Legendary Ha Ha Tonka “Castle”

 Damming the Osage, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jan 262022
 

Robert M. Snyder engaged the services of a Kansas City architectural firm, A. Van Brunt and Brother, to design a spacious residence and complex of supporting structures. Like Snyder, Adriance Van Brunt had come to Kansas City around 1880 and with his brother John enjoyed rapid success. He was a believer in the City Beautiful Movement and for a decade was a member of the Board of Park Commissioners. This outlook and experiences made him a singular architect to transform wild Ha Ha Tonka into the “gentleman’s estate” the senior Snyder desired.

From Ha Ha Tonka State Park History: He envisioned a European-style castle with 60 rooms and a center atrium rising three and one-half stories to a skylight. He also planned a water tower, greenhouses and stables. The materials were extracted from the area, with sandstone quarried nearby and transported by a mule-drawn wagon and miniature railroad.

Construction of his dream home in the Ozarks began in 1905. Robert M. Snyder was killed in a car accident in Kansas City in October of 1906 and it was left to his sons to complete. After his father’s untimely death, one of Robert Jr.’s duties was to dispose of the distant estate. Colonel Scott’s Carter’s Magazine article had already given it some status as a natural wonder, calling the place a park. With Herbert Hadley, the float-tripping progressive Republican as governor, it seemed that selling Ha Ha Tonka to the state might go easily. In 1909, a bill authorizing its purchase failed by one vote in the Missouri House. From then on Robert Snyder Jr. encountered years of frustration trying to facilitate an adequately compensated transfer to public ownership. In his booklet, Hahatonka in the Ozarks (1914), Snyder emphasized the place’s aesthetic and historic value. As much as he loved it, the family needed to sell it.

Bob Snyder, Jr. became an expert on early Missouri history and a collector of its literature.  He was passionately involved with the property he was trying to sell.

 

From Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir. Lens & Pen Press is having a half price sale for all titles. Damming the Osage is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

A Kansas City Capitalist Discovers The Ozarks

 Damming the Osage, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jan 062022
 

Robert M. Snyder was a Kansas City businessman, capitalist, and lover of the outdoors.  R.M Snyder’s triumphs had come in the natural gas, oil, real estate, and banking businesses, and he was the organizer of what became the Kansas City Life Insurance Company.

While staying at a hotel in Lebanon owned by Major Kellogg, Robert McClure Snyder Sr. was told about fabulous Ha Ha Tonka by Colonel R. G. Scott. The Kansas City capitalist was an active sportsman. His great-grandson, Bob Snyder, reported he had considered buying Roaring River. In 1904, he purchased Ha Ha Tonka spring and lake from Col. Scott and added sixty tracts.

According to Scott, Snyder’s holdings amounted to 5,300 acres “of Camden county’s most beautiful hills and streams.” In an extensive interview (The Springfield Press, Oct. 19, 1929), he recounted the beginnings of Snyder’s Ozarks retreat:

“Mr. Snyder’s advent in the Ozarks gave me (Col. Scott) new hope. It brought development to the county I believe to be Missouri’s greatest asset. Twenty-four years ago we started building the Snyder castle and tower at Ha Ha Tonka. But death intervened to prevent Snyder seeing his dream castle completed.”

When his big new green Royal Tourist motorcar skidded on the freshly oiled street, Snyder was fifty-four. He had come far since arriving in Kansas City around 1880 to engage in the wholesale fancy grocery business. The paper mentions his ambitious project in the Ozarks:

Two years ago Mr. Snyder acquired, under a mortgage foreclosure, Ha-Ha-Tonka Lake and a tract of 2,700 acres surrounding it, a famous natural park in southeast Missouri. Ha-Ha-Tonka Lake, a beautiful sheet of water seventy acres in extent, includes an island, precipitous, picturesque and honeycombed with onyx caves. On the topmost crest of this island Mr. Snyder set about the erection of a summer home of such proportions as to astound the residents of that remote district. The structure had an appearance of a hotel rather than of a private residence, and was to cost, it is said, $50,000 or more.

“Here I will spend my leisure—secure from the worries of business, and the excitement of city life,” the owner said. “I will fish and loaf and explore the eaves in these hills, with no fear of intrusion.

“At the time of his death,” speculated the Star, “It was generally understood he was making money rapidly. He was a man who understood big things and made them win by keeping up the fight when other men might have been ready to give up.”

From Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir. Lens & Pen Press is having a half price sale for all titles. Damming the Osage is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

THE OZARKS: Where It’s Been, Where It’s Going. Vol. 3 in Brooks Blevins’ Trilogy

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Jan 022022
 

Brooks Blevins discussing the third volume of his trilogy, A History of the Ozarks, Dec. 13 at The Library Center in Springfield.

