Ella Dunn
No one ever believed in or put into practice more the old adage that idle hands are the devil's workshop than Ella Ingenthron Dunn, a life-long resident of Taney County, MO. Throughout her long and productive life, she never let her hands be idle, even though her eyesight failed her. Even during the last years of her life until her death in 1994 at age 104, she pieced quilts or rolled the tangled messes of twine from her son-in-law's feed sacks into neat balls. She believed that keeping her hands busy would keep her mind active.
Active seems to be the key word to describe her life and her many talents. The daughter of a farmer, she early learned all the jobs of farming, gardening, and housekeeping. Since her mother was a granny woman, Ella learned about delivering babies and child care. From both parents she learned to gather and prepare natural foods, such as wild greens, maple syrup, and to prepare her own yeast and lye for making hominy.
Many Ozark women, who were born when she was in the early 1890s, learned to do these tasks. But not all lived more than a hundred years still remembering how to, or in their mid-eighties going out into the woods and streams teaching the skills to high school students so the knowledge would not be lost.
But Ella Dunn did not use her hands only for the utilitarian purposes of keeping her family fed, clothed, and comfortable. She knew there was more to human existence than work; keeping her hands busy did not mean working all of the time. She was a good pianist and singer, entertaining herself and her family with dozens of hymns, popular tunes, and traditional folk songs she knew by heart. She played by ear any piece she heard. She sang at her work, and when her work was finished, she sat at her organ or piano to play.
Her love of beautiful things became projects for her hands. She painted scenes around her that she liked and hung the pictures on her walls. From memory she made illustrations of the one-room school she attended and other buildings from her childhood. To help others understand how the equipment worked, she sketched old-fashioned machines such as a sorghum cane mill, ash hopper, and an evaporator for drying fruit. In the evening she pieced quilts, she sewed pretty clothes, and she modeled figures from the native clay she found on her farm. She made jewelry out of seeds and shells.
The family's worn-out and faded clothing she tore into inch-wide strips. After tacking them together, she wove the rags into long yard-wide sections for carpeting. Fastening these strips together, she had a warm and colorful floor covering. Before the term wall-to-wall carpeting was popularized, she brightened up her home for her family's winter enjoyment. "We didn't have rags enough for all the rooms. We scrubbed the floors every Saturday with homemade soap and sand until they were so clean you would be willing to eat off of them. We carpeted the best room and saved it for when we entertained our young company."
She made toys, fashioning dolls, animals, tiny dishes, and noise makers. The many things she made for her children, for the house or for decoration, we today call crafts. At present, the income from crafts such as she made comprise the largest percentage of each tourist dollar spent in Missouri. And since after agriculture, the tourist industry is the second largest source of income in the state, we can see that crafts are even more important now.
But in Ella's childhood and younger years, she made these things not to sell, but because she didn't have the money to buy "the real thing." Rather than doing without rugs on the floor, she made them. She couln't afford the then popular china head dolls for her daughter, so she made dolls using material she found on her farm. She twisted strands of wire to make the frame of the body. Over that she wrapped strips of old stockings to give the body form. Devising hair from yarn, cotton, or anything else she could improvise, next painting on the facial features, and then sewing some clothes, she could give her daughter a doll that was as much fun to play with as if she had a store-bought one.
One source of fun for the boys was a noise maker which also doubled as a deterrent for undesirable trespassers or hunters on their land. With a nail keg, a groundhog hide, and 10 feet of trot line, she created a device called a dumbull. Pulling their hands down across the keg, the boys could produce a scary sound resembling some huge prehistoric animal. After hearing the sound at night, men and dogs would run away never to return.
Ella wasted nothing. Even the ashes from the stoves had further use. Instead of buying the lye she needed for making soap or hominy, she let the ashes rot in homemade wooden ash hopper. The rain water that seeped through the ashes became the lye she needed.
Her knowledge of plants was as great as her know-how with making things with her hands. Why spend money on yeast to make bread when she could make her own? Ella used mashed potatoes as a starter to grow her own yeast from the hops she raised, and after stirring in her cornmeal, she dried the mixture, cut it into yeast cakes and stored them until needed.
For ornaments and to give the house a pleasant scent, she grew exotic plants called plumgrannies. The little green and white striped melon-like fruit produced a pleasing, almost oriental fragrance when cut in half and placed in the house.
