Then, a pickup truck pulled up across the tracks. Two of those houses turned out to be vacant. Just outside the town limits, I knocked at the doors of three houses. One contraption looks like it used to load rail cars.Īfter talking with Rives, I came back to try to talk to residents in the surrounding area.
Across the railroad tracks, a graveyard of machinery rusts. One lonely dirt road runs along the railroad tracks. “Because the roads were getting better, people were getting automobiles, and they’d go to bigger places to shop.” “The grocery man that ran the store out there, he said it wasn’t profitable anymore,” Rives says. But he says it wasn’t a slowing economy that did the town in – it was an economy that got better. Rives says that after World War II, one by one, the stores and church in Goss closed up. Rives remembers when a salesman from Quincy, Ill., traveled to Tink Hardware in Goss every few weeks to sell tools to a shop in town. KBIA Although Goss, Mo., has zero residents, my cell phone's weather app recognized it as a valid location.Īt Goss’s peak, right around World War II, it had about 30 residents. And, we’d have parties to entertain them.” “It seemed to me like you had really good control over your kids,” Rives says. They ended up raising three kids together in Goss. In his kitchen, he tells me that just a short drive down the road from Goss he met his wife at a street fair in 1947.
“He had the grocery store, and a feed store.” “This used to be a very active little corner here,” Rives says. He points to a dilapidated building on the left and says Mr. As we roll down a dirt road in my car, he gives me an informal tour. But today, the trains just whish through. Mail deliveries came here by rail twice per day. Back in World War II, miners used the trains to send clay. Trains on the Norfolk Southern railway pass through Goss a few times each day. While some towns grow rapidly, others – like Goss – continue to dwindle. The census shows the nation’s population is in flux. If you stopped in Goss to ask for directions – you’re most likely out of luck because, well, nobody lives here. While driving by, you might miss it if it weren’t for a few green road signs marking the town’s location along Route 24 in Monroe County. Goss stands as one of the smallest towns in Missouri.
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