As published, the picture that appears in the March 28, 1949 issue of the Springfield (Missouri) Leader and Press is easy to overlook. Four men meet an elderly woman in a shawl and long skirt, with a cane. Two children, a boy in dungarees and suspenders and a girl with a jump rope, flank the group. Expressions on most people’s faces are indistinct. The caption tells us that members of Woodland Heights Presbyterian Church have raised $100 and given it to “Aunt Ruth” Caldwell, a rural woman who had recently been robbed. The caption reads, in part:
“Faith Restored—'Aunt Ruth’ Caldwell’s faith in the Ozarks and its people has been restored. Three weeks ago several men invaded her ancient home near Strafford and robbed her of $100 – every penny she possessed. Members of Woodland Heights Presbyterian Church, upset by the thugs’ actions, started a drive to raise $100 to replace the stolen money. They did it in a week”
There’s no kind of historic text that reveals itself completely at first glance, and every item gains significance through aggregation – arguably photographs are more subject to that elusiveness than other documentary forms. Susan Sontag famously wrote that forgery in painting falsifies art, but edits or captioning of photographs serve to falsify reality. Walter Benjamin once asked whether the caption was the most important part of the photograph. Somewhere between the caption, the image in newsprint, the print closer to the original tableau, we can ascertain meanings about the event.
The men of Woodland Heights who are in charge of the money have dressed in suits with vests and large lapels. The photo editor highlights them with either correction fluid or white gouache, so that the suit forms are legible in newsprint. The editor also halos the men’s heads so that they stand out from the background of Ms. Caldwell’s “ancient home.” The men are of a modern age; they surround the woman who lives as if she’s of a distant past; their money travels backward in time.
Woodland Heights gained its first building in 1907, in the fast-growing northwest of Springfield, at Florida Street and Franklin Avenue. The whole building was moved half a mile to Atlantic Street in 1912. The congregation grew quickly, from 209 members in 1920, to 518 in 1940, to 716 in 1950, becoming the second-largest church in Ozark Presbytery. In 1959, the congregation built a $122,000 building, and took down the old wood-frame church. Woodland Heights and the 2300-member megachurch First and Calvary accounted for 75% of church members in the presbytery in 1950. The rest of Ozark outside the big city, was made up of family-size rural congregations.
Rural denizens of Missouri’s ridges and pine forests were frequently depicted in the early 20th century, as so many mountain people are, as backward and forgotten by the unstoppable march of progress. Unlike the rest of the Appalachian region, widely comprehended if stereotyped and romanticized before the onset of the First World War, the Ozarks and their residents remained a frontier isolate in American popular imagination until the 1930s. By then, the Ozarks were depicted, “as either a romantic arcadia of contemporary ancestors or a backwater of lazy, inbred deviants.”
The caption calling Ms. Caldwell’s home “ancient” captures her status for the Springfield newspaper as one of these “contemporary ancestors.” The darkened building behind her, with rough-hewn wood, is hard to credit as a house, though it may be – the caption might also misidentify a barn or stable as her home. Her shawl and plain coat, and the foreground spread with hay make the scene almost like a nativity – a miracle among simple people. Ms. Caldwell’s shoes – to my eye, black rubber galoshes, or gaiters meant to be worn over a shoe – counter the process of mythologizing here: she’s an ordinary 20th century American, in contact with department stores, and the vulcanization process, even if somewhat removed from them.
By the 1940s, subsistence farming had become all but obsolete and much of the Ozark countryside depopulated. A fascination with rural habits of life sprang up in the wake of the population transfer, and Missouri and Arkansas found folk festivals in full swing by the 1950s. At this juncture in 1949, Ms. Caldwell would have represented, for the Presbyterians of Springfield, a living relic.
They and the newspaper photographer, and the photo editor and caption writer, left behind a series of traces telling us what they believed. The church chose to publicize the handover of funds – they believe their charity is worth talking about. Ms. Caldwell is not dressed in her Easter finery – the people in charge of the photograph believe her poverty is a virtue. The men are outlined – they are not meant to blend in with the rural backdrop, they believe they are modern and sophisticated.
Woodland Heights Presbyterian Church was dissolved by The Presbytery of John Calvin earlier this year, bearing to the archives 4 cubic feet of records, going back to 1892. They included, for future readers, this short excursion into other people’s pasts.
Learn more
25-0841. Woodland Heights Presbyterian Church (Springfield, Mo.) records, 1892-2025.
Brooks Blevins, "Wretched and Innocent: Two Mountain Regions in the National Consciousness." Journal of Appalachian Studies. Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 2001)
RG 303, box 5, folder 70. Ozarks--United Lakes Ministry photographs, 1968.
RG 300.1, boxes 5 through 8. Appalachian Regional Hospitals, Inc. (ARHI/ARH), 1963-1969.
RT 593. Presbyterian Appalachian Research Project, 1966-1968.
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.
