Howdy! I don't know about y'all, but the changing of the seasons is always an exciting time for me. Of course, I live here in Taney County, where each season gets its just due, if Mother Nature and El Nino/Nina don't fight too much...we haven't had a real winter now for several years. And the White River (the lakes that now ARE the White--Beaver, Table Rock, Taneycomo, Bull Shoals, and Norfolk--5 I believe) is lower than anyone remembers; the creeks can be easily walked across, water appearing and disappearing in shallow pools at will. This weekend was my Wilson Family Reunion. About 50 of us were present Saturday, with folks visiting from all over. A distant cousin, Rod Bias and his wife Suzanne even drove in from Phoenix, AZ, to attend this year. Pama Nash Wilder, one of my double/triple cousins LOL, came down and met her Wilson cousins for the first time ('ceptin' me, of course), and had herself a blast. I found out I'd gone to school with even more cousins (Don, are you listening?), the children of Georgine Boswell Cummings. LOL I don't know if it happens to y'all or not, but I've met folks at funerals and weddings both, after seeing them for years around Branson (likely as customers at WalMart), never knowing we are cousins until those events, when we get to asking how come the other one is there...<BG> My cousin Judy Boyd JOHNSON--her husband's JOHNSON family are from the Ava, Douglas Co. area--gave me a picture of our g grandparents, Sarah Elizabeth BULL and John Woodrow WILSON. Her grandmother, Martha Annis (she md William McKinley "Bill" JONES) was about 3 in the picture, and our g uncle Franklin Sherman WILSON is still a babe in arms. This is the first decent picture of Sarah I've ever seen--and boy, between her and my g grandmother Lula May OVERSTREET MACOMB, you know where I get my looks. Made my day for a week, getting that picture, which was taken about 1906. Most of y'all know, I'm bound to go out "gallivantin'". Just hop in the car and go, seeing what there is to see. Best kind of day there is, far as I'm concerned, is when Greg and I can get up and just jump in the car with my notepad, chalk for any tombstones we might find, and hiking boots, and take off. Well, yesterday, another Wilson cousin, Terri Tindall, and I went lookin' for Garber. Now, I know I've been out lookin' for it before, taking my little Cavalier up the shelf-rock/ledge rock road from Roark Valley to an old part of Hwy 76, close to Silver Dollar City. Don't know what the road is called now, but back when the Railroad first came to Taney County, tourists would ride down to the small village of Garber, get off, and then get a wagon ride up this road to visit Marvel Cave. That was in the early 1900s, and after the book "Shepherd of the Hills" was published in 1907 (if you haven't read it, you really need to), the number of visitors to the area exploded... Anyhow, Terri and I got to talking yesterday, and we kinda snuck out of the Reunion--Greg and my parents had run home for this and that, the kids were visiting friends for the day. Now, if you've seen my picture at the WRV site (click on "About Stuff" if you haven't), you know I'm not much on doodads, and for some reason this year, I've started wearing long broomstick skirts and flats. Which I wore yesterday. Go figure. We went driving out Hwy 248, and just west of where the Old Boston Road meets 248, turned south again down Sycamore Log Church Road. This road, another old road, leads down from an area called Skyline. You can see this if you go to http://www.terraserver.microsoft.com/ , type in "Garber, MO", and it'll come up with 2 maps. Neither are real recent, but you get some idea from the aerial photo of the land we're dealing with. There are a few old rock houses with some excellent rock work along the road. The road travels down, down, down, into the valley; you cross at the bottom under a nearly 100-year-old railroad trestle. Before the trestle, there's some old buildings--a barn, a couple of sheds, an outhouse, a gate with a stile--right alongside the road. Went on past to the backside of the Ruth and Paul Henning State Conservation Department Forest, where there's the 4 mile hiking trail that goes past some other old buildings and glades the Con. Dept is working on. We parked there, and walked to the ford there at Roark Creek, an old cement slab. Then we turned around and went back to the buildings at the trestle. Remember now, I'm in an ankle-length long skirt, with a denim vest and flat shoes, no socks. Terri was smart and wore blue jeans yesterday. We parked at the foot of a gravel road that climbed the hill--it's an extremely narrow "cut" in the valley--the road is blocked off by a cattle gate. First, we went around the gate and walked up the gravel road, and we see the buildings from above. See more that we want to get to, but there's a "bob-wire" fence. So we went back down and walked along Sycamore Log Church Road to the gate, and took the path up this hill. Overgrown with brush, the path had been delineated--not a word most hillbillies use, BTW--with field stone, and steps were laid, again with stone. Wooden hand rail still standing. On the steep part of the bench--we're looking at the buildings all the while--the steps were overgrown with brush, but you can see iris beds and that someone had spent an enormous amount of time landscaping. The bench, while a natural part of the hill, kinda like a pause in the downhill aspect, had been "terraced" with natural stone. The part we were standing in front of, someone had taken flakes of limestone and covered the foot of this part of the bench--it was about 3 ft in height. We climbed it. We were standing on an old roadbed. Didn't appear to have ever been graveled, and right in front of us was what appeared to be an old small barn--but I'm not