Its First Hundred Years
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Christian
County Its First Hundred Years |
The crossroads happened also to be in the center of an area of rich farmland, which appealed to the more provident of the later comers to a new area. First comers in the region, during the 1830's and 1840's, preempted the more desirable homesites along wooded streams where fuel, water, game and building material were more abundant. Those who settled the immediate Nixa area came along in the 1850's, and while they appreciated the level land and the richer soil, they had some inconveniences due to the necessity of digging wells or hauling water from a distant spring, and in many cases the need of hauling in logs for their buildings, since much of the area was covered with a tangled growth of brush and vines with only occasional clumps of trees.
First community services were set up to cater to the travelers on the old Wilderness Road from Springfield south, and on the less traveled road westward from Ozark. Among a the first of these was a store, although who established and ran it is not known; and a blacksmith shop set up in his barn by Nichols Alexander Inman.
Born December 17, 1831, in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, "Nick" Inman migrated to Missouri before the Civil War and established a blacksmith shop in partnership with Joe
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