Gerald Massie, courtesy of the Missouri State Archives
East Stoddard Street, Dexter, Missouri
In St. Louis, harvest festivals quickly went from rustic to industrial. In the teens, Valley Park handed out prizes to housewives for “winning displays” of turnips and pumpkins—and sponsored tours of factories. This 1955 fall festival parade in Dexter, by contrast, seems homespun and Rockwellian: dads in overall and suspenders, a ruffled float platform full of Brownies, a kid in ironed jeans dashing into the street, brandishing his pop gun. But Dexter came into being as a company town, not a farm town. Founded by the railroads, it was platted with a tidy grid of streets, and its main agricultural output was timber. The railroads wanted Dexter to grow—and it did, very slowly, with, the census counting a couple of hundred people more each round. Today, the town still hosts the Stoddard County Fair, where you can win a blue ribbon for hand-crocheted baby booties, a 3-foot-long cucumber, or a prize billy goat. Every September, people still line up on their favorite side of the street, in overalls and suspenders and maybe even ironed jeans, to watch the fall festival parade wind its way through town.
