Visiting The Historic Hosmer Dairy Farm is like stepping back in time.  As you drive down the "Old Wire Road" six miles northwest of Marshfield, Missouri, you see where the past meets the present.  This beautiful place that has been know as "Walnut Springs Farm" for the last thirty years, shows a unique farmstead as it was in the late 1800s.  The farmstead includes two large barns, three silos, a springhouse creamery, two hired hand houses, a tomato cannery building, a foreman's house, and a stagecoach stop.  Many of the buildings have period items and equipment on display.  Eight original buildings of the farm have been restored over the last thirty years, and the "Hosmer Dairy Farm Historic District" was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on May 16, 1996.  

     The Hosmer Dairy Farm was started in 1889 by Edmund and Eliza Jane Hosmer, who moved into a log cabin built in 1838.  Prior to the Hosmers moving to the farm, it had been a stagecoach stop for changing horses and giving a break to weary passengers on the stage route from St. Louis to Springfield and points beyond to the south and west until the railroad reached Springfield around 1870.  

     The farm prospered under the wise and progressive management of the Hosmers.  In Webster County in Southwest Missouri, where there were no commercial dairy farms or creameries, Edmund Hosmer built up the first; and his success influenced other farmers to start dairies.  He found that Jersey cows usually had milk with the highest butterfat content and built his herd accordingly.  The Hosmers decided that churning and selling butter would be the most profitable for their operation.  By 1916, the Hosmer Dairy Farm was the largest butter dairy farm in Missouri.  By 1919, there were more than 10,000 dairy cows in Webster County and three-fourths of them were Jersey.  Webster County became known as "The Dairy Center of the Ozarks." 

     Edmund Hosmer moved to the Ozarks in 1871 and ran a hardware store on the square in Marshfield.  There he met and married a widow named Eliza Jane Nichols Goss who ran a mercantile store.  They moved to the farm in 1889 and soon began dairying. 

     Edmund was born in 1828 in Concord, Massachusetts, where his family were friends and neighbors to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau.  His father, also named Edmund, was often mentioned as Farmer Hosmer in Thoreau's and Emerson's writings and was even pictured on the cover of Thoreau's book, Men of Concord.  The younger Edmund, along with his brothers, helped his father build the cabin for Thoreau on Walden Pond.  In 1882, Edmund and his nine-year-old son, John, traveled from Marshfield back to Concord to attend Emerson's funeral.

     Eliza Jane Hosmer, born in 1830, came from Kentucky with her family to the Marshfield, Missouri area at the age of eight.  Her dad, Lazarus Nichols, bought a squatters claim on Pleasant Prairie (close to where the Marshfield Walmart is today).  She remembered while living there, looking east toward where Marshfield would later be established, seeing the Cherokee Indians traveling on the Trail of Tears.  She also remembered seeing Springfield when it was just a circle of log huts.  Eliza Jane married Edmund Hosmer in 1871.