08/19/2026
Chapter 5 • What of the Future?
John Homer Bothwell, Sedalia, and the Pioneer Spirit
Long before John Homer Bothwell stood before the Indiana University Alumni Association and delivered The American Pioneer Spirit, he had already begun to live it.
That is where we left him.
On June 10, 1890, John Homer was forty-one years old. The experiences that had shaped the man standing before that audience were already behind him, but thirty-nine years of his life were still ahead.
For much of his speech he looked backward, toward generations who had crossed oceans, mountains and rivers, made homes in unfamiliar places, and then watched as their children continued farther west. His own family had followed that pattern for generations.
John Homer admired the courage and independence behind that movement. He believed what he called the American pioneer spirit had been one of the great forces in the development of the country.
But near the end of the speech, his attention changed.
“What of the future?”
By 1890, he believed much of the old physical work of the pioneer was ending. Land was being settled. Railroads crossed enormous distances. Towns had grown into cities. The frontier that had encouraged generations to continue moving west was disappearing.
The pioneer spirit, however, had not disappeared with it.
That seems to have concerned him.
John Homer believed people had to recognize the circumstances of their own generation rather than simply imitate the work of the one before it. A patriot, he said, should “recognize and accept the conditions of his own generation, and perform the work that the times and those conditions allot to him.”
The work ahead might be quieter than clearing forests or crossing mountains, but he did not believe it was less important.
He spoke of useful work, education, better homes, productive communities, good citizenship and responsibility toward others. He also worried about something more personal. Americans had become accustomed to moving. Farms were abandoned. Families scattered. Young people left communities because opportunity seemed to exist somewhere else. When one place became difficult, there was always the temptation to begin again in another.
What would happen, he wondered, when that constant movement was no longer possible?
Near the end of the address he turned the question back upon himself and everyone listening.
“Do we in our own lives furnish examples worthy to be followed?”
John Homer Bothwell had thirty-nine years left to live with his own question.
I do not think we should assume that he left Bloomington in 1890 intending to use that speech as a guidebook for the rest of his life. There is no evidence that he did.
What is interesting is what happens when his words are placed beside the life that followed.
John Homer continued traveling throughout his life. He crossed the country, traveled abroad, and maintained friendships and business relationships far beyond Missouri.
But Sedalia remained home.
During the years after 1890, he became increasingly involved in the concerns of the city and county where he had already chosen to live. Some of those efforts were political. Some involved business or civic development. Some succeeded and some did not.
The failed campaign to move Missouri’s state capital from Jefferson City to Sedalia belongs in that story as much as anything that later carried the Bothwell name. John Homer and others worked hard for it, and they lost.
The Missouri State Fair turned out differently. His involvement with the idea can be documented as early as 1889, when, as a member of the Missouri House, he presented a petition from Pettis County citizens asking the state to establish a fair and provide funding for it. Ten years later, when Missouri finally created a permanent State Fair and communities competed for its location, John Homer was among the Sedalians working to secure it.
The process lasted months and involved far more people than one man. Sedalia competed with other Missouri communities, each offering land, access and arguments for why the Fair belonged there. John Homer carried the city's filing papers to Jefferson City and helped argue its case, alongside other Sedalians working toward the same goal. Even after Sedalia won, questions over the property and legal requirements threatened the selection before it finally became secure.
That fuller story deserves to be told separately. What matters here is that John Homer was repeatedly willing to involve himself in the practical work of the community where he lived.
By the 1910s, that practical work could take many forms. He became involved with efforts for a cross-state highway and later with Pettis County’s campaign for hard-surfaced roads, ordinary improvements that connected farms, schools, towns and markets.
In that sense, the work of his generation looked very different from the work of the pioneers he had described in 1890, but perhaps that had been his point all along.
The clearest connection between the speech and his later life may have come on a much smaller scale.
In 1916, the rural families living around Stonyridge needed a better school.
