WHITE RIVER FLOODING 1927

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Aug 092017
 
Although there are no big government dams on the James River, Table Rock Dam backs the lower James up almost to Galena. So we covered the genesis of the Table Rock project in our new book, James Fork of the White. There’s no denying that the White River is prone to flooding.  The Army Corps of Engineers originally had no faith that dams were a solution to overflows. That would change and much of the White River has been incorporated into a system of multipurpose dams.
Press photo of Forsythe in the 1927 flood taken from Shadow Rock
Rising in the Boston Mountains and flowing through a narrow valley, the White River would rise quickly and put buildings on low ground underwater. The Corps of Engineers’ solution protected most of Branson and Hollister from flooding but permanently submerged most of the agricultural land along the upper White River. Valuable farmland hundreds of miles downstream was protected from normal rises.
 
As these government dams were premised on flood control (power generation was an option), local advocates like the White River Boosters Association cried out to Congress for relief from floods, supporting the Corps of Engineers’ claims.
 
Felicity to the new patron of dams required a revised chant from the Missouri business community. When Empire District Electric was considering building Table Rock Dam factory creation was the mantra. Local supporters really didn’t care who built the dam, or why. They just wanted a nice lake, a bigger Taneycomo, at no cost to them.
Sample pages from James Fork of the White can be seen on www.beautifulozarks.com. The book will be available by the end of September. Our earlier river book, Damming the Osage, can be at seen www.dammingtheosage.com)

MCDOWELL MILL ON FLAT CREEK

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Aug 052017
 

Following the gravel road east from today’s crossroads known as McDowell, we found the remnants of a mill that once took its power from Flat Creek. Footings and foundations still resist the work of water, but the building has been gone for a while.

Milldam of the McDowell water mill on Flat Creek. This stream has an average fall of seven feet per mile and with good water can be floated as high up as McDowell – noting obstacles like this milldam.

Water mills were not unique to the Ozarks, but they flowered in the region due to isolation imposed by the deep river-cut terrain and the abundance of spring-fed streams. There were five water mills on Flat Creek alone.

Mills powered by running water were constructed soon after settlement. Overshot wheels drove most, but turbines were common after 1880. Some even employed steam power at the close of the local milling era. The handsome building (below) was the McDowell Roller Mills, which unlike many could produce flour from wheat. Most early mills used stone burrs to grind corn into meal.

Vintage photograph shows a mill at McDowell. This one utilized rollers designed to process wheat. Photograph is courtesy of the Barry County Museum.

James Fork of the White, page 80

Delights of Road Trip Research

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Aug 022017
 

As the release date of James Fork of the White approaches, I’ll be posting some samples of what you will find in the book. All research is not done in libraries or other books.  To write a book on a river, you have to learn the river, its people and places. Over the last several years, we have explored the watershed of the James, its tributaries – large and small, the byways, backroads and the small and large towns of its landscape.

We met people and pets, sportsmen with their catches and families recreating on the banks of creeks, playing at Table Rock, or floating the river. We found remnants of past mercantile enterprises. We ate chicken at Crane’s Broiler Fest, joined the crowds at River Jam and sought out the source of the river in Webster County.

Greene, Christian, Barry, Stone, Webster, and Taney counties. Creeks and larger streams. Dams that slow or halt the flow; a dam that wasn’t built. Drainage systems and sewage treatment. We visited them all…

Railroads, highways, dam projects, tourism, the growth of towns, agriculture, industry, media and art, political will, and cultural values—all interact. The river we see today is an outcome of all these forces. Even though transformed, and still changing, the watershed of the James Fork of the White is still in many places scenic and beautiful, and where it lacks aesthetics, it is interesting.

James Fork of the White, introduction

Book Give Away for Steve Wiegenstein’s SLANT OF LIGHT

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Jul 302017
 

In anticipation of the upcoming release of his new book, THE LANGUAGE OF TREES, Steve Wiegenstein is giving away five signed copies of his novel, SLANT OF LIGHT the first book of the series. Slant of Light was the runner-up for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction.

