This story is published in partnership with Ozarks Alive, a cultural preservation project led by Kaitlyn McConnell.
RURAL DOUGLAS COUNTY - Soft piles of fallen leaves drift across the path that both curves away from the pavement and departs from the world. Its crunchy path takes travelers to peace, a link between past and present, and Juanita Herrell, now 88, who lives at the end of the lane.
Her eyes saw the same wooded hideaway as a child, the last of around 20 children created through various marriages before her birth. Those days were different, but the twisting power of life is the same as today: She left as a teenage bride, and spent many years away, never planning to return. Yet decades later, the same woods where her young heart beat pulled her heartstrings home again.
The home from which she looks out is of her own creation, built gradually — like her works of art, for which she has received considerable attention. In recent years, her deep Christian faith has manifested through mosaic masterpieces depicting faith-filled scenes.
Such work seemed an impossibility as a child growing up in the same woods where she pushes open the screen door and says hello.
“I built my dream,” she says.
Herrell waves me inside on the chilly, gray November day. In a workshop — a small room attached to a much larger house — we sat near pieces of a mosaic table currently in progress, and a wall of bottles of colorful paint.
For a young Herrell who made her first paint brushes out of matchsticks, the sight would perhaps be as unbelievable as the ability to buzz down a highway to Springfield. After all, the family rarely even left their Douglas County homestead.
“I remember living a whole summer and never seeing anyone but the milkman who came to get our milk,” she says. “Just Mom, Dad, the milkman.”
She was born in Roy, Missouri, a year after her mother thought she was unable to have any more children. The elder Herrell already had a few at that point: Through marriage, an unexpected divorce in that day and age, death, and remarriage, the blended family grew to nearly two dozen kids. Herrell, born in 1934, was the last. From the time she was 10, she was the only child at home.
“There was no electricity, no running water. We drew our water out of a well. It was a handmade well made with stones. Later on we got a real well during World War II,” she says. “But see, until after World War II, there was no electricity down there to be had. Then I remember we got a gas refrigerator and stove. I think we were probably the first ones in the community to have that.”
Edward Herrell, her father, became a blacksmith in the early part of the 20th century. It was a skill he took with him — as well as his family — to Texas during the war, when the call was put out for volunteers.
“Everybody was going to war in one capacity or another,” she says. “Whichever way they could help out. We lived in a different country then.”
They later came home to the Ozarks, but the time away left a lasting impression.
“When I was down in Texas, somehow I got ahold of some paint,” she says. “It was a real cold winter down on the farm, and we were all sitting around the stove. I didn’t have anything to do, and I found this paint and a board. I didn’t have a paintbrush, so I chewed the end of matches — they were wooden — and made myself some paintbrushes. That was my first oil painting.”
Herrell’s innovative spirit, her “Why not?” attitude and effort to better her life also came forward, leading the family to also be one of the first locally to have a bathtub.
“When I was a freshman in high school, we were studying water systems and I said to my dad, ‘You know, we could put in a bathroom for ‘X’ dollars,’ and he said, ‘Well, let’s do it,’” Herrell recalls. “So we put a bathroom in the house and my girlfriends would come home with me just to take a bath. I had lots of girlfriends come home with me just to take a bath.”
She married a local man, which led to settling in Illinois. Herrell was just 17 when she married. One day, however, she caught the eye of another young man under the oak trees at a summer party. He asked if he could see her again; she said no, that she was married.
It seemed the end of the story — but it wasn’t.
The family was joined by a baby, but her traumatic birth changed Herrell’s life forever. The doctor who delivered the baby came in to apologize: He hadn’t paid enough attention to her progression, leaving Herrell in labor for way too long.
It bridged a much greater relationship, extended when the physician hired Herrell to work for him as an assistant. She feared her work wasn’t good enough one day when he asked her to stay after patients were gone.
“I thought I had done something wrong. I went in his office and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘You’re too smart to be a doctor’s assistant for the rest of your life.’ He said, ‘Isn’t there anything you would like to have done with your life?’”
She said yes: She’d always wanted to be an artist, but that wasn’t considered acceptable by her family.
“Two weeks later, he came in. He had registered for me to go to an art class at the public library – and he went with me.”
In addition to a growing interest in art, careers and life changed, too: Herrell ultimately divorced her husband, and announced in the newspaper in 1970 that she was reclaiming her maiden name. After leaving the medical field, she began selling yellow page ads (which at times she drew herself) and ultimately found herself working at an employment agency — also where she found her second husband.
The couple rose through the ranks of Snelling and Snelling, a recruitment company, ultimately owning eight different locations at one time. Life looked good, until it didn’t. One day, her husband disappeared, and they ultimately divorced. Herrell soon learned that the couple owed around $170,000 in back taxes to the IRS.
Amid many decisions that had to be made, Herrell thought of a local banker whom she’d met years before. They had a mutual friend, and Herrell asked if he might speak to the banker and see if he’d help her navigate the difficult situation. That is, if he even remembered her.
