Wayne county’s lost river settlements

As a small boy the author was caught up in the emotionally charged evacuation and abandonment of historic Greenville, his place of birth. Construction of the reservoir of Lake Wappapello was well under way when he moved in 1941 with his parents and siblings to higher ground at what then was styled New Greenville, two miles to the north. He has memories of the high level of excitement that permeated the place, of the tearful goodbyes, of the great number of boxes of household goods lined up neatly in front of the homes of the tree-lined streets ready for loading, of the houses being moved on huge rollers ever so slowly from the old to the new site, of the heavy rainfall that left the new site saturated in mud as hardy craftsmen toiled under difficult circumstances to build the new Wayne County Courthouse, the first homes, the school and business houses town. He practically grew up in the office of his father?s newspaper, the Greenville Sun, has found memories of hiss childhood there, and values still the friendships he made during that part of his life, but in 1951 his father moved the family again, this time to the much larger Piedmont. In that place he worked for his father?s newly acquired newspaper, the Wayne County Journal-Banner, and was graduated from the high school there in 1954, then earned a bachelor?s degree with emphasis on journalism from Arkansas State University and Jonesboro in 1958. his career included reporting stints on daily newspapers in Missouri, New jersey, and Kansas before he returned to the area to begin publishing his own, at Bonne Terre, Marble hill, Jackson and Puxico. He won recognition for his reporting skills, but history and genealogy have been his passion for well over 30 years. He published Old Bollinger and Old Reynolds, about those two continues, before he wrote America: The Mabr(e)y Experience ,about his mother?s family. In more recent times he published Piedmont, Missouri: A Sesquicentennial History, and he has plans to publish a manuscript he call Mingo, which is about the ancient southeast Missouri swamp and its role in the Civil War, and possibly High School Alumni and a Scottish Rite Mason. His home is nine miles from Lake Wappapello an Puxico in Stoddard County.3