Ralph Foster Museum

The museum on the College of the Ozarks campus at Point Lookout began in the 1920s, when the school's president, Dr. Robert M. Good, gave space for displays in the basement of Abernathy Hall, a boys' dormitory, and later had the whole building converted when it was vacated. Its focus today is collecting and showing the history of the Ozarks.

It is named for Ralph Foster, a radio man. In 1924 Foster and his partner, Jerry Hall, set up a 50-watt station, KGBX, in a corner of their Firestone tire store in St. Joseph. Foster moved it to Springfield in 1932; unable to get more power for it, he bought the license of a station in Grant City, moved that to Springfield as well and took the call letters KWTO, for Keep Watching the Ozarks. Live talent filled the schedule, with Slim Wilson, Porter Wagoner, Chet Atkins, the Carter Family and Homer and Jethro, and a KWTO subsidiary produced the Ozark Jubilee on television with Red Foley. Foster gave his own collection to the school's museum, and the trustees named it for him in the mid-1960s. He died in 1984.

The best-known object is the truck from The Beverly Hillbillies. Thomas Hart Benton's Departure of the Joads hangs here, along with Rose O'Neill's Kewpie dolls, a Rolls-Royce Phantom II, a large natural history and taxidermy section and what the museum calls the largest weapons collection in the region. The Star School, a one-room schoolhouse whose story begins in 1863 on Flat Creek in Barry County, completes the visit.