Caldwell County MO Archives History .....MRS. COSTELLO-SMITH, AN EARLY BUSINESS WOMAN  
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Karen Walker khw4@yahoo.com September 4, 2008, 6:07 pm

MRS. COSTELLO-SMITH, AN EARLY BUSINESS WOMAN OF KINGSTON AND HAMILTON
	Narrator:  Mrs. Minnie Hooker, Hamilton

     Mrs. Hooker knew Mrs. Costello (or Mrs. Smith as she was later) because 
they were neighbors when Mrs. Hooker was a girl and lived at home on the J.W. 
Harper farm (the present Hooker place).  Mrs. Costello-Smith lived just across 
the road to the north on the suburban tract.  Mrs. Costello-Smith told her 
about some of her experiences at Kingston.
     She came there in the late 60s with about two dollars and a half and two 
children.  She bought a hat form of plaster and proceeded to make about the 
first hats for women to wear to church.  From that beginning, she owned a very 
good millinery store at Kingston, and later one at Hamilton in the early 80s.
     While at Kingston, she was a great friend of Mrs. Neff, a doctor's wife, 
and after his death, she and Mrs. Neff began sewing together, at last Mrs. 
Neff sewed in Hamilton with Mrs. Costello-Smith as aid.  Mrs. Neff lived in 
the first house north of the Presbyterian church.
     Mr. and Mrs. Smith kept a restaurant in Hamilton at the middle of the 
first block north of the Penney corner.  This same site had been used as the 
Costello millinery store in Hamilton.  This small restaurant kept a very fine 
stock of candy and children with pennies all went there.
     Mrs. Costello-Smith came of Pennsylvania Dutch family and she brought to 
Missouri many of the ways of that community.  She washed about twice a year, 
which was a great surprise to the other neighbors who believed in the weekly 
wash.  When the semi-annual wash day came, the yard, porch and grass were 
fairly covered with wet things.
     She gave her son Frank a law education, and he went to Maysville to 
practice.  He had been a school teacher before that, and people said that 
Frank Costello was a good teacher.
     Her second husband's name was N.C. Smith, but people always called her 
Mrs. Costello Smith, because many had known her as Mrs. Costello.
     This story is interesting because is concerns one of Hamilton's early 
business women.
     Interview  1935.


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