sure. The front was open, and it was roughly 16 ft tall, built with the hill rising at its back. Two stories, with the bottom part having been built of rock, the top floor of planks. Some of the rock had caved in, but you could make out a short doorway into the bottom floor. Inside this floor, which wasn't tall enough to stand in unless you're under 5 ft tall, there was a crib. Top floor could easily have been hay storage, or maybe it was a corn crib, I don't know. I didn't see a hole in the top floor for hay to be pitched down, but I didn't go inside--the wood was not safe. The floor of the top story was above our heads, and the door on the right led onto a path which met the road we were on some 15-20 more to the right. I would say it might have been a cow barn, maybe for an expectant cow to be penned up. More rock work and iris beds. We turned right, and an old foundation of rock, with 2 concrete porches was on the right side of the road. The path we had been on apparently had led to a door in this house, which was pretty good-sized. Weeds in the roadbed were about knee-high as we walked along, trying to figure out if this was the original site of Garber. Awful lot of buildings--there was an old cabin to the left of the house foundation, with a rock fireplace. Across from it was another shed-type structure, this one open-fronted as well. There wasn't any wood lying there to tell if it had a front. You could tell the big house had burned. A water pump was in the concrete of the front porch, and there were holes in the concrete where the logs had supported the roof. The railroad trestle was not more than 50 feet behind this house, and a path from it led down to the trestle. Made me think it had been a store, with the owner living in the cabin next to it. Even though my grandma has about 8 sheds on her place for storage, she's not a farmer and her buildings are full of stuff. I couldn't see how this wouldn't have been a small village, with the rock work along the old road bed, and the many buildings. The roadbed ran parallel to the graveled road Terri and I had walked up, and went past the cabin into a turnaround. By this time, I realized that my skirt was covered with burrs. Of many kinds. Now, I've never seen a burr plant, don't have any idea what burrs come off of, but I was covered from ankle to about 3 feet high. Made it worse that my skirt is extremely full-cut--lots of fabric. Terri had burrs on her legs as well, and the denim shirt she'd tied around her waist was coated with them. Realizing we needed to get back--Mom had made chili for the clan, and we hadn't told anyone where we were going--we started to go back down the way we came up. Nope. That limestone flake was NOT the way to get back down. There's a couple, three buildings between the old roadbed and Sycamore Log Church Road. An outhouse, a probable chicken coop, something else I couldn't tell you the use of. A really big barn was across "Church" Road, and a couple more smaller sheds between it and the pavement. The front of that big barn appears to be right on the train track. We didn't go look. We followed the roadbed down to the fork where we'd parked. What appeared to be poison ivy blocked the way going around the cattle gate on the left end; dense brush and "bob-wire" was between the right end and the gate that blocked the gravel road. The only thing to do was climb over the gate. These gates neither one had fencing attached, and stand at least 6 feet high. Terri went first, me holding her camera. Then I handed it and my ever-present Diet Dr. Pepper to her, and started up. Heard a car coming, and I honestly don't remember the last time I moved so fast--but I flew over the top of that gate, skirt flyin' as well. Landed with a nice thud, and had gathered my ladylike facade by the time the truck came rollin' by. Terri was still laughin' when we got into the car. The Empty Gas Tank light came on--my gallivantin' buddies know it's always an adventure when I get to goin'--and we made it back to civilization and a gas station just fine. Everyone was rather jealous when we got back to the Reunion late, but they'd left us some chili just the same. Grandma says that that place was the old Leonard Jones place. In the 1910 census, he is 14, living with his parents Calvin age 37 b MO (parents b KY) and Clara Siegal/Siegel age 34 b OH. They were md 4 Dec 1892 in Taney County. There was a brother Lonny age 16, and a brother Elmer, age 1 1/2. This was Branson Twp, although it's not far from the boundary shared with Jasper Twp. Since Grandma was born about 2 miles west of the Jones place in 1915, I'm suspecting she never knew Leonard's parents. The buildings are all, but for the burned house, standing where they were built; some have some roofs fallen in somewhat. The rock work...man, it's something to see. However--I don't advise going onto folks' places unless you know the owner, or if you get permission. There's no one living within 2 miles of this place--can you imagine?--and I knew, because of the good condition it was in, that a native owned it. Not that I'm special, but my Daddy is, and if he isn't related to someone in this area, he knows them! I figured if someone came haulin' after us with a shotgun, seeing 2 women--one wearing a skirt in the woods, for idiocy's sake--we'd just do like always, and ask if they know about this place. Most of the time, that'll get you all kinds of stories, and the natives, if you can't tell, we like to tell stories. I spent the rest of the evening picking burrs from outside and inside my skirt--retaining my facade--and listened to kin singin' blue grass and "Rocky Top". That was Saturday. Boy, wait till you hear about today. Vonda Wilson Sheets ListMom for MOTaney and MO-AR-WRV http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~moarwrv/