Factories, Families, and Farms: Placing the Phenix Town Site in Context

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For more than a century, books, movies, and other media have portrayed the Ozarks region of the U.S. as historically isolated, rural, backwards, and overwhelmingly white. However, recent studies have begun to reveal a more complex and nuanced picture of life in the Ozarks during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our investigations of a company town constructed by the Phenix Stone and Lime Company in Southwestern Missouri are part of this new body of work. In a 2019 archaeological field school, we documented site structure and the remnants of public architecture. In a 2022 field school, we focused on the architectural remains and domestic refuse associated with worker households in the company town. Ongoing analyses of the resulting data, along with ethnohistorical research, allow us to explore the variable ways that Phenix workers’ households participated in regional and national social and economic networks, the industrial dimensions of daily life, and the demographic position of town residents within a diverse regional population. Quarry workers and their families came from a wide range of backgrounds and contributed to a complex set of economic, ecological, demographic, and racial shifts in the Ozarks prior to World War II.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37255.0