Following the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Ozarks program, Folklife Magazine continues to spotlight artists and community builders in the region.
It’s clear Amelia LaMair is a grower, using her hands to care for goats and a farm-sized garden. Those efforts also involve her heart, which has felt called to create a sense of community and connection in the rural Ozarks through Flotsam Farm, a tucked-away oasis next door to one of the country’s iconic water mills.
The farm is where she and her family call home. But in a rugged, isolated part of the region, it’s also a destination for folks to gather: for ongoing, organized events, education, music performances, and other life-enriching moments that may not make a profit in dollars but do in quality of life and create change.
“The recommendation for social change that literally I read in a textbook is that we have to have a global paradigm shift,” LaMair says. “Everybody has to have the realization that the current paradigm isn’t working out. Then, once we decide that, we can do whatever we want. Reality is shaped by us.
“It’s terrifying but also inspiring in a way,” she adds. “We can change things.”
Visiting Flotsam Farm
Flotsam Farm is tucked away in rural Ozark County, Missouri, a 745-square-mile patch of beautiful, sparsely populated land with 8,500-or-so residents.
It has rolling hills, limited cell service, and nooks and crannies that have long drawn folks in search of a new sense of community. One example is East Wind, an intentional community known for its nut butters and rope sandals that celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2024.
About twenty miles from there is Flotsam, a peaceful place filled with chickens and colorful buildings and sculptures, that community building, and a wooden barn. There are goats, dogs, and a small produce stand near the main road. And it’s a continuation of LaMair’s own life experience.
The daughter of artists and the mother of two daughters, LaMair spent time as a child in the Ozarks’ more rural corners but graduated from high school in Springfield, the region’s largest city (for reference, it’s a place of about 170,000 people). She spent a year abroad in Italy as part of the Rotary Youth Exchange, a cultural experience that would show her a new perspective that influenced her future. In college, she lived in a house with other like-minded folks who hosted a weekly gathering that would plant seeds in her mind for what the future could be.
“That was just a really cool, fun experience to see,” she recalls. “You can just open up your house, and a bunch of weird and cool and fun people will show up, and they’ll bring whatever food they have—whether it’s something they made or grew or got in the dumpster or stole from the cafeteria.”
College led to her degree in sociology and anthropology, as well as her husband, Eric Tumminia, who also has roots in the Ozarks.
Together—after a month-long, nearly thousand-mile bike ride from Missouri to Minnesota—LaMair and Tumminia chose to land at what would eventually be known as Flotsam about a decade ago.
“Since we are in this little spot, it has arguably been a gathering place,” LaMair says. “Just channels, people, this valley with the spring and the mill. Since pre-colonization, people have gathered right in this area.”
The mill she refers to is Hodgson Mill, a long-shuttered but cherry-red landmark down the road. “It’s kind of a magical place that people are drawn to.”
Far from the debris and discards typically found at sea, Flotsam Farm is named for unconventional beauty found along nearby Bryant Creek.
“The river brings all of these random things together and thrashes them around and leaves an intricately woven pile of stuff behind that eventually breaks down into amazing compost,” she says. “Our farm is a reflection of that—a lot of different stuff and people and a lot of weird buildings on our property, all kind of smattered together beside the river.”
Building Flotsam’s Community Impact
Flotsam is visited by a wide range of people. Some tie to the lingering legacy of the back-to-the-land movement, which began regionally by the 1970s. Others—like LaMairand Tumminia—have moved to the area in more recent years. Most, if not all, come in search of reframing society.
It’s an idea supported by Thomas Michael Kerson in his book, Where Misfits Fit, that focuses on counterculture in the Ozarks.
“Ever-changing values, and the rise of technology and mass culture, have influenced what we think about community,” Kerson writes. “More isolated communities as well as communities of the past were tight-knit and centered on family and close friends who tended to interact in personal, face-to-face encounters. Many people were drawn to the Ozarks to be a part of such communities.”
And many of them find it at Flotsam, a hub in a very rural area where the closest incorporated town is about a twenty-minute drive.
The heart of that Flotsam hub is its community building, which is complete with some kitchen facilities, a library, bathroom, and large space to gather. It was gradually constructed by Tumminia and his dad; the men used salvaged materials and local lumber for the building, which is the home of a weekly gathering known as the Sycamore Salon.
These gatherings typically begin with a potluck dinner and end with a group activity, like learning about local history or how to screen-print T-shirts. One time, a representative from the local Sierra Club came and talked about issues the club faces. Other events in 2024 included a seed swap, poetry reading, and holistic health and wellness programs. A bioregional congress is held the first week of each month to discuss and assess relevant topics including childcare, education, and cooperative food production.
There are ongoing yoga classes, sweat lodges and seasonal parties that are some of the region’s biggest draws for independent music. Music is a key focus for the couple; Flotsam even has its own record label. LaMair, a bass player, and Tumminia, an all-around musician, form the group Creek Stink. Bands and listeners come for the concerts, sprawling out in lawn chairs and blankets after enjoying those potluck meals.
In 2024, LaMair and Tumminia’s community-building efforts also extended to the months-long “Seed to Syrup” project, funded by a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education youth grant, which brought kids to the farm on a regular basis to plant, harvest, and process sorghum cane.
That was shared in the Ozarks Agrarian News, a colorful publication LaMair founded in 2017 to share seasonal growing information, folk practices, and a calendar of related events. It’s where I learned of a home-canning class that I attended.) The publication is now led by friends at another nearby intentional community, Oran Mor, but it’s still for sale by donation in the community building.
All of these efforts are important because they are fun, LaMair says, but also because they help bring people together in inclusive ways. In 2024, Flotsam hosted what was believed to be the county’s first LGBTQ+ Pride parade.
“A lot of people who live here for many generations haven’t known anything else,” LaMair says of the region’s limited diversity. “I try to look at it as an outside observer, through the anthropology lens, and there are just a lot of people who haven’t been exposed to different kinds of people or different ideas. When certain forces, conservative radio for a big one, are telling them that whole sectors of humans are bad or fearsome…” She paused, choosing her words carefully. “It’s easy to believe, I guess, if you’ve never met a Black person or a gay person or whatever.”
An important factor in this work is that most of what happens at Flotsam is free or donation-based at a nominal rate. That’s of particular importance in a place where the median household income is just over $39,000, per the 2020 U.S. Census.
Money is a challenge, LaMair says, in a world that is so focused on it as a measure of success. While she admits it’s necessary to survive, the farm exists to reimagine satisfaction and meaning: through family, art, music, relationships, meaning, and beauty.
“I feel confident that we’re doing something good in the world, and it’s a way of rebalancing things and redistributing wealth,” LaMair says. For her, it goes back to the core of building community.
“There’s so much economic stuff that happens when you gather regularly,” she says, listing opportunities like sharing food, clothing, tools, and work needs. “Community can really be an alternative to working forty hours a week.”
Kaitlyn McConnell is the founder of Ozarks Alive, an online project dedicated to the documentation of local history and culture. She was part of the curatorial team for the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program The Ozarks: Faces and Facets of a Region.
This project received federal support from the American Women’s History Initiative Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.
