It adopted its constitution during an April 25 meeting. Ralph E. Warden, former owner and publisher of The Republican, was listed as the association’s president. AlmaPoppenhouse was the group’s president. Marjorie Murray was the secretary and Martha Barth served as treasurer. Promoting educational interests and fellowship for grads was their purpose. John Grohskopf served as a chairman of the constitutional Drafting Committee.  Board included Warden, Chester Mellies and Alfred Berger. Membership requirements were stipulated that candidates must be graduates of the accredited High School dating from 1909. Each member was allowed one vote and was entitled to an invitation to the annual banquet and other social functions. Dues were $1 per year payable in advance.

The College specialized in training county’s teachers for 19 years......In 1989, a private academy offering high school work was opened.  Knows as The College, The Owensville Academy or even as the Owensville High School, the school was operated by Fred H. and Mrs. Isenberg and E.F. Isenberg, at the corner of Highway 28 and First Street. The gray, two-story, wood-framed school as located immediately eat of the Owensville First Baptist Church. Tuition was $6 for a 10-week term. A $2 fee was charged for fully furnished rooms, meals and for fuel and light. Music lessons cost 30 cents for one hour of instruction.  The school was known as a preparatory school for teachers. According to an 1896 advertisement if the Owensville Republican, the academy was in its sixth year and the school’s teacher are “ Normal graduates, the Normal methods are exclusively used by the instructors. Training teachers is made a specialty. 

Nearly nine-tenths of the teachers in Gasconade County have attended our school. No pupil has ever left our school because he was dissatisfied with its work or management. The College was in operation for 19 years. 

Although it was not a part of the state’s school system, credits were accepted by most every academy in Missouri, noted an Aug. 31, 1939 story in The Republican. Officials from the school advertised that their institution  “has a steady and substantial growth, surpassing the expectation of its most enthusiast friends. We have worked hard without making much noise about it.”

Bell rings, students noisily celebrate 1923 bond approval Crowed educational environments were noted in a Dec. 22,1922 story published in The Republican which described class sizes. The total school enrollment was 317 in late 1922 with all students being taught in the Owensville Elementary building. More were enrolling each week, the story noted. Sixty-six students attended high school classes. One teacher mentioned , a Miss Wilcox had 36 third graders and 34 second graders-70 students for one teacher. Other teachers were taught 43, 50, 47 and 41 students with each instructor apparently teaching two grade levels.

“It can rapidly be seen that another teacher is badly needed to relieve the congestion of this room,” wrote The Republican. “ Especially is this true because of the constantly increasing enrollment. No teacher can do justice to her work when her enrollment is about 45, since individual attention then becomes impossible.” The writer continued by asking this question, “What are we going to do for room next year?”   The answer was to build a new high school building on the site of present Administration Field at the corner of Highway 28  and 19.  “ It is a self-evident fact that, at our present rate of increase in attendance, we shall be compelled to have more room for next year.” The story continued. “Without a doubt, every room of our present building can well be used for grade (elementary)work next year, for our grades must not be hampered for another year since to do so must result in a crippling of our school system. Neither should we be content to see our high school cramped and retarded in its growth.  A new building for the High School work alone, is badly needed for next year if we are to continue school work. The maintenance of both a high school and a grade school in our present building another year is impossible. 

Something must be done if our schools are to move forward with the general growth of the city.”

So it was in the early twenties that growing pains in Owensville’s school system were as evident then as they have been in the nineties. A special election was held March 1, 1923, to determine a $40,000 bond issue to build a new high school building. The Republican’s headline proclaimed “Owensville District to Build  Modern High School Building.” The bond issue passed by a vote of 374 in favor and 113 opposed. It was also noted that the turnout was the largest ever for a school election.

“When the ballots were counted and the results became know, the school bell was rung about 7 p.m. and for the next two hours the students in a body celebrated with a parade aided and abetted by plenty of noise.”  Noting previous history of opposition to building such large buildings for schoolhouses, the writer acknowledged those who bitterly objected to building another school. But, the writer continued, “ We believe that, within a year or two they will see and reap the advantages of it and that Owensville will widely become known as a school town. In a good many years of observation, we have never known a community to regret voting money for better schools.”  

