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The Legacy of LeadAuthor: KBIA
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Rural Missouri Town Reflects on Lead’s Impact 40 Years Later
Monday, 28 August, 2017
Forest City is a very small town of about 250 people, nestled in very small, very rural Holt County in Northwest Missouri. The whole county has about 4500 residents. Mayor Greg Book was born and raised in Forest City, and he refers to his home as “a Mayberry type of town.” The town is quiet and charming, but there isn’t much to it. There is a diner, open until 2:00 p.m., a historic city hall, open until 2:30, and a Drug Store Museum, open for four hours every Sunday. It only takes a minute to drive through this little Missouri town, but four miles up the road in Canon Hollow, down a winding, two-lane county road, sits Exide Technologies, a lead battery recycling plant that has been operating since 1975. Holt County has no other connection to the lead industry. It’s not in any of Missouri’s lead belts, and agriculture is the major way of life, not mining. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Holt County has around 1300 employed people, and Exide employs about a hundred of them.
