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Last summer, I published an article in the Springfield-Greene County Library’s Local History & Genealogy blog about John Polk Campbell’s “bottomless well,” the founding site of Springfield. Since then, I’ve kept digging into the city’s early history—and getting requests for more images or video from that crawlspace.

So, my colleague Jaden and I strapped cameras to our hard hats and returned to the bottomless well. I’ll be premiering the footage in a short documentary at my Preserving the Ozarks program, “The Bottomless Well of Water Street,” at 7 pm next Tuesday in the Library Center’s Annie Busch Community Room. Come on out to learn more about Springfield’s most notable home in the ground!

https://programs.thelibrary.org/event/15355066

If you grew up in the area, you may recall hearing words like “airish,” “idlesome,” or maybe even “willipus-wallipus.” While the Ozarks dialect is essentially extinct today, much of its unique vocabulary is preserved in Vance Randolph and George P. Wilson’s 1953 book, Down in the Holler.

I put together an article for the Springfield-Greene County Library’s Local History & Genealogy blog that showcases 26 of these words and phrases. Not all of these words are unique to the Ozarks, but together they paint a picture of the region’s speech before the incursion of the radio and television.

Read on to learn more about the Ozarks dialect, and test your backwoods knowledge with a short quiz at the end of the article. I hope you tree-top it like a real rabbit-twister!