Moore: This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Matthew Moore. For some of our listeners, you are a lifelong Ozarker. For others, perhaps you've moved to the region and called the Ozarks your home now. But regardless of your tenure, there's always Ozark history to be learned. And here to help us in a new recurring segment in our show is Jared Phillips. Jared, thanks for doing this with us.
Phillips: Yeah. No problem. Happy to be here.
Moore: So it seems like you fall on the opposite end of the spectrum from me as a lifelong Ozarker. Give us a little bit of your expertise here. Why are you the person to give us this Ozark history?
Phillips: Well, I don't know if I'm the person to give a history. But, you know, my family, like so many of us, we've been here in Arkansas hills for, oh, since before the Civil War. And then I'm a historian at the University of Arkansas, where I write and work on the history of the Ozarks and sort of the region, you know, and how we came to be.
Moore: What is it about you that made you want to pursue the history of the region that you grew up in, and the history of the region that your family grew up in?
Phillips: Yeah. Accidents, really. It's just accidental history. So I was working on one project and got interested in a story I heard from a neighbor about the back-to-the-land movement in the Ozarks in the 1970s. And I realized that the stories that I heard were not matching up with the people that I knew. And then from there I'd always been interested in and worked in rural history and concerns around agriculture and things like that. And so I started to jump more full, you know, with both feet into it, as opposed to just kind of play around in it.
Moore: So the premise of this segment here is you are a lifelong person from the region. You are a historian by trade. I am not either of those things. However, as we're going to learn in this very first segment, there's a chance that I actually maybe have always been an Ozarker.
Phillips: Yeah, I think so. So on your wall here, you've got a map of southern Illinois.
Moore: Yes.
Phillips: Why do you have a map of southern Illinois?
Moore: So I grew up in southeastern Illinois. There's a part of Illinois in the middle of nowhere where Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky all meet, all touch, right there on the Wabash River. And that's where I grew up in that region. Spent some time a little bit farther west in Illinois, closer to St. Louis is where I went to college. Spent some time in St. Louis after college. But southern Illinois is where I was born and raised.
Phillips: Yeah. Okay, so southern Illinois is interesting. It causes my students, when I teach the history of the Ozarks class, it causes them some confusion. A few years ago, some folks may know the Smithsonian had one of its annual Folklife Festivals, and the Ozarks was one of the regions for it, which we hadn't been for a long time. And a guy out of Branson, a folklorist and lay historian by the name of Curtis Copeland, who is an expert in GIS technology and works for the city of Branson, does a bunch of stuff—he decided that this was a great opportunity to just ask the internet, where are the Ozarks?
And so he did a bunch of things. He worked with the historian Dr. Brooks Blevins and other folklorists like Rachel Reynolds, and they put together this really interesting map. And so part of the map is the traditional Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma Ozarks, but it has this weird jut out into Illinois and almost touches Kentucky. And it's because he said the responses that he got indicated that people at least culturally identified in some measure as Ozarks or saw the geography or geology there as Ozark-ish. And so there you go. So maybe you're an Ozarker now. It goes against the history. This is not how normally we've thought about it.
Moore: So tell me a little bit about historically when we think of the Ozarks. You talked about Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri as typically thought of as the Ozarks. Why should we believe someone who just did a survey on the internet and take them at their word?
Phillips: That's a great question. So two reasons. One, we've historically thought about it really just as this thing in the West, right? West of the Mississippi River, this relatively unique geologic place. And so the Ozarks, from south of the Missouri River, north of the Arkansas River, or even a little bit south depending on who you ask, into the Oklahoma foothills—this is a place, as Dr. Blevins and others have said, that is really a place of ditches, not hollers.
So if you think about if you were to look at the top of the Ozarks, it's relatively flat, but it's got all of these cuts in it everywhere. So it's super rugged and rocky terrain, especially if anybody's been over in the Boston Mountains just a little bit east of where we're sitting right now. That's some of the roughest country in the country out there. And so that's a geographic place that has seemed to be relatively unified and easy for an observer just passing through—an old explorer from before the Civil War to tourists today—to say, oh, that's the Ozarks.
But as scholars and folklore and the world have kind of shown us, there's more to defining a place than just the rocks and the trees and the water. There's also this cultural idea. And so that's why I like the map. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I think it's a cool map, and it makes us think about our assumptions about what an Ozarks is, because it's asking what people think. Where do you fit on this map?
And so we know that not everybody that lives within the Ozarks would even consider themselves an Ozarker, no matter how long they've been here. And so it lets us see the tensions in defining a place.
Moore: It's fascinating that you bring up this sort of cultural element to a place. And that when we think about places being defined, often it is by geographic constraints or even geological constraints. We think of the Rocky Mountain region as obviously the Rocky Mountain region because of the Rocky Mountains. And so to think about the geography playing a role, but not the role, in what defines someone as an Ozarker is very fascinating.
