It was during the earliest years of the 20th Century that many of the personalities who would shape the future and character with their special skills and determination and other personal resources appeared here and began their work, leaving marks of their passage in clear and certain ways.
One worthy example was Charles R. Dumars, who began his adult life in Springfield, where he organized and managed one of the first town bands, playing trumpet with one hand and conducting with the other, and relentlessly recruiting other young and promising musicians. His skills soon were recognized throughout the region and he responded to a call for musical help from some of of the business pioneers involved in the labor of a rugged mining camp that grew to become a center of mining and smelting named Joplin. He organized an informal and of brief duration a mining camp band but soon was spotted by Carthage promoters.
He was ready in the early days of the new century to serve the growing Carthage community with fine musical instruments and the latest printed scores of music of the time. Soon he assumed leadership and expansion of efforts of a fine military band based at Carthage. In a few years, he gained international recognition for himself and his bandsmen. The Carthage Light Guard Band was a headon challenge to one Patrick Gilmore for widely praised performances in Boston and other major American cities.
During the same era, Dumars also prepared the Dumars Music Co., then just south of Central Avenue on Main Street as a wholesale music publishing house, with continuing musical merchandise offers to the retail trade with continued musical merchandise offers to the public and his response to expressions of fresh new musical ideas. He published some of his own compositions and the works of several young Carthage musicians, most notable of whom were James Sylvester Scott Jr., who would become the Crown Prince of Ragtime and Clarence Woods, who would win recognition as an outstanding theater musician.
Wearied by the years and pressure of constant public performance, he later moved to the West Coast to serve as a store manager and bandmaster in California the remainder of his life.
Upon departure, Dumars left a legacy of quality, excellence and popularity of ragtime and other period idioms with the memory of success that has inspired many generations of musical artists and who in their own way worked with some success to perpetuate the worldwide fame of Carthage as a city of music, where creativity was a way of life.
These are highlights only of a complex list of personalities who helped at an early time to earn and retain a place in the annals of humanity as unique as a place of the arts and of a different distinguishing approach to the mortal experience. Industrialists, educators, poets, attorneys, pastors, politicians and retail business experts continued through the years to use that status as the basis of a local history like no other, a reason for ongoing community pride and one of the greatest centers of ragtime’s infancy on the planet.
The pride prevails, and now is awaiting its application in the lives of more generations to come.