He did, and he did. The measure ultimately led her business to his bank. It also helped keep the company open over the coming years, and pay back the taxes.
“He said, ‘Sure, I’ll help her,’ and he loaned me $20,000 over and over and over again,” says Herrell.
They began to grow a friendship — one that began under the oak trees at that summer party so many years before.
Yet while they were friendly, things didn’t progress past business for around 20 years. But one New Year’s Eve, both were single and a dinner date led to the realization that they’d both been waiting for each other to be free.
“He kissed me, and he said, ‘It’s been a long journey … to here, hasn’t it?’” Herrell recalls. “I said, ‘Oh, you remember the oak trees?’ He said, ‘I never forgot them, you just never stopped long enough for me to catch you.’”
The next day, another realization reminded time is fleeting. The banker said he had something to say: He had bone cancer.
“We were good friends for five years before he died,” she says.
Herrell’s life largely remained in Illinois until the 1980s, when she came back to her native hills and hollers for a family funeral. It was then that the Ozarks drew her home. She bought land, and ultimately moved to her backwoods oasis, just a few miles from where her story started.
“I dealt with so much stress at my business,” she says. “Someone was always mad – either a temp, or an employer was mad, a recruiter was mad. Every day I dealt with anger. And I wanted to go to the end of the road in the middle of nowhere. And I accomplished it.”
Throughout her adult life, Herrell continued to develop her love of art. After starting with paint, she moved to clay, where she stayed.
“I went from painting on the clay to carving the clay to cutting holes in the clay to the mosaics,” she says.
Those skills helped her join the local art scene, regularly visiting with artists groups and exhibiting at the Branson Mill Craft Village and Hawthorn Galleries in Springfield.
Like her projects, Herrell’s land was an opportunity for creation. She began with a cabin, which later expanded to a separate home and studio. The latter was where she began with mosaics: She started with her kitchen’s backsplash. That led to other projects, including a series of large-scale panels depicting the Biblical days of creation and about how God created the earth.
After a physician saw prints of them on display at Hulston Cancer Center, she was asked to sell the original panels. They weren’t for sale, Herrell said, as they had been given to a family member. But she accepted a commission to make another set, which today hangs in Temple Israel, a synagogue between Springfield and Rogersville.
Each mosaic is made of hundreds of small, clay pieces Herrell creates herself. Through a series of steps, she forms the pieces, fires them, adorns them with color, and adds more heat before they’re ready to use. That work is done all by hand and as she goes, leading to her touching each small, rounded piece “at least 13 times between when it goes from the clay to the picture.”
When all are in place, she adds grout. The process, in some cases, can take months.
“It takes so long to make the mosaics that people can’t afford them, but they like the prints,” she says, and she has also sold more than 400 crosses.
Her work largely ties to her faith, and extends through her latest – and what she said is her last — large installation, a multi-panel piece titled “Jesus is Coming” that showcases the second coming of Christ as told in the book of Revelation.
“People think I’m crazy, but it was like a vision. One Sunday morning — I think it was a Sunday morning — I woke up and I didn’t have a project. And I thought, ‘Why don’t you do a horse made all out of circles?’ And then it went to the four horses of the apocalypse. From there, I thought, ‘Well, that’s the bad part, what’s the good part?’ Well, the resurrection and the second coming of Christ.”
“I believe that with all my heart,” says Herrell of the work’s name. “It was like a revelation of how to do it. It just comes, and you don’t know where it comes from.”
Herrell’s efforts to serve the world and its future are found through more than her art. When she was in her early 80s, she became certified as a counselor through Victorious Christian Living, a biblical counseling ministry and training institute for which she currently serves on the board.
“I decided because I was already an employment counselor, I’d just become a Christian counselor,” she says.
It’s a reality that recently led her to start serving individuals through her church.
“My pastor asked me if I could counsel people at church because he just didn’t have time,” says Herrell. “So I dug out my diploma and put it on the wall and ordered in supplies — and I got sick.”
Like the path that took her to the end of the road, life is different than it once was. Visitors used to regularly roll down that road to visit, but many have passed away. Herrell has had health challenges herself in recent weeks, leading to some time away from her home, and a decision that the large panels in her living room depicting Christ’s second coming will be her last large installation.
Instead, she’d like to change her focus on what she can do to make a difference in her final years.
“I just want to end my life well. I love people, but it doesn't matter to me what degree you have, it doesn’t matter to me how much money you have. None of that stuff matters to me,” she says. “I did all that already. I’ve lived in the best places, eaten the best food and stayed in the best motels all over the world.
“I don’t like that artificial lifestyle. I would like to go out leaving something meaningful.
“Because when I die, no one is ever going to remember what I did. All they’ll ever remember is how I made them feel.”
Herrell’s work is available through Hawthorn Galleries in Springfield. Click here for more information.