To satisfy the family sweet tooth, in January and February when the nights were below freezing and the days warm, Ella collected the sap from the many maple trees in her creek bottom farm. She boiled down the liquid for several hours to produce maple syrup. Her average was 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup.
She knew how to use the medicinal plants she either grew herself or found wild. Her specialty was a spring tonic she made in March. "This builds up the body's system, purifies the blood and clears up the complexion," she said. She boiled down to a heavy liquid the roots of sassafras, burdock, sarsaparilla, blue burvene, and may apple, and the bark of dogwood and wild cherry, adding sugar or whiskey to preserve it. Her recommendation for an adult was to take one tablespoonful each morning and night for two weeks. "I think I'd feel better if I had some now," she said a few years ago.
As Ella kept her hands occupied, her mind was also constantly busy. Her creative skills included writing. For many years she was a country correspondent for Taney County Republican. She wrote and illustrated with line drawings her own book, The Granny Woman of the Hills, reprinted in 1978 by the Ozarks Mountaineer. It is still available. She wrote about many activities in addition to the experiences of both herself and her mother as granny women. She described old-fashioned Fourth of July picnics when someone proudly read the Declaration of Independence. She described how to dry foods, how to butcher a hog, cradle wheat, raise broom corn, tend to sheep, and many other farm and household tasks.
Today, the housekeeping chores she did as a young farm wife are interesting to young people because they illustrate the ingenuity and creativity of the people who found their way into these hills far from any city on roads that were merely trails. Ella's accounts also make us very glad that we enjoy today's conveniences. For instance, young mothers feel lucky to live now when they have unlimited quantities of disposable diapers instead of only 12 cloth ones. In her day, women had to wash their babies' clothes on a wash board almost every day, using lye soap and water carried up the hill from the spring and heated on the stove that needed fueling by going to the timber and splitting wood. Young women today are awed at the work she did. But Ella never thought about it.
But perhaps of more interest than her talents and ability to accomplish so many tasks is her philosophy based on her observations. Her busy mind was constantly thinking of other people's needs, how to be healthy and live a good life. One example of that was her contribution as a granny woman. For many years she was in demand in her neighborhood, delivering over 100 babies. She never asked for money. Sometimes she was paid a dollar, never more than five. She wrote of granny women, "They went through all kinds of weather and sometimes the nearest thing to reward was when they heard, 'I thank you. It was sure good that we could get you.'"
She began the practice in the first place on the insistence of her mother, a long-time granny woman. When her mother could no longer ride to the isolated homes, she simply told Ella that she would have to take her place; Ella had the talent and the spirit to help. The community needed a granny woman. Moral codes in the hills were so strict that women wouldn't even bare their legs below the knee, much less allow a man to deliver their babies. But customs changed. When doctors and hospitals finally reached the hills, the medical community, as well as the general public, frowned on using these experience-trained granny women. When Skaggs Hospital was built in Branson in 1949, Ella stopped delivering babies. She said, "I told the people it was just as easy to take them to the hospital as it was to come for me."
She believed that childbirth was easier for women when she was practicing than now because years ago women walked a great deal and got plenty of exercise. "Now-a-days women sit too much and ride in cars. They eat fatty foods and don't restrict their diet as they should."
Ella lived long enough to see some of the practices she recommended for expectant mothers substantiated by modern research, as if just recently discovered. In addition to encouraging healthy diets for the young women while carrying their babies, advice even doctors didn't give at that time as most women sought help only at the delivery, she recommended a schedule for their daily habits. "Another thing I drilled the women on was their daily thought," she said. "That has a big influence over the child. The mind is developing as well as the body, and if you want a good child, if you want a child to be industrious and work and not sleep all the time, keep a busy mind. But keep your mind on the good of life. Not anything that's contrary. And then it's not hard when you begin to train a little one after it comes to you, because it's already instilled in its little mind."
Ella was not quite 15 when she married Ralph Dunn. "I ought of been home being spanked and washing the dishes," she laughed and said, not recommending marrying that young. Since her husband couldn't make a decent living in the Ozark hills, they moved to Lake City, CO, for him to work in the mines. Ella washed dishes in a hotel. But she was snubbed because of her background and was homesick for the hills. Her husband laughed that he could take Ella out of the hills, but he couldn't "take the hills out of her." After a short stay, they came home. She never left her hills after that.