Slant of Light by Steve Wiegenstein

Twenty more days to sign up (open from July 19 to August 19)! More info is available  on the Goodreads site – https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/245377-slant-of-light

 

LOST SILVER MINE THEATER – an Ozarks Ruin

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Jul 222017
 

Near where the Branson Entertainment Strip (a.k.a. state highway 76) meets highway 13, in a little town once known as Lakeview (now Branson West), hidden in a deep hollow are the decaying facilities of the Lost Silver Mine Theater, which opened in 1983. Not quite lost to history – yet – the concrete steps/seats are gathering moss, woooden letters occasionally flutter to the ground from creaking signage. In the amphitheater at the bottom of the hollow, remanants of stagecraft are melting into the ground. Here the story of the Lost Silver Mine and the Yocum Dollar played  out summer nights in the early Branson ‘boom’.

The Lost Silver Mine theater was owned, operated and supplied with a creative narrative by Artie Ayres, who like his father, was obsessed by the legend of the Yocum Dollar. Numerous different story lines have described the origins of the fabled coin (no authentic one has ever been found) and the silver mine where its ore was dug. Despite extensive searches and diligent research, no authenticatable specimen has yet been produced.

The legend itself has been around for 150 years or more. The Yocum (Y-o-a-c-h-u-m is an earlier spelling) brothers arrived in the upper White River country sometime after the War of 1812. They traded with the Delaware Indians who, as the legend says, happened to have a silver mine in the area. The details vary in different versions or more elaborate tellings, but tales of lost mines and buried treasure are not uncommon in this region. One rumored location of the lost mine was at the junction of the James and White Rivers, now under 150 feet of water. Artie Ayres, owner of the Lost Silver Mine Theater and author of Traces of Silver about the legend, has most likely had the best return on this silver investment of all the generations of fortune hunters and tellers of tall silver tales.

 

Find more extensive background for this entertainment relic on our new book, James Fork of the White.

 

 

APPOLLINARIS – not a name you hear every day

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Jul 202017
 

Today’s soon-to-be parents research names for the next scion of the family from lists of  trendy baby names, popular fiction, rock/pop stars or the hottest chick flick of the season.  “Apollinaris” hasn’t made any of these lists for a long time. But in the mid-nineteenth century, naming sources were more limited. Family Bibles, occasionally Shakespeare’s characters, or – in this case – the early saints names were tapped.  Today, July 20, on the Catholic calendar is the feast day of Apollinaris, a Syrian saint of the second century, named bishop of Ravenna, Italy by St. Peter himself. He was the first of several Appollinarises who achieved sainthood over the early centuries of Christianity. An auspicious lineage for the name of a miller on clear stream in the mid-nineteenth century Ozarks

In the fall of 1857,  John Joseph Hogan made his first exploratory trip to the Ozarks in search of “land for people of small means” (poor Irish immigrants). He and a surveyor explored  from Greenville to west of the Eleven Point River and back. Near the Current River they came across a mill, owned by one Appollanaris Tucker:

Traveling by way of Brunswick, Jefferson City, St. Louis, Old Mines, Potosi, Iron Mountain and Frederick Town, I halted at Greenville, in Wayne County, where I hired a surveyor familiar with the country. I examined the lands on the head waters of Little Black River, Cane Creek, Brushy Creek, in Ripley (now Carter) County, and entered four hundred and eighty acres in a body on Ten Mile Creek, making arrangements at once to put men thereon, opening and cultivating it.

With the surveyor I rode westward, across the Current River, by Van Buren, up Pike Creek, thence southward over the great divide east of Eleven Points River as far as the head waters of Buffalo Creek, thence eastward along Buffalo Creek and its tributaries to a ford on Current River. At this place there was a mill and homestead owned and occupied by a man named Appollinaris Tucker; he and his family were the only Catholics known to be residing at that time in that district. At the time of my arrival, Mrs. Tucker was in the last stages of her mortal illness, in which it seemed God’s Holy Will that she should linger until her longings could be gratified to receive the last Sacraments; and, as it happened, from the hands, of the first priest known to have come into that region of country. After Mrs. Tucker’s death, I returned homewards, by way of Iron Mountain, St. Louis, and Hannibal, to Chillicothe.

Mystery of the Irish Wilderness

We tracked in our Jeep the areas that Hogan covered on horseback when we were working on Mystery of the Irish Wilderness. We did find record of the Tuckers’ land purchases, but little else.  One of the largest springs in Missouri is Tucker Bay Spring in Ripley County. Its average flow is 24 million gallons a day. Jo Schaper notes that “very little is known about this spring, either geologically or historically. The spring is a boggy, low area (locally known in the Ozarks as a ‘bay’).”

