![]() ![]() And the new old general store? “That was just my house.” Davis didn’t just rebuild his past – he moved inside of it. in southern Taney County In March of 1920, a tornado devastated the town located south of Hollister on the east bank of Turkey creek. ![]() I just packed it up and moved it here, put it back together and furnished it all up like an old general store.” And Red Oak II was born. Drop pin locating the ghost town of Melva, Mo. In Davis’ own words: “The general store, it went vacant, and there was no one running it any longer, and it was falling apart, so I just had to save it. But back in Red Hook, familiar haunts plagued him. ![]() He set up in a vacant cornfield near Carthage, Missouri with dreams of starting his own farm. Red Oak seemed nearly invisible his patchwork of relatives up and left, dispersed to bigger cities like Joplin, St. After 13 years there in Dallas, homesickness drove Lowell back to Red Oak. Following his service, he got a job as creative director in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Davis first left Red Oak to serve during World War II, in the air force. His great-grandfather was the first to ever plow a field in Red Oak. The lives of community members were completely intertwined. His description of growing up in the original Red Oak, Missouri sounds almost mythical today: raised in the back of the local general store, everyone in the town was Lowell’s family. When the multi-media artist began building Red Oak II in 1974, an obsession for nostalgia drove the design process. Lowell Davis has been hailed as the “Norman Rockwell of Rural Art.” And it checks out. ![]()
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