Valentine’s Day is almost here in the Ozarks. You might be wondering: How did Ozarkers in the past celebrate the holiday? The answer isn’t clear. Vance Randolph, the preeminent folklorist of the Ozarks (although he preferred to call himself a “collector of folklore”), doesn’t mention Valentine’s Day when writing about other holidays, such as Christmas or New Year’s in Ozark Magic and Folklore (77-81). We do know that by the mid-1800s, Valentine’s Day was already considered a national holiday, with traditions like giving flowers and love letters in full swing (Schmidt 1993). The first mention of Valentine’s Day in a local newspaper was in February 1877, with a brief article in the Springfield-Patriot Advertiser pointing out that the holiday fell on the same day as Ash Wednesday and the tabulation of the previous year’s general election. This casual mention of Valentine’s Day suggests that it was already a part of local culture, with people observing it much as we do today.
In 1888, the Springfield Daily Herald published a full page for Valentine’s Day, part of which is shown below. By this time, the holiday had become well-established, and it’s likely that people in the rural Ozarks celebrated Valentine’s Day just like those in Springfield. After all, rural Ozarkers were not an isolated, primitive people with no connection to modern culture, contrary to what some local color writers might suggest. In the 1800s, they had access to books and newspapers and engaged in cultural exchange with other parts of the country. Like any group, there were some who held onto older traditions, but let’s not mistake the exception for the rule. It’s possible that Randolph didn’t write about Valentine’s Day simply because there wasn’t much to say — or at least, not much that backed up his claim that Ozarkers, “like all isolated illiterates… [had] clung to the… outworn customs of their ancestors” (Ozark Magic and Folklore, 3).
What has been better documented is how Ozarkers navigated love more generally. We’ll take a look at the work of two scholars here: Vance Randolph (especially The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society, published in 1931, and Ozark Magic and Folklore, published in 1947), and University of Arkansas history professor Janet Allured, who wrote the article “Ozark Women and the Companionate Family in the Arkansas Hills, 1870-1910” for the Arkansas Historical Quarterly in the autumn of 1988. These two scholars offer differing views: Randolph depicts Ozarkers as insular and stubbornly traditional, while Allured argues that the culture of the Ozarks was more dynamic, following broader national trends regarding marriage, divorce, and the roles of women. It would be too simple to say that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Both perspectives offer valuable insights, and the tension between them deepens our understanding.
Finding Love
Perhaps it’s human nature to view the people that came before us as more chaste or restrained. If we believe this, we might think that early Ozarkers only romanced one another with the intention to marry. However, Randolph suggests that many Ozarkers were actually surprisingly tolerant. For example, illegitimate children weren’t held in lower esteem than those born to married parents, and brides in shotgun weddings weren’t necessarily looked down upon by others. According to Randolph, Ozarkers believed that “lawful wedlock [was] supposed to cancel all previous laxities” (The Ozarks, 53-4), so as long people eventually married, it seems early Ozarkers were given considerable leeway when it came to romance.
While early Ozarkers may have been tolerant of premarital relationships, that didn’t mean that they condoned promiscuity. Once a young couple became publicly involved, the woman was expected to stop seeing other suitors to avoid “getting somebody killed” or damaging her reputation and chances of marriage. Men, on the other hand, weren’t held up to the same standard. A little “tomcattin’ round” was permitted for young men, as long as he hadn’t “set up to one particular girl.” This “setting up" usually meant that the couple had attended church together, which Randolph noted was “equivalent to announcing their engagement” (The Ozarks, 51-2).
Like young people everywhere, girls in the Ozarks put a lot of effort into attracting potential partners. Randolph notes that while the first European settlers in the region were suspicious of any woman trying to make herself look more attractive through artificial means, by the time he arrived in 1919, things had changed. “Nowadays… young girls manage to get ‘store-boughten’ cosmetics — cheap powder, lipstick, perfume.” If regular cosmetics weren’t enough, Ozark girls had other options. Randolph describes how girls applied chicken blood, cow manure, and soiled diapers to remove freckles, or ate chicken hearts to improve their appearance. Astrology also played a role in beautification. Ozark girls believed they should only pierce their ears when “the sign is right”; that is, when the Sun was in a certain zodiac constellation (Randolph didn’t specify which one). Girls also thought that cutting their hair during the new moon would make it grow faster and thicker (Ozark Magic and Folklore, 162-5).
