and state representative who discovered galena and hemimorphite deposits west of town and founded the Stotts City Mining Company in eighteen seventy-three.

After he died in eighteen seventy-six, the community incorporated in eighteen ninety-six and renamed itself in his memory. The lead mines brought the population to nine hundred two by nineteen hundred, a genuine boomlet for this corner of the Ozarks. Then the ore thinned and the market softened, and by nineteen ten the population had dropped by more than a third.

What remained was a tight little farm community with a co-op grain exchange, a volunteer brass band, and a newspaper called the Stotts City Sunbeam, published from nineteen oh one until the end of nineteen oh seven.