Where Time Stops : Artist Relocates Buildings From His Hometown, Re-Creates His Past

CARTHAGE, Mo. —  Lowell Davis ponders the question: What does he like about modern civilization? He puffs on his corncob pipe for a long moment before deciding, “I can’t think of a damned thing.”

Davis has chosen to live in the past. His past.

On a 60-acre plot in southwest Missouri, Davis, an artist-eccentric, has re-created a way of life that he remembers nostalgically from his boyhood on a family farm in Red Oak, now a ghost town 23 miles to the north of what used to be Route 66.

He calls it Red Oak II. Here, Davis, at 53, has proved that you can go home again. He has done it by moving buildings--including the schoolhouse and the general store--by commercial trailer. And those too fragile or too far gone--”basket cases,” he calls them--like a gas station or cemetery headstones, are moved in pieces, then reassembled at Red Oak II.

A lean figure in faded denims, a blue bandanna knotted at his neck, he greets visitors as he returns from a spin in his 1934 Plymouth. Settling into a desk in Red Oak II’s one-room schoolhouse, he conjures up memories of Red Oak I:

“It was a small community, self-sufficient, neighbors helping neighbors. Everybody had a garden and a Jersey cow, and Mom made her own clothes.”

It was, in short, what he thinks hometowns should be. But after graduating from high school in nearby Carthage, Davis had other ideas.

His wanderlust took him to the Air Force, Kansas State University and Dallas, where he was art director at an advertising agency.

“I spent 13 years staring out the window of this advertising agency, hoping I could get back to the farm someday.”

He bought the land in 1973. He dubbed it Fox Fire Farm, he explains, because “Lowell Davis Farm sounds so vain.” Here, he and his second wife, Charlotte--”Charlie”--and their two young children live in a cozy home, part of which is a 149-year-old log cabin.

Leading the way through the back door, Davis apologizes, “This is a real embarrassment. Charlie put in a high-tech kitchen.”

Fox Fire is also home to Davis’ three adult children, all of whom have old houses here. A daughter runs the Red Oak II general store.

Often, Davis’ three grandchildren, with 25 cents each, walk to the general store, a world of wonders. Red Oak, with its blacksmith shop, feed store and steepled church, is their playground.

“I want to create memories for them,” Davis says. “There’s just no memories for kids being raised in suburban U.S.A. They have closets full of toys, and they’re bored silly.”

This day, Davis had taken his widowed mother to a quilting bee in the basement of the church up in real Red Oak. That church, rebuilt in the ‘50s after a fire destroyed the original, is a gathering spot for former Red Oakians.

Four years ago, when Davis went looking for his first building for Red Oak II, he bypassed the church--too new. And the country school he had attended was gone. “They tore it down before I could get to it.” The feed store was his first find.

Davis doesn’t insist that the buildings for Red Oak II come from Red Oak, which--except for a few dilapidated houses and a cemetery--has all but disappeared. He does insist that they be true to an era roughly from the turn of the century through the 1930s.

The schoolmarm’s house, a pink gingerbread confection with green trim, was his great grandmother’s. A green-and-red Phillips 66 gas station once stood on Route 66 near Red Oak I, but was abandoned when Missouri 96 bypassed the town.

The blacksmith shop--William Weber proprietor--also came from Red Oak. Weber was Davis’ great grandfather. The Davis family lived in the rear of the general store, which was owned by his uncle. Young Lowell pumped gas out front.

“I learned to whittle on this front porch,” Davis says. In a window hangs a white satin banner, “Remember Pearl Harbor.” On the walls are a photo of FDR and sepia prints of the “hucksters” who used to bring in their groceries by horse-drawn wagon.

Today, the store sells an eclectic mix that includes lye soap and key chains with miniature replicas of Belle Starr’s tombstone. “In winter,” Davis says, “we come as a family and eat supper and shoot pool” in the back of the store, around the pot bellied stove.

Red Oak II is not a mere stage set, no Disneyland in the Ozarks.

Children from Carthage enjoy a day in the country school, singing the old songs, playing the old games. A favorite play area is the circus wagon, which was on the road from 1927 to 1942.