Brooks Blevins finds it endlessly fascinating why a modest uplift in the center of America is believed to be the homeland of a race of slack-jawed yokels in spite of compelling demographic evidence it is inhabited by a populace not dissimilar to those of surrounding states. Fans of Dr. Blevins will find in Volume 3 of A History of the Ozarks: The Ozarkers a definitive answer to that paradox and a good guess as to the durability of that region’s hillbilly identity. Given the long literary origins of the trope it seems unlikely associating the Ozark hills with old timey ways will completely die out even though the place is in a rebranding phase.

Professor Blevins is more familiar with popular culture than many historians—and more respectful of its influence. His lively writing style is animated by these cultural conflicts. He points out a year before Alice Walton’s (of Walmart) toney art museum opened, a violent meth film set in the Ozarks premiered: “The fact that the movie Winter’s Bone dominated national perceptions of the Ozarks during the year and a half preceding the opening of Crystal Bridges made the museum’s premiere that much more jarring and its impact on the region’s image that much more transformative … But the twenty-first century has certainly sparked a reimagining of the Ozarks and Ozarkers. It was inevitable that at some point the reality of life in the Ozarks would stray so far from the region’s stubborn image that the dissonance would be impossible to ignore.”

His two earlier volumes are solid reconstructions of the place’s past. Volume 3 brilliantly shows how legend and myth infiltrate our perceptions of the past. Such stereotyping displeases the business community but is a gift to novelists, folklorists, and souvenir makers. The hillbilly was once a tourist icon—and to some degree may still be in spite of greater sensitivity to negative regional profiling. Another reasoned, well researched, and fun read from Missouri State University Professor Blevins.

 

A History of the Ozarks: The Ozarkers is available at the University of Illinois Press or on amazon

 

Origin of Ha Ha Tonka Mythos

 Damming the Osage, See The Ozarks  No Responses »
Nov 102021
 

In Damming the Osage, we wrote about the connection between Col. R. G. Scott and Robert M. Snyder, who built Ha Ha Tonka.

Colonel R. G. Scott came from Iowa to the Ozarks around 1890 where he futilely attempted to promote a railroad linking Jefferson City and Springfield. He and a friend, Major R. D. Kelly, bought or optioned a large parcel of land around Gunter Spring from Jack Roach. His son, Sydney Roach, was an attorney on the Snyder legal team.

Likely, it was the Colonel who built the low dam that created the lake that would be subsumed by Lake of the Ozarks. Possibly, it was he who stocked it with rainbow trout. Probably, it was Scott who coined the name Ha Ha Tonka, although he claimed a Captain Lodge learned that name from a group of visiting Osage Indians. Certainly, it was Colonel Scott who published the first article extolling Ha Ha Tonka’s natural wonders in an 1898 issue of Carter’s Magazine.

A 1929 article in The Springfield Press (Oct. 19), “Pioneer Enthusiast Of the Ozarks, Who Dreamed of Dams, Hopes to Live to See Vision Accomplished Fact,” confirms our supposition: “(Ha Ha Tonka was) the first development in the Camden county Ozarks and came through the vision of Colonel Scott, who sold the land and the idea to the late R. M. Snyder, and incidentally it resulted in Scott building the first dam in the Ozarks to form Ha-Ha-Tonka lake. “

“Colonel Scott said he named the Snyder tract Ha-Ha-Tonka because it is the Osage Indian name for Laughing Water.” This was the beginning of our awareness of the bogus nature of many “Indian legends,” which some years later led us to research and write our recent book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco.

After the death of R.M. Snyder as the backed-up Osage obliterated Ha Ha Tonka’s small lake, the sons battled Union Electric for compensation for damages for their lost trout lake. From 1930 to 1936, trials and appeals continued in the courts. At his death on February 9, 1937, Robert McClure Snyder, Jr. was planning an appeal to the Supreme Court.

From Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir.

Lens & Pen Press is having a half price sale for all titles. Damming the Osage is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

LOVER’S LEAP LEGENDS Earns Awards and High Praise

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Nov 022021
 

LOVER’S LEAP LEGENDS

FROM SAPPHO OF LESBOS TO WAH-WAH-TEE OF WACO

Visit a Lover’s Leap on your Vacation—but don’t jump! Award-winning new book reveals locations of these tragic, but invented, Indian legends.

“The views,” adds co-author Crystal Payton, “are grand and these romantic stories, though fakelore, are fascinating.”

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.– Authors Leland and Crystal Payton are pleased at the popular and critical reception of their 352-page book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco. Published by Lens & Pen Press, it contains 545 color illustrations.

