Hidden in the Walls: One Smithville Family's Journey Through 50 Years of Town History

When the Hargrove family tore into the walls of their 1973 ranch house on Elm Creek Road, they expected to find old wiring and maybe some water damage. What they actually found was a window straight into Smithville's past — and a reason to call just about every longtime neighbor they knew.

The project started simply enough. Donna and Ray Hargrove had been planning a kitchen renovation for the better part of two years, finally pulling the trigger last spring after their youngest moved out. Ray's parents had built the house in 1973, and Ray grew up inside those walls. He figured there'd be some surprises. He just didn't know how many.

"First day of demo, my contractor pulls out this newspaper tucked behind the drywall near the window frame," Ray said, spreading his hands on the kitchen table where he'd laid out the finds. "It was the Smithville Gazette from October 1973. Just sitting there, perfectly folded, like someone left it for us to find."

What the Walls Were Keeping

The newspaper was just the beginning. Over the next three weeks, as the crew worked through the kitchen and then into the adjoining den, the discoveries kept coming. A glass Coca-Cola bottle. A child's penny loafer, size 4, wedged beneath a floor joist. A hand-drawn map of what appeared to be the old fairgrounds property on the south end of town — the same land that now holds the Smithville Community Center. And perhaps most striking: a small bundle of photographs, rubber-banded together and wrapped in wax paper, showing faces no one in the Hargrove family could immediately identify.

Donna, who teaches fourth grade at Smithville Elementary and has a habit of treating every mystery like a classroom project, started making calls. She reached out to the Smithville Historical Society, posted some of the photos on the town's Facebook group, and eventually tracked down 84-year-old Ruth Ann Pickering, who lives over on Sycamore and has been in Smithville since before the Hargroves' house existed.

"Ruth Ann took one look at that bundle of photos and just started crying," Donna said. "Happy tears, she kept telling us. She recognized three of the people in those pictures. One of them was her late husband."

A Town in Transition

The Gazette clipping from 1973 turned out to be a remarkable artifact on its own. The front page carried a story about the expansion of Smithville's water treatment facility — a project that, according to the article, was expected to support a population "well into the future." Ads on the back pages showed prices that made Ray laugh out loud: ground beef for 69 cents a pound, a two-bedroom rental on Maple for $110 a month.

But it was the letters-to-the-editor section that really caught people's attention. One letter, written by a man named Gerald Foss, pushed back against plans to widen what was then called County Road 7 — now known as Main Street. Foss argued that widening the road would "invite the kind of traffic that changes a town's character forever." Another letter praised the new Little League fields. A third announced a lost dog named Biscuit.

Smithville's own town historian, Margaret Okafor, stopped by the Hargrove house on a Tuesday afternoon to look everything over. She sat with the newspaper for a long time.

"What strikes me is how familiar it sounds," Margaret said. "People arguing about development, celebrating small victories, looking for a lost dog. That's Smithville in 1973. That's Smithville right now. The specifics change, but the conversation doesn't."

The Map That Started a New Question

The hand-drawn map of the old fairgrounds property has generated the most buzz. Ray brought it to a recent Smithville Historical Society meeting, and within an hour, three different people had offered three different interpretations of what the dotted lines and handwritten labels meant.

One theory holds that the map documents the original layout of the Smithville County Fair, which ran on that property from the late 1940s through 1981. Another suggests it might be a property survey done before the land changed hands. A third — floated by eighty-year-old Frank Deluca, who was at the meeting and claims to have worked the fair as a teenager — is that it shows where the original carnival midway was set up, including the location of a Ferris wheel that Frank says "was the tallest thing in Smithville for about thirty years."

The map is now on loan to the Historical Society while they try to figure it out. Ray says they're welcome to it as long as they want.

What Gets Left Behind

The penny loafer remains unidentified. Ray's mother, now 79 and living in assisted care in Clarksburg, had no memory of it when Ray called her. She laughed and told him she'd raised three boys; small shoes weren't something she kept track of.

For Donna, that's almost the point. "Everything we found tells a story, but none of the stories are complete," she said. "And I think that's kind of beautiful. Someone put that newspaper in the wall in 1973. Maybe they did it on purpose, maybe it just got there by accident. But it waited fifty years for someone to find it. That's a long time to carry a secret."

The kitchen renovation is nearly finished now. New cabinets, new counters, a window over the sink that looks out toward the backyard where Ray's father once planted a garden. The artifacts are organized in a plastic storage bin in the spare bedroom, each one labeled in Donna's neat teacher handwriting.

They're talking about making copies of the photographs for Ruth Ann Pickering. And if anyone out there recognizes a size-4 penny loafer from the early 1970s, the Hargroves would genuinely love to hear from you.

You know where to find them — same house it's always been, on Elm Creek Road.