Lovesick Ozarkers sometimes turned to alchemical or “magical” measures. Local “country druggists” are said to have sold love potions made from “a perfumed mixture of milk sugar” (possibly powdered milk) and “flake whiting” (the identity of this substance is unclear). Young men would slip this mixture to women by dissolving it in coffee or mixing it with candy — not exactly upstanding behavior, even if they were working with snake oil. Randolph also reports women wearing a “pinkish, soaplike” love charm, made from an unknown material and placed inside a stone fruit pit, which was then worn on a necklace or garter. According to Randolph, people sincerely believed in the efficacy of these charms and potions, to the point where “the victim of a love-charm or philter [was] not held morally responsible for his actions.” So strong was the Ozarker’s belief in love magic that women who were abandoned by their husbands often found comfort in the belief that their husbands hadn’t deliberately left, but had been “cunjured off” by another woman (Ozark Magic and Folklore, 166).
If you find some of this hard to believe, then you aren’t alone. We should probably take Randolph’s detailed accounts of young girls’ private practices with a grain of salt, especially considering that he himself reported how Ozarkers believed that “respectable” women were “not supposed even to talk with men except on business, and only if her husband is not present to speak for her” (The Ozarks, 52). That said, when have people not gone to extreme lengths to win love? Many of the things we do today to improve our looks or find a partner will likely seem just as ridiculous in one hundred years, if not much sooner.
When a young man and woman became a couple, they often spent much of their time together in the company of the girl’s parents. The suitor would often stay for part or all of the weekend at his sweetheart’s home, getting to know her and her family over shared meals and hearthside conversations. In more rural areas, the young man might even be allowed to stay overnight. Keep in mind that, in most of these homes, the entire family slept in a single room, meaning that the unmarried couple would, in theory, never be out of the girl’s parents’ sight (The Ozarks, 52). Still, shotgun weddings and illegitimate children carried little stigma in the early Ozarks, suggesting that parental surveillance wasn’t completely effective as a preventative measure.
Proposals, Weddings, and Married Life
Ozarks girls used various methods to try to predict the identity of their future husbands, such as keeping a snail in a jar overnight and then attempting to discern initials in the trail it left behind. Young men and women also turned to bibliomancy, or the use of books for divination, to scry the nature of their future marriages. One technique involved consulting the twenty-first or thirty-first chapter of Proverbs, depending on your sex. Each chapter contains exactly 31 verses. The idea is that the verse in your chapter — 21 for men and 31 for women – corresponding to your birthdate would offer insights into what married life might hold. For instance, a man born on the 30th would turn to Proverbs 21:30 to see what his romantic future might entail (Ozark Magic and Folklore, 178).
When a young man in the Ozarks proposed to a woman, he did so with a wedding ring — but not just any ring. Men were advised to purchase a mail-order ring from a catalog (yes, they had catalogs), since store-bought rings might have absorbed bad luck from previous customers trying them on (Ozark Magic and Folklore, 187). When a woman received a proposal but was unsure of how to respond, she would sometimes use a method called “leaving it to the cat.” This involved taking three hairs from a cat’s tail, wrapping them in paper, and leaving the paper bundle under the doorstep overnight. In the morning, the woman would carefully examine the hairs: if they formed a Y, her answer was “yes”; if they formed an N, the answer was “no” (Ozark Magic and Folklore, 181).
Concrete details about marriages in the Ozarks can be difficult to uncover. Many genealogists with ancestors in the Ozarks can attest that records prior to 1900 are often scarce — marriage records included. This scarcity is partly due to the natural erosion of time: courthouses burn, and documents are lost or misfiled. In some instances, those documents may have never existed at all. In Greene County, a fire in 1861 destroyed the county courthouse; however, many marriage records and divorce records survived and can be found in online genealogical databases. According to Randolph, many marriages in the early Ozarks were “not legal marriages at all, since the ‘saddlebag preachers’” (traveling clergymen, some of whom may not have been ordained) “who officiated had no authority to perform the marriage ceremony” (The Ozarks, 54). As a result, many of the earliest marriages in the Ozarks would not have left behind a paper trail.
Some insights can be drawn from surviving records. Using census data, Janet Allured estimated that the average age of new brides in Boone County, Arkansas, between 1870 and 1910 was between 19 and 20, which is about a year and a half younger than the national average at the time (230). Cross-cultural surveys have shown a universal trend of husbands being older than their wives on average (Buss 1989), so it’s reasonable to assume this applied to Ozarks marriages as well. Additionally, Allured calculates that the average family in Boone County during this period had between six and seven children, with rural women having slightly more children on average than their urban counterparts (238). While figures may have varied in other parts of the Ozarks, we can expect that the typical Ozarks bride was slightly younger than the national average and had more children.