John Homer had spent years thinking about rural life. He believed inadequate schools, poor roads and limited opportunities encouraged capable young people to leave the countryside for towns and cities. His concern sounds remarkably familiar when read beside The American Pioneer Spirit. More than twenty-five years earlier, he had questioned whether Americans could continue solving every difficulty by moving somewhere else.
Now he was asking what might make a community worth staying in.
His answer included education.
The families around Stonyridge organized a new school district. John Homer helped with the legal work, contributed heavily toward the school and teacher's cottage, and gave the project a great deal of his personal attention. The neighbors participated too. They hauled materials, contributed labor and gave what they could.
John Homer hoped the school might become “one bright spot in the rural world.”
His concern went beyond the children. He wanted the teacher to have a comfortable home and greater stability within the community. He also questioned the common expectation that a woman should have to leave teaching simply because she married. In his view, schools could benefit from experienced men and women who became permanent members of the communities they served.
That concern becomes more interesting when we look at the women John Homer actually knew.
His niece Ada was a teacher. Other women within the Bothwell family were educated, independent and unmarried. We cannot know exactly how those relationships shaped his opinions, but the women closest to him were not abstract examples. They were people whose lives he knew personally.
Viola Everhart Rhoads remembered that side of him.
John Homer intended to send Viola to College. She chose instead to marry. When she saw him afterward, she remembered no anger over the change in plans.
What stayed with her was what he told her:
“There is no finer career than being a wife and a mother.”
The importance of that memory is not that John Homer believed every woman should make the same choice. He had been prepared to support Viola’s education. When she chose something different, Viola remembered that he respected the choice she had made.
Her recollections also give us a John Homer who rarely appears in lists of public accomplishments.
“He was not a big talker,” she remembered. He was fairly quiet.
When she visited Stonyridge as a young girl, he took her through the construction and tried to explain what the workers were doing, even though she admitted she understood very little of it. She remembered being nervous about the open stairs and remembered him taking her up to show her what was being built.
“He was kind,” she said.
Viola also remembered that his quiet manner did not mean he avoided a good argument. When guests gathered at Stonyridge, she recalled that the women might retire to the game room while the men gathered in the library to talk about politics and life. John Homer did not limit his friendships to people who agreed with him. One of his closest friends, Charles E. Yeater, was a Democrat while John Homer was a Republican.
Their conversations could become spirited.
When those discussions grew heated enough that strong language entered the room, Viola remembered John Homer quietly closing the library door so others in the house would not be disturbed.
That detail changes the picture considerably. He could argue forcefully, but he was also conscious of the people around him.
Viola remembered him as particular about work as well. John Homer knew how he wanted things done, especially at Stonyridge. His carefulness with money seems to have worked in much the same way. He could spend generously on something he believed mattered, but he did not like waste and expected work to be done properly.
That combination of frugality and generosity appears throughout his life.
Other children remembered him differently.
Pauline Rehmer attended Bothwell School and later recalled that when John Homer returned from his travels, he sometimes brought unusual objects back for the students. One time it was an ostrich egg from Australia. Another time it was an armadillo shell.
The objects fascinated the children, but what Pauline remembered most was that he answered their questions.
“He was very busy, but he always had time,” she said. “That was John Bothwell for you.”
Charlie Wise remembered something even simpler. Because John Homer did not want a telephone at the Lodge, important messages sometimes came to the Wise home. Charlie would carry them across the road and up the hill.
John Homer usually gave him a banana for his trouble.
Those are small stories, but sometimes the small ones are the ones worth keeping.
Sedalians already know the large names connected with John Homer Bothwell. The hotel. The hospital. The Lodge. The State Fair.
The smaller memories show us the person who lived between those names.
Stonyridge may reveal more about him than any building carrying his name downtown.
In 1918, while away from Missouri, John Homer wrote to his niece Ada that he looked forward to returning “ready to settle quietly into my usual simple life among my good friends, and to enjoy the quiet life and work at Stonyridge Farm.”
There is something almost humorous about John Homer describing life in that enormous stone house as simple.
