Elise Crain has watched Ozark, Missouri grow from 1,000 people to 20,000 — and she spent a career in construction and public service helping build the Ozarks along the way.
Her first name is Martha, and she's never used it. Elise grew up in a 1931 house in downtown Ozark, the same house her parents bought when she and her twin brother were 11 months old. From there she built a career nobody would have predicted: keeping the books at a Springfield engineering firm, building highways in Arkansas, handling the mobilization for $180 million of construction work in Cairo, Egypt, and coming home to manage the restoration of Springfield's Gillioz Theatre and the green addition to the Wonders of Wildlife Discovery Center era. She also served as executive director at Wilson's Creek National Battlefield, where she took the idea of "Attractions" highway signs all the way to the Missouri Senate.
She's the fourth generation of her family elected to public office in Christian County — and the only woman. In this conversation: jumping off the Riverside Bridge at six years old, her mentor Anne Drummond and what it means to pass it on, training women for the construction trades, brownies on the job site, and why the volunteer spirit of southwest Missouri gets noticed across the state. She's retired now, but you'll hear it pretty quick: she's not done.
Every corner of the Ozarks has a story worth telling — a person worth knowing, a business worth supporting, a community worth celebrating. That's why we do this.