Given the central role of religion in the Ozarks, it may come as a surprise when Randolph claims that “there were no church weddings in the hill country.” Instead, “the ceremony always takes place at the bride’s parents’ home, followed by a dinner and ‘frolic’ that often lasts until dawn.” The festivities would continue the next day, as the wedding party and guests gathered at the groom’s parent’s home for the “enfare,” which is described as “another feast and jollification.” Another celebration took place with the shivaree — a raucous mock serenade involving guns, pots and pans, cowbells, and anything else that could make noise. The shivaree party, made up of the rowdier friends of the newlyweds, would quietly approach the couple’s home under the cover of darkness. At a signal (usually the discharge of a pistol), the party would erupt in noise, prompting the newlyweds to appear at the door. The expectation was that the bride and groom would then entertain the shivaree party with food, liquor, and tobacco; failing to do so could result in the groom being thrown into the nearest body of water (The Ozarks, 57-8).
Our sources offer differing views on the day-to-day realities of marriage in the early Ozarks. Randolph describes the “Ozark hillman” as taking an “eighteenth-century” approach to marriage, where women occupied a “subordinate position” and men “studiously [avoided] any outward show of deference to the weaker vessel” (The Ozarks, 41). Allured challenges this view, arguing that Ozarks women “far from acquiescing in the preservation of a traditional culture which granted them only a servile existence,” actually “sought to enhance their position within a family that was clearly modern.” While Ozarks women did not enjoy the rights and freedoms of modern women, Allured contends that they were not “trapped in some pre-modern, eighteenth-century patriarchy” during this period. Instead, she argues, marriages in the early Ozarks reflected the companionate family model typical of the Victorian era. The companionate family emphasized “more loving and equitable relations between spouses, the pre-eminence of motherhood, and the special attention given to children” (232-3). To support this claim Allured points to two key pieces of evidence: first, an increasing tendency among Ozarks men to leave the entirety of their estates to their wives upon death (rather than to an oldest son or other male relative) (248); and second, a notable rise in divorce rates in Boone County, Arkansas, between 1870 and 1910, which she interprets as indicating a growing belief in the importance of mutual affection within marriage (242).
Divorce
Randolph and Allured differ in their understanding of divorce in the early Ozarks. Randolph writes little on the subject, aside from stating that divorce was rare. He claims, “Divorce is rather unusual among the real old-time hill people,” noting that while separations occurred, “legal sanction for the ‘parting’ is not much in favor.” On these “separations,” he writes, “A woman never definitely ‘leaves’ her husband; she goes to visit her kinfolk, and puts off returning time after time, until finally everybody is accustomed to the situation, without any open scandal” (The Ozarks, 62). This idea aligns with Allured’s findings: her analysis of the 1910 federal census records for Boone County reveals “a substantial number of married or divorced daughters and their children [who] could be found taking refuge with their family of origin” (243).
However, Allured diverges from Randolph when it comes to the frequency of divorce in the early Ozarks, and the statistics are on her side. In fact, she finds that Boone County families in the 1890s were actually “more likely to be broken by divorce” than families elsewhere in the nation (242). Can we reconcile Randolph and Allured on this point? It is possible that divorce, while relatively common in the Ozarks, was not a subject discussed among “polite company,” leading Randolph to mistakenly perceive it as rare. Randolph, not being a statistician or a census enumerator, may have simply been out of touch with the reality of Ozarks society at the time, relying on the attitudes and perceptions of his informants, who tended to be the older members of a community. If this is true, then Randolph and Allured’s findings together reveal something paradoxical: Divorce may have been both commonplace and taboo.
Alongside the increasing prevalence of divorce in the Ozarks came the growing belief that mutual affection was a fundamental part of marriage. While we take this idea for granted today, it was a relatively new concept at the time, spreading throughout the English-speaking world during the Victorian era. Other Victorian shifts in family life also made their way to the Ozarks, such as the modern idea of childhood which regards young people as inherently innocent rather than sinful, and which emphasizes nurture and affection over strict discipline. Another societal change that reached the Ozarks was the division of men and women into “separate spheres.” Randolph observed that “women do all the cooking and housework and laundry,” and that “the religious and social life of a mountain settlement is very largely dominated by womenfolk” (The Ozarks, 41-3). Men, by contrast, occupied the rougher domains of work and commerce, while women held varying degrees of power in the home, church, and social fabric of the broader community. It’s important to be clear here: Just because Ozark women were not living under a pre-modern patriarchy doesn’t mean they had equal social status to their male counterparts. Throughout the Victorian world, the domestic sphere occupied by women was considered subordinate to the public realm of men, and women’s work as homemakers, mothers, and spiritual educators was almost universally regarded as less valuable than men’s labor (Rosaldo 1974).
