Profile of Lebanon, Missouri

In 1889, a worker digging a new well in the rural Missouri town of Lebanon, was shocked to discover that his tools could pick up nails.  Rumors of the magnetic water’s supposed healing properties quickly spread and the small town, nestled amongst the Ozarks in southwestern Missouri, became a popular tourist destination.  For playwright Lanford Wilson, a Lebanon native, it wasn’t the pull of magnetic well water that attracted him back to his hometown, it was: “the sound of Missouri—I know that better than I know anything” (“I Hear America Talking,” Rolling Stone, 1982).

Lebanon was first settled in the 1820s, long before it became home to the fictional Talley family.  Originally perched on a hill, Lebanon provided its residents with picturesque views of the surrounding Ozarks.  When town leaders refused to donate land for the construction of a train depot in 1869, the railroad company responded by erecting a depot a mile away, inspiring the development of a “New Lebanon” around this locale, while “Old Town” remained up on the hill.  Although robbing its residents of the view “Old Lebanon” provided, the new location incorporates a diverse topography: beautiful streams, green pastures, wooded forests, and arid farmland frame this rural community.   

Historically, a variety of manufacturing plants have called Lebanon home, but in the latter half of the twentieth century, local industry shifted to boating and fishing supplies, including the boats which populate the nearby Niangua River.  In a preface to the published text of Talley’s Folly, Wilson recalls being mistaken about how close he lived to the river growing up: “I remembered swimming there.  What I didn’t remember was the twenty minute car ride getting there.”  This combination of remembering and forgetting has been instrumental in imagining the Lebanon of the Talley Trilogy; Wilson writes  “Nostalgia…soften[s] the play, giving it the scent of honeysuckle and sound of a distant band playing across that imagined river.”