She was proud of her heritage and bemoaned the misconception most people had of Ozark people. She wrote, "News of the hill people's way of living traveled in a misapprehended manner to the northern states, where people had more of this world's goods and were blessed with greater opportunity to get an education, but the stories they heard of our people were highly exaggerated and the picture some drew in their minds was fantastic. We became labeled as Ozark hillbillies. However, our people were broad-minded citizens of the hills. We did not let it canker our way of life. God had given us sufficient knowledge to guide us in whatever industry we became a part of. God gave all a feeling of admonition that He created them equal. Some might have to go barefoot through necessity. However, they did not complain; maybe they rather enjoyed slipping off the heavy brogans and wading in the mud, feeling God's good earth squash up between the toes, even walking over chinquapin burs and never flinching."
Ella experienced the growth of the tourist business in Taney County. Even in her childhood during the late 1890s, when the only means of reaching the hills was over the rough, curvy, and hilly roads by horseback or stout wagon, the area was becoming popular for the fishing floats on the White River. Men's clubs in St. Louis had fishing and hunting lodges in the area for their members. The publication of Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills gave the White River region another tourist boost and the coming of the railroad to Branson in 1905 made the area easily accessible. After Powersite Dam was built in 1912, forming Lake Taneycomo, tourists came regularly. Rockaway Beach was a resort center.
One of the ways the Dunns made their living was by growing vegetables on their Bear Creek farm. They irrigated the land from the spring-fed creek, raising one vegetable crop after another all season long. They sold their first-class cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, celery, okra and other vegetables to the Taneycomo Hotel at Rockaway Beach. The lesser quality vegetables Ella canned at home in No. 2 tin cans and sold them by the case to local markets.
As Ella looked back over the changes the tourist industry had brought, she described it in bittersweet terms. It was good for the country because people lived better, but she thought there was a better world without it. "The progress has been wonderful. We have good roads and good schools, and young people can make money better ways than beating it out of the soil and hunting pelts and raising tobacco like in the early days. But there's also a lot of bad things that we can't do anything about that came in with progress. I think it really tore up home living a lot. I think this progressive-living has broken up an awful lot of homes--brought dissatisfaction."
Though she was happy that women have the opportunities of making the same as a man, she said, "I'm not quite an advocator and believer for women's liberation. It creates a sort of selfishness. As a whole, back when women depended more on their husband and their home, their home life was better, their children's life was better." When she made that statement, she paused before adding, "but they didn't have as much."
She regretted that home life suffered when both parents had to work. "Children are turned loose when they're too young to go on their own. They buy them a car. They don't have the judgment to be turned loose quite so young."
In reflecting on how she raised her family, she said, "I gave my life for my children. If it was to do over, I'd spend more time with them than I did. I taught them to work. That's a good thing for them--self-reliance. I don't think children have to do enough this day and time to really know what it means to make a home. It takes a lot of strength."
Even when she was distressed by some modern practices, she said several times, "I wouldn't want them to do like I had to do."
She also regretted the loss of neighborliness. She wrote, "That was one of the nice things about the hillbilly people. They had love for their neighbors. Sometimes a house or barn burned and the men of the neighborhood all went in and helped cut, haul, and lay logs for the new building. All work was donated; someone who was apt with shingle making took that job and in a short time the loss was made good."
Hwever, in recent times neighbors are not as important. She said, "People don't like to get out and visit. They'd rather watch television." She admitted she watched it for a pastime. "I don't read my Bible as much as I used to, either."
But in spite of the good and bad in earlier days and today, Ella knew that she'd lived a fulfilled life. Her last 20 years she lived with her daughter, Anna Mae Lewis, of Rockaway Beach. Lewis is very proud of her mother and agrees that she was special. "Mother was blessed," she said, "to have so many talents and live such a profitable life. I wish I had her memory. I admire her and miss her."
Keeping her hands ever busy, helping her community, and thinking good thoughts, Ella Dunn helped those she came into contact with all during her life. In the short biography in The Granny Woman of the Hills, her nephew, Elmo Ingenthron, wrote, "Ella Dunn's accomplishments in life cannot be measured in economic terms, for she achieved a measure of success in many fields. Her ambition to be a successful wife and mother was fully realized. Her love for God and her fellowman was best manifested in her service to others. Her ingenuity and ability to make the best of things under any and all conditions was never doubted. She was thrifty, cunning and persistent in overcoming the obstacles of life, which often baffled women of lesser courage."
Photograph of Ella Dunn and article provided by Gaye Lisby, Branson Living Magazine
