In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Introduction In June 1948, workmen began to demolish an eighty-nine-yearold house hidden away in an overgrown lot at the northwest corner of Ninth and Jules Streets in St. Joseph, Missouri. Inside, the structure had already been stripped of its ornamental fireplace surrounds and the walnut newel post and spindles that had once graced the front stairway leading to the second floor. The trash that littered the floors, which included dozens of books on a variety of topics and a broken bust of the German poet, playwright, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, hinted at the wide-reaching interests of the home’s former residents. As he pried up the dining room floor, worker Archie Shull nearly fell into a large hole that had been concealed under the floorboards. The hole, it turned out, was the remains of a well, and the workers could hear water splash as they tossed books, chunks of broken plaster, and other debris into its black bottom.1 “Passersby look through the heavy foliage of ancient trees and conclude the city has moved on from the old Owen home at 306 North Ninth Street,” the St. Joseph News-Press had proclaimed a few years earlier. “They are wrong; the city has not yet caught up with it. It was from this house with its half block of ground that three sisters with scientific minds moved to all parts of the world to investigate nature and write learnedly of their findings.”2 For eight decades, the house had been a hive of activity and a hub of intellectual curiosity. In the years after the Civil War, it had been the home of James A. Owen, Agnes Cargill Owen, their five children, and their assorted household servants. Over the decades, as two of the children, Herbert Owen and Florence Owen Orr, moved 2 Mary Alicia Owen out and the elderly parents passed away, it became the permanent home of three remarkable sisters, none of whom ever married. Though the women never moved away from their childhood home, their world was not one of insular confinement. There, in rooms lined with books and works of art, the three worked at careers that took them to faraway places. They entertained guests from around the world and they corresponded with some of the leading intellectuals of the day. The home, it was said, was “a Mecca for those who were interested in the better things in life.”3 Juliette Owen, the youngest of the sisters, had been an artist and ornithologist and was also the only Owen child to live in the house her entire life. After her older sisters died, she lived at the residence with thirty-seven cats, a bantam rooster, a hen, and an unknown number of pigeons, until 1943, when she died in the same room in which she had been born eighty-four years earlier.4 Luella Owen, more commonly known to her family and friends as Ella, was a geologist who had circled the globe and explored the depths of caves across the United States. She had been a small girl when the house was built and she too had died there. The best-known of the three sisters was Mary Alicia Owen, who lived in the house from the age of nine until her death in 1935. Within the house’s walls, the eldest Owen child had written at least three books, several academic articles , and an untold number of short stories and poems. “I don’t think [the family] will either sell or rent the house where . . . [the three] sisters lived for so many years,” Robert Orr, the executor of the Owen estate stated after his three great-aunts had passed away. “They won’t want anyone else living there.” Thus, the demolition of the Owen house served as a symbolic end to three distinguished careers. Today, a church parking lot marks the spot where the home once stood. Like the debris that lies at the bottom of the well that supplied the Owen family with water, many details about the work and the lives of the intellectual pioneers who once lived and worked there are now obscured and have been forgotten. This book attempts to unearth some details about the extraordinary life and career of one of those three sisters, Mary Alicia Owen. Mary Owen is perhaps best known as a folklorist who studied and wrote about the culture, legends, and folkways of Missouri’s African Americans. Her articles on the...

Share