A reviewer on Amazon agreed Lover’s Leaps are intriguing places to visit: “This book is divided by area and would be a wonderful travel companion for side trips, or day trips to one of the legend sites and add an interesting and fun adventure to a vacation.”

Families have visited Rock City with its spectacular Lover’s Leap in Chattanooga for generations. How many realized that a short drive away in Gadsden, Alabama, leaping Noccalula is cast in bronze in a city park? Mark Twain’s hometown, Hannibal, Missouri boasts a stunning Lover’s Leap overlooking the Mighty Mississippi. Upriver in Wisconsin they found the spot where, in 1805, Zebulon Pike recorded the first known Lover’s Leap legend featuring Native Americans. Research unearthed many other obscure sites as well.

The Missouri Writers Guild awarded Lover’s Leap Legends First Place for Nonfiction, 2021. The book was also a Finalist in the Multicultural Non-Fiction category of the 2021 International Book Awards.

A Mind-Boggling Work of Research, concluded an Amazon top reviewer. “This is, I believe, the only book-length account of Lovers Leap legends in the United States and beyond, and it’s a terrific one. Folklorists both amateur and professional will find much to savor in this book. And did I mention that it has an excellent index, the sign of an author who has truly taken care?”

At the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Awards, the oldest exclusive contest for independent presses, Lover’s Leap Legends was awarded a bronze medal in the Popular Culture category.

A Benjamin Franklin Awards judge was enthusiastic: “Lover’s Leap Legends is a spectacular leap into contrarian history, a celebration of ” sentimental romantic infection.” It is one of the oddest surveys I have ever read; I could not tear myself away from it. Bonus, it is lavishly illustrated, and a gift at its retail price. Describing themselves as “former flea market pickers,” the author/photographers/cultural anthropologists are perversely suited to this adventure. And what a treasure trove of local legend and artifact. And they are seriously funny. I had no idea that our fascination with this myth was as firmly embedded as they find. WOW. I immediately wrote a half-dozen history buffs to alert them to this marvel.”

Midwest Book Review said, “An inherently fascinating, beautifully illustrated, impressively informative, expertly organized and presented study, Lover’s Leap Legends is an extraordinary, unique, and unreservedly recommended addition to personal reading lists, as well as community and academic library collections.”

Lover’s Leap Legends, though intended for a general audience, has proven useful to scholars. A PhD candidate whose thesis examines the phenomenon wrote: “Your collection is really phenomenal and beautifully presented. I believe that everything you have written and collated provides valuable information and much food-for-thought for future scholarship. As I read it further, I am amazed at the variety of information you have collected. … Your publication … has really helped me to hone my presentation, so your work has already been useful in scholarship!”

The authors were honored that a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and celebrated author concluded: “Lover’s Leap Legends is the definitive visual sourcebook for an American tradition that is as disturbing as it is amusing.”

Lover’s Leap Legends is available at amazon.com. Lens & Pen Press currently has a sale offering all their titles at 50 % off postage paid. http://www.dammingtheosage.com/buy-the-book/

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www.beautifulozarks.com www.dammingtheosage.com www.hypercommon.com

 

Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco

ISBN: 978-0-9673925-9-2

352 pages, 7.5×10 545 color illustrations

$35.00

 

 

 

Gentrification of an Outlaw Hangout on the Osage River

 Damming the Osage, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 102021
 

Club House, Monegaw Springs, real photo postcard by Becraft

Between bank, stage, and train robberies, the Younger Brothers’ gang found refuge and recreation in the rugged hills of the Osage. Grandfather Younger had settled here in the 1840s. Relatives and even former slaves of the family took pride in sheltering the outlaws. Frank and Jesse James on occasion joined the Youngers at the billiard table in the spacious hall of the log hotel at Monegaw Springs. The young men attended dances where they thrilled local girls with stories of their exploits on behalf of the vanquished.

In 1905 the old house and 300 acres were acquired by a group of Kansas City businessmen who created “The Monegaw Club.” The KC headquarters of the club were in the office of Mr. James B. Keister, 706 Bank of Commerce Building. The Henry County Democrat, August. 3, 1905 took several paragraphs from the Kansas City Journal description:

“The old log tavern on the crest of Mount Monegaw, now the property of the club, is one of the historic buildings of St. Clair county. The hotel was built in1854 by Thomas Estes and Harry Davis, both well known in the county at that time and still remembered. The building was originally intended for a hotel and since its erection has been conducted as such, with the exception of a short period during the war.

