Abandoned Ozarks: Southwest Missouri

A haunting visual journey through Southwest Missouri's abandoned schools, churches, mills, and homesteads, revealing the forgotten cultural fabric of the Ozarks.

Abandoned Ozarks: Southwest Missouri offers a poignant, artistic, and sometimes sorrowful look at abandoned structures that have helped shape the culture and society of the rural Ozarks region and the people who live there. Photographer and author Robert McCormick takes you on a colorful and historical journey into the past with his haunting and evocative photos of the buildings that helped knit together rural communities and families in ways that are often forgotten in today's fast-paced and homogenized world. As rural communities and schools were consolidated in the mid-twentieth century, many historic structures were left abandoned to decay, even as others were repurposed for unorthodox uses or preserved for their cultural significance. McCormick has traveled extensively throughout the region over a period of years to find the most historically significant and architecturally interesting examples of schoolhouses, churches, general stores, mills, barns, and farmhouses that showcase the unique identity of Ozarks inhabitants. Join the author on a nostalgic journey into the Ozarks' past.