But I think he meant it.
Near the end of his life, when he dictated his recollections of Stonyridge, he wrote at length about the land itself. He remembered trees, cliffs, Muddy Creek, birds, animals and the native forest that had first attracted him to the property. He was deeply disappointed when much of that timber was cut before he purchased the land, but instead of abandoning the property, he thought about what time and effort might restore.
That may be one of the strongest connections between the man of 1890 and the man he became.
The younger John Homer had questioned whether progress always required leaving.
The older John Homer spent decades caring for one place.
Viola remembered that he did not want visitors picking the wildflowers. She remembered his appreciation for the countryside and the trails and that visitors were expected to respect the property. His own later recollections show that those rules were not simply the preferences of a particular old man. The woods, wildlife and hills surrounding Stonyridge mattered deeply to him.
So did the people around it.
His will, written only months before his death, continued many of the same concerns that appeared throughout his later life. He provided for relatives and friends, continued support for Bothwell School, established educational funds connected with Indiana University and the University of Missouri, and gave preference in Missouri student loans to young people from Pettis County.
He also made careful arrangements for Stonyridge.
The details are complicated, but his intention that the property be cared for beyond his own lifetime is unmistakable.
The same is true of the larger projects of his final years. Hotel Bothwell and the hospital were not gifts dropped into Sedalia by one wealthy man. Both required cooperation among citizens, organizations, investors and local government. John Homer contributed heavily, but the projects depended upon other people being willing to participate.
That seems important when read beside his 1890 speech.
John Homer did not describe the future as the work of one exceptional individual. He spoke about generations, communities, duties and examples.
Even his accomplishments make more sense when viewed that way.
He could contribute money. He could use political influence. He could organize, argue, persuade and plan.
But other people had to care too.
Perhaps that is one reason the personal memories are so valuable.
They show a man who could be stubborn and particular, who sometimes lost political battles, who did not always talk much, and who apparently had very definite ideas about how things should be done.
They also show a man who kept his wife’s piano and paintings after losing her young, who intended to send a young woman to college and respected her when she chose marriage instead, who brought curiosities home for schoolchildren, who answered their questions, who protected wildflowers, and who looked forward after long trips to returning to his friends and his quiet life at Stonyridge.
His interest in family history gives us perhaps the clearest statement of how he measured a life.
John Homer spent years investigating Bothwell ancestry, including family traditions connecting them to Scottish nobility. He was unwilling to accept those stories simply because they were impressive.
Instead, he wrote that he was content to know his parents and grandparents had been “honorable and kind” and had “lived useful lives.”
Their descendants, he believed, would have done well if they could be “as useful, kind and honorable as their known ancestors.”
For a man who accumulated wealth, held political office and eventually had buildings bearing his name, that was a remarkably uncomplicated standard.
To be useful, kind and honorable.
Those words bring us back to Bloomington.
“Do we in our own lives furnish examples worthy to be followed?”
I do not think it is my place to answer John Homer’s question for him.
He was a man of the nineteenth century, and The American Pioneer Spirit reflects that world. Some of its language and assumptions about westward expansion, Native peoples and “civilization” belong to a time very different from our own and should be read honestly within that context.
Nor was John Homer responsible for Sedalia’s progress.
Sedalia was built by thousands of people, many of whose names have been forgotten. John Homer Bothwell was one of them.
What makes his story unusual is that in 1890 he left behind a record of what he believed his generation should do with the world it had inherited.
Thirty-nine years later, we can place those words beside the life he actually lived.
He questioned the habit of always looking elsewhere for opportunity, then invested much of his life in the place he already called home.
He believed education mattered, then helped provide it.
He spoke of practical work, then spent decades involving himself in practical problems facing his community, from rural schools and roads to larger civic projects.
He worried about attachment to place, then became deeply attached to Stonyridge, its woods, its neighbors and the city beyond the bluff.
He asked whether a person’s life could furnish an example worthy of being followed.