I think about growing up when I tell people that I am from Illinois, almost immediately they assume, oh, you're from Chicago or the Chicago region. And if you've ever spent time in southern Illinois, you would know that it could not be further, not just geographically, but culturally, from Chicago and that sort of environment. It’s an extremely rural and agricultural-based area. A lot of mining happens there as well. And so it's a very blue-collar, lower-middle-class to low-class group of people who live in this region who often have what I define as a country accent or a bit of a hick redneck accent. Not necessarily a Southern accent, but they talk a little slower, lower. They have malaprops in the way that they talk. They have a certain tone to the way that they talk. But it's very different from the—when you look on a news station at the blue of Illinois, southern Illinois does not fit that mold at all.
Phillips: Yeah. Well, and I think that’s an interesting way to think about the Ozarks, whether we include southern Illinois or not. So the Ozarks in Arkansas—the top third of the state—we're very distinct from the Delta and the true southern part of Arkansas. We're all sort of in the South if for no other reason than Arkansas secedes in the Civil War. But the Ozarks is a weird place. We have our own kinds of things up here that make us really quite distinct. And that's true of the Missouri side as well. Missouri south of the Missouri River is a different place entirely than north of the Missouri River. And I don't think anybody from Kansas City would affiliate themselves with Ozarks. You're out of the hill country and in the Plains, the Midwest, almost by that point.
So these movements of how we, through time, have come to appreciate the interrelationship between geography and cultural definition, I think, is one of the reasons that makes the Ozarks today such a dynamic place.
Moore: You said you're not sure if you agree with this map, this definition. Let's start with the positive. What do you see of value in this version of including this much of Illinois and southern Illinois on a map of the Ozarks?
Phillips: It lets us have this kind of conversation. Honestly, I think one of the reasons I start off every semester when I teach on the Ozarks, I start off the very first day of class, the very first thing I show them is this map. Ever since Curtis put it out, because it makes students sit up and say, wait a minute, this place is different than I thought. And then once somebody starts to say something is different than they thought, they want to ask more questions. And that's why I like it. Because for too long the Ozarks has been assumed to be a particular kind of place, and things like this map help us ask different questions, but they help us ask questions in a way that gives voice to the people that are here and have been here a long time—not just voice to all of the stereotypes that kind of surround us.
Moore: What do you not like about this map?
Phillips: Oh, I'm a traditionalist. And so I just figure if it's on the other side of the Mississippi River, it can't be Ozarks. And so it's not a good reason at all, but I disagree. I think really that part of Illinois and really Indiana, Kentucky—that has been Appalachia West to me in some ways and not Ozarks East. And if for no other reason than geologically, they are more directly connected. They don't have this massive river in between them.
Moore: To be fair, the Wabash is on the eastern side of that part of Illinois, which leads to one of the other things that we often call southern Illinois, which is Little Egypt. Is this because it's in between the Wabash and the Mississippi? It's very fertile land. It's why there's so much agricultural happening in that region. But there is a bit of a separation, but it is extremely fair to say the Mississippi is bigger than the Wabash River and the Ohio River. There's no denying that.
Phillips: Yeah. I think those two places—that whole region—is more intimately connected to a different industrial and agricultural economy than we ever have been. We've never been a disconnected place. Where we're sitting here in Fayetteville is one of the anchor points in the Springfield Plain, so that western kind of edge of the Ozarks that has been historically one of the more connected and wealthier areas. And that's kind of the outlier in the region. The majority of the Ozarks is a really rugged, hard-to-connect—not unconnected, just hard-to-connect—place. And it's been relatively poor compared to even other Mountain South states.
And so when you think about these kind of northern, north-of-the-Missouri-River areas, closer to those early corn belt places, it feels economically disconnected to us as well, if we really want to dive into some of the statistics on it.
Moore: Jared, thank you for doing this. Look forward to more of these conversations.
Phillips: Absolutely.
Moore: What are some topics people might hear about in future versions of this?
Phillips: Oh, maybe we'll talk about the first major syndicated country music show in America. It's an Ozark special that we can talk about. We can talk about the development of things like the bazooka, how its name comes from an Ozark actor.
Moore: I did not know that.
Phillips: Exactly. And all sorts of fun things like that. We'll also talk about serious stuff. We can talk about, you know, the fight between folks trying to dodge the draft in World War I—not Vietnam, but World War I—and how they hang out in places like Strickler down in southern Washington County, and everything in between.
Moore: Wow. I love it. Jared Phillips, thank you so much for your time on this. Appreciate it.
Phillips: Yeah, absolutely.