“Appollinaris and Ellen Tucker purchased government land in 1854 and 1856 in Ripley County.  . . .  There is no record of the mill after the Civil War or what became of Appollinaris. Tucker Bay Spring, large … but curiously unstudied, flows into the Current River.”

 Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, caption, page 25

 

Traditions take many forms in the Ozarks

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Jul 052017
 

When working on our new book, James Fork of the White, we were struck by the continuity of sporting activities from a century ago to today.

On opposite pages we put a circa 1910 George Hall real photo postcard of giggers on the James River at Camp Yocum with a recent photograph of the Nixa Sucker Day festival. One difference—the gent in the center of the boat in Hall’s “flashlight” photo is wearing a necktie and coat. I doubt if today’s giggers dress so formally.

Nixa has a celebration based on an unprogressive method of catching an Ozark bottom-dwelling fish. Sucker Day has been held in the spring since 1957 when Finis Gold, barber, one-time mayor, and American Legion commander, invented the event. Suckers are rarely caught on hook and line. When they ascend creeks to spawn they can be snagged. They are also gigged in the winter when the rivers are clear and stockpiled in freezers. Though boney, sucker are delicious when scored and deep fried. The event has grown from a novel fish fry to include talent competitions, a Little Miss Sucker Day pageant, pie-eating and bubblegum-blowing contests, numerous craft booths and musical entertainment by bluegrass groups.

James Fork of the White, page 110

COMING This Fall: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.

Sample pages from this new book can be seen at www.beautifulozarks.com

Our earlier ‘river book,’ DAMMING THE OSAGE, can be seen at www.dammingtheosage.com

Family Gatherings on the River – an Ozarks Tradition

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Jul 012017
 

Although unmarked, this circa 1890 cabinet photograph of a family gathering was acquired locally, and really looks like it was taken beside an Ozark river. Guitars, guns, and gatherings in riverine settings are Ozark traditions. Our ancestors seem to have dressed up a little more for such outings than we do today, but the strong connection between family kinship and nature remains constant.

In The Ozarks: Land and Life, Milton Rafferty described the relationship of Ozarks people and their landscape:

Generations of the same family often lived in the same community so that family history intermingled with the landscape in an uncommon way. Life is integrated with the landscape in a natural way that is understood by everyone. Thus the Ozarker is a kind of homespun Lockian who thinks of the landscape as an object that penetrates the mind and alters the man.

From Chapter 3, “Gravelly Geography,” of our forthcoming book, James Fork of the White: Transformation of An Ozark River.

 

Hogs and Hillbillies

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Jun 272017
 

Real photo postcard by Hall. Probably taken in Stone County, Missouri, but Arkansas sounded more primitive. The hog’s board collar is to keep it out of fenced gardens. Cattle and hogs were released in the woods to feed themselves. The destructive rooting of feral pigs was, and still is, an environmental problem.

Though the hillbilly icon didn’t emerge for several decades, the Ozarks has been depicted as a primitive place inhabited by people living a pioneer lifestyle since the early 1800s. This mythos was rejected by progressive Springfieldians, but in Galena, and the White River Hills, it was a component of tourism.

Arkansas was held to be slightly more regressive than southern Missouri but only slightly so.

(Page 72 in the forthcoming book, James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River.)

COMING THIS FALL: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE

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Jun 102017
 

In 2012 we published a 304-page book about the transformation of a big, muddy river that rises in the tall grass Kansas prairie then cuts into the northern flank of the Ozark uplift before emptying into the even muddier Missouri River. Damming the Osage is a history of engineering interventions justified by questionable hydrologic theories. Human cupidity orchestrated many of these unharmonious projects.

This October, we will publish our second “river book”: James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River. In this we look at the watershed of the river that rises in Webster County near Marshfield, wends its way to Springfield, running along its eastern edge and then drains south to Table Rock. The James – unlike the Osage – feels the effects of a major metropolitan area on its watershed. The James was a storied Ozark float stream; the Osage, a prairie-born, rich but unspectacular stream, home to a prehistoric fish.

The James is definitely a different river and this is a different book. More pages (352), more illustrations (because we have more pages!) to examine, discuss and showcase that different river and the people who live and recreate along its course.

Look for it this fall!

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