When John Homer died at Stonyridge on August 4, 1929, Pauline Rehmer was still in high school. Years later she remembered the crowds climbing the steep road to pass through the Music Room where his body lay.
She remembered the funeral procession afterward.
“When the first cars in the procession reached Crown Hill,” she said, “the last cars hadn’t left the lodge.”
She called it the longest procession she had ever seen.
Then she added: “But that didn’t surprise me; not for Mr. Bothwell.”
Perhaps that is a better place to leave him than with a list of buildings.
John Homer came from generations whose lives had been shaped by movement. Their stories were about leaving one place, crossing another boundary and beginning again farther west.
Those stories inspired The American Pioneer Spirit.
But by the time John Homer reached the end of his own life, the question had changed.
What happens after the journey?
Eventually someone has to care for the place that has already been found. Someone has to teach the children, preserve the woods, improve the roads, help a neighbor, argue over what a town needs, invest in ideas that may fail, and leave something useful for people who will come afterward.
For John Homer Bothwell, that place was Sedalia.
Perhaps the final chapter of the American pioneer story is not always about having the courage to leave home in search of something new.
Sometimes it is about what happens when a pioneer finally decides to stay.
— Jennifer Dorrell-Van D**e
Stonyridge Chronicles
Series Note: This concludes the five chapters of The American Pioneer Spirit. Thank you for following John Homer Bothwell’s story from the generations that shaped him to the life he ultimately built in Sedalia. His story is far from finished here, and Stonyridge Chronicles will continue exploring the people, places, and stories that remain.
© 2026 Jennifer Dorrell-Van D**e. All rights reserved.
SOURCES:
Primary Sources
• John Homer Bothwell, The American Pioneer Spirit, address delivered before the Indiana University Alumni Association, June 10, 1890
• John Homer Bothwell to his niece Ada Bothwell, 1918, private family correspondence
• John Homer Bothwell to Marion Bothwell, July 2, 1921, regarding Bothwell family history and his belief that his ancestors should be remembered as “useful, kind and honorable”
• John Homer Bothwell's dictated recollections of Stonyridge, 1928
• Last Will and Testament of John Homer Bothwell, February 13, 1929, and codicil dated July 2, 1929
• Missouri House Journal, 1889, including Bothwell's presentation of the Pettis County petition requesting establishment of a State Fair
• Missouri Session Laws and State Board of Agriculture records relating to establishment and location of the Missouri State Fair, 1899
• Contemporary newspapers including the Sedalia Capital, Sedalia Democrat, Sedalia Weekly Bazoo, and other Missouri newspapers covering Bothwell School, the Missouri State Fair campaign, state capital removal efforts, road and highway improvements, Hotel Bothwell, the hospital, civic activities, and John Homer Bothwell's death and funeral
• Viola Everhart Rhoads interviews and oral recollections regarding John Homer Bothwell, Stonyridge, College, Bothwell's personality, political conversations at the Lodge, and life within the Bothwell household
• Firsthand recollections of Pauline Rehmer, Ruth Wise, Charlie Wise, and other neighbors and former Bothwell School students preserved in later newspaper interviews and oral-history accounts
Published Sources
• Mary K. Dains, “The Missouri State Fair: A Struggle to Begin,” Missouri Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1, 1978
• Genealogical History of the Family of Alexander Bothwell, revised edition, 1971
• Later historical newspaper features concerning Bothwell Lodge, Bothwell School, Stonyridge, and the administration of the Bothwell estate
Archival Collections
• Indiana University Archives
• Missouri State Archives
• Missouri State Board of Agriculture records
• Pettis County historical and governmental records
• Bothwell Lodge State Historic Site archival and interpretive collections
Research & Family Collections
• John Homer Bothwell Family Genealogical Collection
• Bothwell Family Papers and Private Correspondence
• Stonyridge Chronicles Research Collection
• Bothwell Lodge oral-history and interview materials
• Family land, probate, legislative, newspaper, and estate research compiled by the author
