Information
Sheet
R Wallower, Frank Carmany, 1882-1966.
57 Papers,
1877-1966 (bulk 1902-1966).
Six folders and 216 photographs.
Frank Carmany Wallower was born on August
23, 1882, at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
He was the son of Elias Zollinger Wallower, a newspaperman and member of
a group of Harrisburg investors who were financing mining operations in the
mineral district of southwestern Missouri.
After education at Columbia University as a mining engineer, F. C. Wallower
was invited by the Harrisburg group to supervise their investments in
Missouri. He came to Joplin in 1906 to
manage the Bradford-Kansas City Mining Company, which operated the Daylight
Mine between Joplin and Webb City, and the Keystone Hotel in Joplin. In 1912, after operating numerous mines and
mills in Missouri, Wallower moved his operations to the Picher field in
Oklahoma.
In 1925 Wallower was elected director and
general manager of the Southwest Missouri Railroad Company (q.v.), an interurban line between
Carthage, Missouri, and Picher, Oklahoma.
He later served as a co-receiver and trustee of the road. Wallower retired from mining in 1932 and
organized the Tri-State Casualty Insurance Company in Oklahoma. He managed this firm and a subsidiary until
1946. He then retired and moved to the
Mission Hills Farm near Joplin, where he lived until 1964. He died in Joplin in 1966.
The Wallower papers consist primarily of
materials connected with his unfinished autobiography, “A Review of Sixty
Years,” which he began writing after his retirement. There are three separate versions of the autobiography in this
collection, each containing both original pages and carbons. Each version is incomplete and differs
slightly from the others. Taken as a
whole, they provide a composite of the intended form of the autobiography.
In connection with “A Review of Sixty
Years,” Wallower collected newspaper clippings and photographs illustrative of
his career in the mines and with the Southwest Missouri Railroad Company. The photographs include both surface and
underground views of mines and mills he operated in Missouri and
Oklahoma. There are also interior views
of the mills and the “House of Mystery,” an electrolytic plant constructed
during World War One. Not all of the photographs
are identified. They have been assigned
arbitrary catalog numbers and are filed in order following the manuscript
material and newspaper clippings. Also
in the collection, and filed with the photographs, is a motorman’s badge from
the Southwest Missouri Railroad Company.
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