Agriculture was Owensville’s economic base for the first 50 years of its existence and continued to play a major role for several years. Although still significant, it now takes a back seat to a much more widely diversified industrial base. Agrarian based economies were not unique for the hundreds of small communities scattered across Missouri and the Midwest in the last half of the 19th century. Many of those smaller towns stagnated-or simply disappeared-when the industrial age went into high gear. Owensville was more fortunate. Small mining operations were pecking away at the area before the turn of the century. Those relatively meager quantities of clay were mined and hauled by some of the same men who previously hauled iron ore from St. James to Hermann. Arrival of the St. Louis, Kansas City & Colorado railroad in 1901 made wholesale clay mining feasible. It also opened new markets for the area’s agriculture products and enticed new businesses-and people-to locate in Owensville. Most of the clay mined before 1901 was fired into bricks for the building boom that took off as the railroad tracks inched their way toward Owensville. George H. Buschmann was one of the first businessmen to make use of locally made building bricks when he constructed a new store in 1882. “The bricks used in the store’s construction were made five miles north of Owensville,” the May 5 1905, Owensville Argus reported. “At the same time and in later years, thousands of bricks were burned there and a number of fine brick residences were erected in the vicinity.” Exactly where the brick yard was located or who owned and operated it was not mentioned. But it was the railroad that turned clay mining into big business. “This clay mining industry has steadily increased, giving good employment to large forces of men,” a newspaper account stated. “Almost every day, five and six carloads of fireclay are shipped from Owensville.” The clay mining industry produced 10,000 common bricks, 80,000 fire and pressed bricks, 805 train carloads of fire and potter’s clay, 8,600 pounds of stoneware, and 1,005 barrels of lime in 1905. Clay mining still contributes to the area economy, although not on as large a scale as it did before the Allied Chemical plant here, which processed and refined clay for use in such products as baking powder, shut down in the 1980s. Laclede Christy Co., which has been in Owensville 25 years, still uses large quantities of raw clay which it refines and fires into various sizes to “pots” used by the glass industry. The village’s business directory in 1905 also listed a canning factory and a company that made flue stops and pipe collars. The next industry to locate in the growing little village was the Union Pipe Factory which began operation in 1905. Making “ Missouri sweet corn cob pipes,” the factory at North Second Street and McFadden Avenue employed between 25 and 50 workers at various times. That year, according to statistics compiled by the State Labor Commission, 90,550 pounds of corn cob pipes, or 1,086,600 individual corn cob pipes, and 1,200 pounds of pipe stems (80,000) were shipped. In addition, 14 carloads of raw corn cobs were shipped to other pipe makers. In July 1909, the pipe factory was destroyed by a fire that spread next door to the Farmers & Mechanics Mill, which provided electrical power to the pipe factory. The mill was rebuilt on the same location and stood until it was razed two years ago.

An August 1909 newspaper account announced that the Union Pipe Co. planned to rebuild on the site of the Ettinger granary, “much larger and as nearly fireproof as possible.” The company was still in production here as late as 1935, but later moved to Washington. W.O. Boyd, manager of The Gasconade County Republican, reflected on the city’s progress and what it faced the coming year in Dec. 30 1910 editorial: “1911 now confronts Owensville. We have been growing and prospering for nine years and the greatest municipal question which we now have is how to keep on growing and prospering without the doubtful benefits of a boom.” “ We have our large fire clay interests which employ a number of men almost the year round; we have the Union Pipe Factory which employs from 20 to 40 people; and we have the most completely equipped creamery in this part of Missouri which gives promise of being a growing industry in our midst. “ Our town is resplendent at night with electric lights and we have the nucleus of an adequate system of the fire projection(this latter is one of the things that must be improved upon). Thousands of railroad ties are annually hauled here and loaded and we have the greatest stock market for miles around. “We are based with an abundance of business enterprises but if we are to grow, and we all stay we are to grow, we must have more than these. The question is, ‘what can we accomplish in 1911?” In the first place, we are lacking in civic loyalty if we don’t become a city of the fourth class. Ever other town of our size and prospects and enterprise in this part of Missouri has taken this important step. Shall we stand back and watch them grow and do things?”

