Information Sheet

 

 

R         Kinderpost (Mo.).

107                  Collection, ca. 1910-1982.

                                    Three folders.

 

 

 

This is material on the post office and community at Kinderpost in Texas County, Missouri.  In­cluded are two photographs, ca. 1910; an illustrated article by Priscilla Bradford; and a three-page memoir on the postal system in Texas County by Ellery P. Bradford, 1982.

 

The Kinderpost collection was donated by Priscilla Bradford, daughter of Columbus Brad­ford, who founded the community.  Columbus Bradford, a Methodist minister who had filled pul­pits in Illinois and Missouri, opened the “Ozark Kinderfarm” in Texas County, north of Lick­ing, in 1904.  The Kinderfarm was a humanitarian project designed to remove orphan and de­pendent chil­dren from the cities and to raise them in the more beneficial atmosphere of a farm in the country.  As Bradford noted in the pamphlet, The Kinderfarm Journal (1904), the chief in­dustry of the farm was “child culture.”  A secondary objective, according to the Journal, was the solu­tion of the problem “as to the relative importance of Heredity and Environment in character building.”

 

Although the project was initially privately funded, it received some state support from Gov. Herbert Hadley’s immigration commission.  The commission, established in 1908, launched a colonization program to settle entire families, chiefly from the St. Louis area, in uninhabited ar­eas of the Ozarks.  A tract of land near Kinderpost was designated as the site of the colony, which flourished for several years.  Agriculture was the mainstay of the community, which by 1910 boasted a post office and general store, saw and planing mills, and a corn sheller and mill.  Its prosperity was short-lived, however.  A combination of agricultural inexperience, a poor transpor­tation system, and the curtailment of state aid discouraged many of the settlers, who drifted away from the community.

 

 

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