A few souls keep town vital

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February 17, 2015 - 12:00 AM

Sitting at a long table beneath the fluorescent lights of the Senior Center in Neosho Falls, Thelma Bedenbender, 84, searches for something amid a pile of papers.
While she does that, Rev. Russell Anderson, the soft-spoken, genial pastor of the town’s United Methodist Church, asks Thelma to recall an aspect of local history. “There were five different churches in this town at one time. Now they’re all gone. We’ve been the only church for a long time. There’s nothing even left of those other five, is there?”
“Oh no. Not a brick. Here it is,” she says. “Listen.” She smooths the yellowed pages of an old copy of the Iola Register, and begins to read: “’Neosho Falls’ story began on April 6, 1857, when two men in an old buggy pulled by one horse came upon the broad ledge of the rocks across the Neosho River forming the falls.’”
From that date the town surged into radiant life — banks, restaurants, a train depot, telephone company, dance halls, a hotel — until one week, in 1951, floodwaters closed in over the city center, floated the pews of the Methodist church, and wiped out the town’s plans for a prosperous future.

THESE DAYS it’s not always easy to tell which houses in Neosho Falls are inhabited. A house or trailer you dismiss during the day as abandoned, will have a lamplight shining from one of its windows at night. The empty old buildings on Main Street are held together with branches and vines. There is a sign in the yard of a two-story house in the center of town on which someone has spray-painted the words: “Welcome 2 the Jungle.” In the yard across the street a pony with a gray and white marbled coat and white mane gallops in wild, stir-crazy circles along the perimeter of the chain-link fence. The bar on Main, open as recently as last year, is closed now, boarded up under rumor of previous illegal activity. To the extent Neosho Falls is known, it’s known as a ghost town. For most, there is no cell phone service. It’s rare that more than one car moves through town at the same time. Large dogs roam up and down the dirt roads, dying for a car to pass so they can give chase.
“When somebody asks me how many people live in this town, I say 100 people and 50 dogs,” said Thelma, who has lived in Neosho Falls since she was nine. “And that’s about the truth of it.”
Today, to be over-simple, there are two Neosho Fallses. The first includes residents like Bedenbender, and families like the Chriestensons and Bruners and Leedys, whose lineage connects them to the booming river town of old. Then there is, many of the long-time residents report, a semi-invisible transient class, people who arrive for the cheap rent or vacant lots or the unsupervised air that pervades the town, and then depart before ever meeting their neighbors.
“They move in and they move out,” says Thelma. “Sometimes they come and they get a postbox, and the next day they come in and take the postbox out.”
Neosho Falls is not a stopover on the way to someplace else. No main highway comes near the town.
“They say, if you want to hide, go to Neosho Falls,” said Thelma.
Anderson agrees. “My little saying is that Neosho Falls is a great place to go if you don’t want people to find you.”
And yet, later that afternoon, as we’re standing at the top of the steps in front of the church, Anderson will look out on a part of town that to anyone else looks like textbook desolation. “Look, it isn’t dead yet,” Anderson says. “All you’ve got to do is stand here and look and go ‘Good grief, there’s ministry everywhere to be done in this town.”

3.

In the spirit of the old black-clad Methodist circuit rider, who travelled on horseback from one country church to another with a Bible in his satchel, Anderson, after his small worship service in Yates Center lets out, makes the drive every Sunday to an even smaller congregation of about 20 in Neosho Falls.
The congregants gather over coffee and cookies at the back of the church before worship begins. Most of them are the descendants, either directly or through marriage, of one woman, the church’s matriarch, 93-year-old Juanita Chriestenson.
Arriving for the 11 o’clock service, Anderson climbs the dais and rings a little bell, signaling the start of service.

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