Although Owensville did become a fourth class city in 1911, the sport of growth that followed the railroad slowed considerably, replaced by a complacent acceptance of the status quo until after World War I. The shoe industry, which was to be a mainstay of the city’s economy for the next 70 years, began operations here in 1922. throughefforts of the Owensville Booster Club, the Household Factory of the Hamilton Brown Shoe Co. located there. A three-story factory building (now occupied by Laclede Christy) was started on the city’s north side that would eventually employ 300 workers. Having bought most of the land around its three-story factory, Hamilton Brown began subdividing much of it and selling lots in the Hambro Subdivision to its employees. But the company fell on hard times in the depression years. A company called Collins-Morris Show Co. entered the picture around 1935. That company manufactured shoes under several different names from a factory on West Highway 28 thatlater , in the 1970s and 1980s, houses Poytech Co., a plastic fabricating company that finally was forced to cease production after two disastrous fires.

In 1938, again through the efforts of the Owensville Booster Club, money was raised for Collins-Morris to start a second smaller factory in the Hamilton-Brown building. Earlier that same years, Hamilton-Brown succumbed to financial woes and ceased production in Owensville. The new Collins-Morris plant expected to produce 13,600 pairs of shoes a day, including a better quality children’s shoe, with both plants going. Its payroll for one two-week period in 1938 was $10,972, the largest since the company began operations in 1935. In July 1938m Collins-Morris and Hamilton-Brown were syndicated with the Morris brothers in control. In March 1947, Brown Shoe Co. bought the Hamilton-Brown plant, also acquiring in the process that Ermtry and Footkind Show Cos. Brown Shoe Co. build a new 58,000 square feet building on East Highway 28 in 1961. Before the Owensville plant became a victim of foreign show imports in 1992,it employed between 400 and 500 workers with an annual payroll of $5 million.

The Chamber of Commerce’s hoped to build an industrial park on the city’s northeast side became a reality in 1977 when Custom Printing Co. announced plans to build a $1 million, 90,000 square feet building.

In August 1977 voters approved $650,000 in city-backed industrial revenue bonds, to be paid off by the company, to help Custom expand. Construction began that October.

Federal grants helped extend water and sewer service and build streets in the 42-acre industrial park, and the Chamber bought 26 more acres adjacent to the original tract. More grants and voter-approved bonds went to completing development of the site.

In the last 25 years, several industries ,Jahabow Industries, Jefferson Stylemaster Apparel Co., Langenberf Hat Co., Mid-Missouri Graphics, Cultech Diagnostics, Hoffman Brothers, Grimco Signs Inc., Marsh Co., Lyn-Flex West Inc. and Pioneer Truss Co. to name a few opened plants here that employ anywhere from a handful to several hundred workers, making Owensville the county’s leader in manufacturing jobs.

Those companies and others provide Owensville with diversified industrial base that manufactures products ranging from printing to sign making; hats and caps to refrigeration parts; packaging materials to rook trusses; shoe components to greeting cards; choir robes to clay pots; and from display cases to medical diagnostic supplies. And agriculture, clay mining and timber products, the old standbys, continue to make a contribution to the community’s overall economy.

In 1874, when the town was named, there were two businesses: a general store and a blacksmith shop. Sixty years later, when the Village of Owensville Board of Trustees first approved an annual levy on merchants and manufacturers, the city clerk issued 49 licenses. This year, 150 years after the general store owner and the blacksmith got together to name the little crossroads hamlet, Owensville issued 201 merchants and manufacturers licenses with some still outstanding.