Raines Family at their Rock House. Photo courtesy of Tim Helton.
Construction of Bagnell Dam brought great changes to the Osage River valley: road building, moving towns, graveyards, and people from its banks.
According to Tim Helton, son-in-law of Sally Raines, her father, William Maurice Raines, was “an attorney with a St. Louis firm retained by Union Electric to help secure land rights so they could create Lake of the Ozarks.”
Sally Raines on the porch of the family home. Photo courtesy of Tim Helton.
In Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, we made the case that Bagnell Dam, which created Lake of the Ozarks, was a complicated scheme by complicated schemers to financially benefit themselves, not the public. It was conceived of in the Roaring Twenties and finished in the early years of the Great Depression. It did finally become a major tourist nexus after World War Two, but it was little used or developed in the 1930s and early ‘40s. There is no denying that its land acquisition and construction phase brought financial benefits to the region.
The family’s old rock house, a classic Ozark adaptation of an Arts & Crafts/Craftsman bungalow-style dwelling faced in rock rubble, is still intact on the Niangua Arm of the Lake.
Tim Helton reports, “It’s amazingly in about the same ‘configuration’ that it was all those years ago.”
Raines family home in the 1920s. The building still exists on the Niangua arm of Lake of the Ozarks. Photo courtesy of Tim Helton.
Personal benefit of the construction of Lake of the Ozarks – Leland’s father, Louis Strader Payton, was employed as a highway engineer to create roads around the new project. The Kentucky engineer met and courted a local schoolteacher, Annie Lewis Daniels. They married in 1939.
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