Photo by Eric Keith / St. Joseph News-Press / Purchase this photo

Don Manville has spent 92 years near the Missouri River valley bottomland north of Wathena, Kan. Fledgling corn behind him, Mr. Manville poses in the backyard of the second home he built on the spread he moved to in 1937.

The boarded-up house pushes against a bluff and faces bottom ground where the Missouri River once ran. A little imagination allows what the property must have looked like in its functioning and efficient glory.

Don Manville, who calls these acres “the home place,” walks up the hill to the backyard, his sound steps never betraying his 92 years. He points to the built-to-last outbuildings — the smokehouse, the winery, the icehouse — that remain mostly intact. This farm, like most of its era, proved a marvel of self-sustainability.

“We never bought anything but sugar and flour,” he says.

Born in Wathena, a half-mile south, Mr. Manville grew up in this three-story house that his grandfather built about 130 years ago. Here, in what had predominantly been “fruit country,” he learned a work ethic measured by seasons. First strawberries, then raspberries, then blackberries, early apples, early grapes and so on. Picking built in little time for rest.

A treat came with the occasional ride to town with his father, the wagon loaded with berries destined for a boxcar. Gladden Lake, an oxbow long since filled in and farmed, supplied other diversions, fishing each summer, ice skating each winter.

If Mr. Manville’s descriptions of rural raising provide a mind’s eye picture of earlier-era Doniphan County, it comes with some authority. He saw a lot of the history and remembers most of it. And what he didn’t witness, he has studied.

From an 1882 county history and plat book, he cites the entry for Peter Manville, a native Ohioan and frontier adventurer. He and his brother maneuvered a boat down the Ohio, up the Mississippi and along the Missouri before Don’s great-grandfather settled in Doniphan County in 1864. With his German-born wife, they raised six children.

Most who came to that area were of German and French heritage, perhaps attracted to land that looked like home, certainly drawn by clusters of like speakers. A settler of the Groh farm east of Wathena came from Rhine-bieren. Owner of the Poirier farm west of the town came from Lons le Saunier.

While agriculture prevailed throughout the county, some found success with other enterprises. Rullman kin, transplanted from Germany, farmed but also invented a hand-operated washing machine, manufactured in St. Joseph and eventually sold in design to Maytag.

Mr. Manville’s lineage tied in with the Johns Manville Roofing empire. “That was the rich side of the family,” he says. (That puts him in relation to Tommy Manville, the playboy heir to that fortune who in the 1940s set a Guinness Book record for marriages and divorces, more than a dozen. His famous quote: “She cried, and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.”)

In 1937, Mr. Manville moved from the home place to property a couple of miles north. Two years later, he took a wife. Don and Lorene were married 65 years before her death in 2004.

The landscape continued to change. Towns went away ... Whitehead, Geary City, East Norway. The prevalent fruit crops suffered a double-barreled hit with a severe early freeze in 1940 and lack of labor during the war years. The emphasis turned to row crops.

When the Missouri River ran closest to the bluff road, it was so shallow “you could nearly wade across it if you picked your route,” Mr. Manville recalls. But seasonal high water played havoc with the banks; chunks of land as high as a house would tumble into the current.

Floods and the Corps of Engineers rearranged the river from the Manville back acreage to a few miles east.

From the road leading to town, Mr. Manville points to the place where the town of Bellemont once resided, where a ferry once offered a shortcut to St. Joseph, where a lime mill once stood.

In the way of rural areas, he knows the names of his neighbors. He also knows the names of his neighbors from a half-century back.

“I never did retire,” he says, standing in the kitchen of his brick home preparing to make strawberry jelly. He works as regional manager for an Iowa-based company that sells corn, soybean and alfalfa seeds. His home phone rings and he talks to a customer about the possibility of replanting after flooding took over some bottom ground.

“I like people,” he says of his continuing work. “I’m just in my prime. I intend to live to be 100 and get shot by a jealous husband.”

A conversationalist of the first order, he shifts easily from talk of the current energy crisis to a joke about a racing mule.

A first-hand historian in Big Smith overalls, Mr. Manville stirs images of a bygone time and a place that was once.

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.