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Research indicates that “Shake Rag” was a predominantly African-American community in Monroe County established for freed slaves after the Civil War. Located on the Middle Fork of the Salt River, the area was found near the railroad crossing about 2 miles north of U.S. Route 24 and ½ mile east of Missouri Route C; it is not currently known if any buildings or signs of this settlement remain. Local legend is that the name “Shake Rag” was given to the settlement by the trainmen who could see laundry hanging to dry on the tree limbs, bushes and fences, a common practice of poor people in those days. 

The area map below was drawn by Wendell Sherman, who was born in Holliday.  As a young boy, he walked and trapped all over the area and knew it as well as anyone could.  He drew the following map from memory and felt that this was a good representation of the Holliday area around 1935-38, including the community in the lower right hand side known as Shake Rag. Of Shake Rag he wrote, “Cemetery 2 in Shake-Rag as I recall did not have any headstones and even grave markers and graves had just about disappeared even during those days. Did you ever read 20 Acres and a Mule? This a book that describes the same as Shake-Rag. This was a government project after the Civil War that tried to make the black self supporting. These plots were laid out over various parts of the north. This was the only one I was ever familiar with and the three buildings as shown were all that was left when I hunted there. I understand there was a house on each 20 acre plot.” 

(Note: In 1867, Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens proposed a Slave Reparation Act also known as the “forty acres and a mule” plan as part of reconstruction after the Civil War. Stevens hoped to confiscate land from southern Confederate plantation owners and redistribute it to the freed slaves to help them make a living and pay them back for slavery. In support of his Act, Stevens proposed that “Out of the lands thus confiscated each liberated slave who is a male adult, or the head of a family, shall have assigned to him a homestead of forty acres of land, (with $100 to build a dwelling), which shall be held for them by trustees during their pupilage.” LPP)