Seligman, Missouri USA
N 36° 30.758 W 093° 56.140
15S E 416218 N 4041216
A historic old town in Barry County, Missouri
Waymark Code: WMRBQC
Location: Missouri, United States
Date Posted: 06/05/2016
Views: 2
In the early 19th century a man named Adam Hurd or Herd settled in this area. Remember that spellings were not very standardized back then, and folks often spelled things the way they "hurd" them (yuck, yuck). This area became known as Herdsville. By the US Civil War, although the settlement was not one of the 4 official towns at that time, it had been renamed after another family as Roller Ridge (or Roller's Ridge). The Roller family is still very present in this area.
After the Civil War, when the St. Louis San Francisco decided to build down toward Texas, it split off its line at Pilgrim Crossing (later Monett), Missouri and headed down through Barry County and the small settlement of Roller Ridge. With the railroad bringing new prosperity, the town was finally established, but was named after one of the backers of the railroad, Seligman (after whom the bigger town of Seligman, Arizona is also named).
When the old Missouri & North Arkansas Railroad (not related to the current M&NA) was built from Neosho, MO to Eureka Springs, AR and beyond, its tracks junctioned into the Frisco tracks (seen here) but to the north of Washburn at the ghost town of Wayne, where the M&NA used trackage rights down to Seligman. Somewhere along here, the M&NA tracks split off of these Frisco tracks and headed east south-east to our right, through Butler Hollow. If you drive Butler Hollow Road to the east, you can still see remnants of that railroad route.
In the 1950s Missouri re-aligned its MO-37 from the heart of Seligman (the road along the tracks in the photo above) to the east, even filling up a portion of Butler Hollow that the tracks used to go through. As usually happens, businesses started growing up along the new alignment of MO-37, stretching the town to the east.
Looking roughly south, with the newer (current) MO-37 being the high road to the left. (The building all the way to the left was a Walmart Neighborhood Market that was built one year and vacated the next!!). The old route 37, which is also the business route, is the lower road in the right that heads behind the tree. It goes down past the old downtown buildings seen in the earlier photo.
Sources:
- Goodspeed's 1888 History of Barry County; reprinted from History of Newton, Lawrence, Barry and McDonald Counties Missouri (etc.); Barry County portion reprinted by Litho Printers of Cassville, MO in 1975
- MoBarry Rootsweb pages on ancestry.com