10/18/2026
A small Missouri town was built to look like an English village.
The Downing Street Historic District in Hollister, in Taney County, is also known as The English Village. It has 12 contributing buildings, built between 1909 and the 1920s as a planned village in the Tudor Revival style. The walls are light-colored stone and stucco, with dark brown decorative boards. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 29, 1978.
It began as a tourism plan. Hollister was incorporated in 1910, around the time a Missouri Pacific depot, now city hall, opened in 1910. A developer saw a chance to turn the town into Taney County's first tourist hotspot and built it to look old. Ye Olde English Inn, still a landmark, was a later addition to the street, dated to 1913 in one account.
Time and water changed it. According to a local history, major floods hit downtown in 1943, 1945 and 1950. Then Table Rock Dam was finished in 1958, and major flooding downtown was all but eliminated. A Ye English Inn Corporation formed in 1967 to bring back the old inn, and Front Street was later renamed Downing Street, after the famous London street.
The buildings were made to look old, but they have now stood for more than a century. They are truly historic.
The main street sits just south of Branson.
Have you ever walked Downing Street in Hollister?
Illustrated with the use of AI