There is some evidence suggesting that Ozark women were viewed as capable of independently managing a household, however: Allured’s research indicates that mothers were “routinely awarded custody of children in the event of divorce.” That said, in many cases, no father was available to be awarded custody, as desertion was the most common reason for divorce. Despite this, the gender dynamics of divorce in the nineteenth-century Ozarks were often relatively egalitarian: men sued for divorce nearly as often as women, many divorcing couples reached mutually agreed-upon property settlements, and women frequently petitioned for and received alimony and child support from their ex-husbands. While many divorces were based on desertion or cruelty, other common grounds included impotence, habitual drunkenness, or intolerable treatment, which was not limited to physical abuse (Allured, 243-7). Ozarkers had legal avenues for divorce, and if those failed, de facto separation was a completely viable alternative, as both Randolph and Allured contend.
While the gender politics of the early Ozarks were, in some respects, more modern than we might expect, it’s important not to assume that Ozarks women lived in a society where they were considered equal to men. Nor should we fall into the opposite trap of believing that women in the Ozarks, prior to the twentieth century, were prisoners in their homes, resigned to lives of silent domestic servitude in marriages of necessity. Ozarkers — men and women alike — married for love, and if their marriage didn’t fulfill that expectation, they could and sometimes did separate. Over time, marriage came to be viewed more as a partnership between husband and wife, with women considered both socially and legally entitled to the benefits of that shared labor if separated from their husbands, whether by divorce or death, although it would be decades before women won anything approaching legal or social equality in the Ozarks, or in the United States generally.
Conclusion
When studying history, it's important that we draw conclusions based on the evidence available, not on preconceived notions or idealized fantasies. Randolph’s work on Ozarks culture is doubtlessly valuable, but remember: He described himself as a “collector” of folklore rather than a true folklorist (Cochran, 82), and it is possible that this collection privileged the rare archaicism over the everyday folkways of the Ozarks. This matters because his portrayal of the Ozarks is often taken at face value, which is concerning, especially since he also noted that Ozarkers were prone to embellishing the truth, particularly when talking to outsiders (We Always Lie to Strangers, 4). Additionally, at the time, Randolph was more or less peerless in the extent of field research in the Ozarks, so we cannot look to similar works by other folklorists for correction.
Scholarship like that of Allured’s is an excellent tool for separating the mythology of the Ozarks from the lived reality of its people. It’s unfortunate that there isn’t more research like this; a quick search for papers on the anthropology or sociology of the Ozarks written in the last 25 years yields meager results.
From what we do know, it seems that love in the early Ozarks was surprisingly modern in many ways. Men and women married for love, had children out of wedlock without much shame, and often divorced on mutually agreed terms. On the other hand, practices like love potions, fortune-telling, and shivarees might seem practically medieval to us. But the emotions behind these rituals — love, desire, connection — are just as real today as they were then. The way people express those feelings may have changed, but fundamentally, early Ozarkers were no different from us. They loved, experienced heartbreak, and carried on with their lives. The poet Ovid said it best: “Everything changes, nothing dies.”
Happy Valentine’s Day!
For Further Reading:
Allured, Janet. 1988. "Ozark Women and the Companionate Family in the Arkansas Hills, 1870-1910." The Arkansas Historical Quarterly (Autumn 1988): 230-256.
Buss, David M. 1989. "Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1-14.
Cochran, Robert. 1985. Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Randolph, Vance. 1947. Ozark Magic and Folklore. New York: Dover Publications.
—. 1931. The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society. New York: Vanguard Press.
—. 1951. We Always Lie to Strangers: Tall Tales from the Ozarks. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist. 1974. "Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview." In Woman, Culture, and Society, by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 17-42. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 1993. "The Fashioning of a Modern Holiday: St. Valentine's Day, 1840-1870." Winterthur Portfolio (Winter 1993): 209-245.
Springfield Daily Herald. 1888. "St. Valentine's Day." February 14: 3.
Springfield Patriot-Advertiser. 1877. February 8: 1.