The Enduring French Creole Community of Old Mines, Missouri
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
French lead miners, fur traders, and farmers were living in Missouri for eighty years before the Louisiana Purchase. Their presence is splendidly preserved in French Creole houses at Ste. Genevieve, now a national “museum village” with the largest collection of French Creole buildings in the United States, and in village layouts and remnants of common-field landscapes at Ste. Genevieve, Florissant, St. Charles, and Portage des Sioux. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, only in the obscure community of Old Mines do the daily lifeways of the residents perpetuate vestiges of a “French way.” Old Mines is a dispersed rural Ozarks community of mostly French Canadian origin in Missouri’s northeastern Washington County six miles north of the county seat of Potosi, sixty miles south of downtown St. Louis, and thirty miles west of the Mississippi River (Figure 1). 1 Some 1,000 people live on its forty square miles of wooded hills. The entire northeastern quadrant of Washington County constitutes a larger settlement region of French Creoles and includes another 2,000 people in the daughter communities of Fertile, Cannon Mines, Baryties, Tiff, Bellefontaine, Shibboleth, Cadet, Kingston, and Richwoods. Whereas better-known Ste. Genevieve, St. Charles, and St. Louis vigorously promote their past Frenchness to attract attention, Old Mines has continued its distinctive cultural traditions without conscious effort. It has quietly and passively evolved over the centuries, always tardily. Old Mines is an “old landscape” in the sense that the families that settled there in the late-eighteenth century are the same families that still live there after twelve generations, some descendants occupying the same houses for as long as seven generations. Unpaved ridge roads used for two centuries bend around long-abandoned mining pits in woodlands that two centuries of repeated cutting have seriously degraded. Though it appears old, poor and worn out to outsiders, the landscape is comfortable to its residents—it is home.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it