There are services each Sunday at the church, which was moved from six miles north. Occasionally, there is a wedding. The cemetery out back, though, is just for effect. Davis explains that, when the Carthage cemetery replaced its stones with flat markers--”so they could mow”--descendants gave him permission to move headstones. (The graves are intact in Red Oak I.) “I’m like a person who collects stray dogs,” he says. “I collect old buildings. I move them in here like sculptures.” Gathering 13 buildings has been a painstakingly slow process, as negotiations are sensitive. “People who have these old houses are really strange,” he says.

Just as Davis’ vintage houses are not only for show, neither are his vintage cars. In his green 1932 Ford--on which is painted “Route 66--Chicago, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Flagstaff, Santa Monica Pier”--he travels to the gift shops within 1,500 miles that sell Lowell Davis farm figurines.

The Ford, which once was a medicine man’s home, is outfitted with a bed, pitcher and basin and pot bellied stove. “It can be a problem,” he says, “driving down the road and keeping that stoked at the same time.”

Although it is his art that has made Red Oak II possible, Lowell Davis is at heart a farmer. “My animals are my models. I have everything that ever was on a farm--mules, horses, sheep, goats, cows.” Geese waddle about. Horse-drawn equipment gathers feed.

Last month, about 2,000 members of the Lowell Davis Farm Club--among an estimated 10,000 figurine collectors--flocked to Red Oak II for Davis’ annual barbecue, which he describes as “the wildest thing you’ve ever seen. Grits and cracklins’ and apple cider and dancin’ girls for three days.”

Each year Davis turns out about a dozen new designs. Today, limited editions bring as much as $750, which enable him to indulge in nostalgia. He sculpts and paints each original, working out of a studio he shares with a white mouse/model/pet named Stanley. Sometimes Davis doesn’t go near his studio for weeks; he’s too busy with Red Oak II.

As fancy goes, his studio isn’t in a class with his chicken house, which is built of bottles of many colors and sizes set into cement. Chickens are his favorite models, so it is only fitting that their house has a stained-glass window. A sign proclaims, “Ain’t nobody here but us chickens.”

The family farm area of the complex--set apart from Red Oak II--is a study in whimsy. A cement pig wallows in a goldfish pond. There is a high-rise cluster of sparrow houses--sort of early Tinker Toy. Davis smiles and points out, “That’s the Joneses up on top with the television antenna.”

There is a tombstone marking the resting place of Hooker, a mutt that died in 1987. “She was on 14 figurines, eight or nine plates,” Davis says. “She paid for this place.”

He opens the door to what looks like an outhouse. “My office,” he says. “Whenever I get keys to the city, awards, stuff like that, I stick them in here.”

Red Oak II’s newest attraction is the Belle Starr complex, the house in which the Queen of the Outlaws was born in 1848 and a replica of the house in which she was killed near Eufaula, Okla., in 1889. Starr moved to Carthage as a young girl, and Carthage claims her.

A Starr tour costs $1; it is the only Red Oak attraction that charges. The money is a bonus for the artisans doing the hands-on work of restoring the Red Oak buildings, working within Davis’ edict--”no plywood, plastic or Masonite”--and signing their work.

Davis decided to open Red Oak II to the public in the summer of 1990, observing, “They’d come out anyway.” It is so low-key that there is no sign on the access road, and one can whiz past.

In conversation, Davis returns again to what Red Oak I represented. “Once,” he says, “there were thousands of these little communities around the country.”

His father had farmed in these parts until, Davis says, “the Depression, that and the drought, got him. So he went to California. It was ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ ” When that dream turned into a nightmare, he returned to Red Oak and ran the general store.

World War II signaled the beginning of the end for Red Oak. California and other areas with big defense industries lured Missourians with well-paid jobs. Most never moved back to their towns.

Gus, a wire-haired terrier--and one of his models--curls up under Davis’ chair in his shaded garden. Davis sips a beer and talks about this “fantasy” that is Red Oak II. Sure, it’s cost him a pretty penny but, he reasons, “I’m not really into new cars or places on the Riviera.”

He’s not sure how much he has spent to make time stand still--”I’m scared to sit down and figure it out. A million, a million and a half. There’s no stopping point.” It is Lowell Davis’ escape from reality. “That’s what I want from it,” he says, “a break from the craziness going on out there.”