A fifteen foot veranda has been built around the old log hotel, which is being remodeled, retaining as much as possible its original rustic features—An up-to-date café and grill room will be one of the attractions at the club; other modern conveniences will be introduced. A pumping system, which required some skilled engineering, has been installed, and for the first time in the history of this ancient resort, the sulpher water is being pumped to the top of Monegaw hill. A bathhouse with sulpher plunge, sulpher baths, vapor baths and mud baths will be maintained.”

At the time it was built, the log hotel was said to be the largest log structure west of the Mississippi. Kansans burned the town during the Civil War, but spared the hotel. The old log hotel burned in 1926.

 

From Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir. Lens & Pen Press is having a half price sale for all titles. Damming the Osage is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

LOVER’S LEAP LEGENDS Garners Praise and Awards

 Lens & Pen Press, Lover's Leap Legends  No Responses »
Sep 252021
 

Lens & Pen Press is having a half price sale on all inventory. All titles now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for half the original price, postage paid.

A VANISHED RAILROAD OF SOUTHWEST MISSOURI IS NOSTALGICALLY RECALLED IN NEW BOOK

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Sep 192021
 

The Greenfield & Northern: A Southwest Missouri Shortline Railroad has accumulated memories, maps, photographs, and official documents about the bold capitalist effort to encourage the development of an interesting but somewhat somnambulant section of Missouri. This geographic region transitions from the hilly, rocky Ozarks to the plains that extend to the eastern slope of the Rockies. It has more agricultural promise than the true Ozarks. In the late 19th century diligent efforts were made to grow small trading communities into real town. Such town-growing activities required a railroad. The author, Larry Murphy, assisted by his son, R. King Murphy, has written an intriguing saga of the phenomenal energies expended connecting these little towns with the outside world.

Back cover, The Greenfield & Northern. The couple in the center are Thomas A. Miller and his wife, Clara Belle (Jopes). Miller was known for many things besides the railroad – his lumber businesses, the town named for him, construction of the courthouse and Aurora’s Franklin school, and his public service in Aurora.
Photo from Aurora Centennial. “Wedding day picture of Mr. and Mrs. Tom Miller.”

The saga of the iron horse is dramatic, and too often filled with miscalculations of need. There were rail projects that were never completed even after financing had been secured. Bonds for such projects were left to be paid by unhappy investors. Eventually trucks and automobiles cut into the services once supplied by railroads. Missouri rail lines peaked in 1920 at 8,117 miles. By 2017, there were only 3,862 miles—103 miles less than in 1880. Some short lines became integrated into major lines. Many had their rails pulled and were abandoned to many years later be occasionally repurposed as hiking trails—“Rails to Trails” program.

South Greenfield depots on right; Sanborn Insurance maps of S. Greenfield in 1892 and 1920

The senior Murphy has a poignant recollection: “One of my favorite memories of growing up in Greenfield, MO (population 1,353) was going to see the Frisco local come into Greenfield from the Kansas City-Springfield-Memphis main line at south Greenfield. This would have been about 1941. I would hear the train whistle for the U. S. 160 crossing south of town near the “Southern Club” and immediately would call Grandad, Porter Murphy, to come get me so we could go see the train. “

Murphy goes on to report that even at 4 years old, he knew the track was “in deplorable condition.” Trains didn’t turn out to be the agents of development town leaders and developers imagined but they certainly were a spectacle in the context of the limited entertainments available in these villages.

Railroad tracks in Dade County, south of Greenfield. On the left is the site of an engine derailment about 1940. On the right, a 3.6% grade was too much for an overloaded G&N train. Fortunately, no derailment, just a slow slide back to the depot.

Larry Murphy’s memories of his father and grandfather are woven into his recollection of the railroad: “All of this, my granddad’s interest in taking me to the train, his stories of the old Greenfield& Northern, his interest in my interest in trains, railroads and mining all made for some wonderful memories and the basis for some additional stories.”

Long after these ultimately uneconomic ventures fail, locals remember not only the spectacle of these monster moving pieces of iron, but they recall the individuals who crewed them and manned the depots.  Probably Larry Murphy is not the only citizen who has passed on an affection for railroads long gone. Larry’s son R. King Murphy wrote a short story called “The Ritual” printed in the June 16, 1994, Vedette. Wrote the son: “I have often wished I could have been there with them as the steam-powered mechanical marvels of a bygone era plied the high iron.”

Two pictures of BNSF switching a number of hoppers at Pennington Seed in Greenfield.

A number of first-hand accounts exist of the effect of rail transportation and of course the inevitable and memorable train wrecks. An amazing number of photographs were taken of the old-time trains and Murphy has numerous maps that explain the towns the line connected. The Greenfield & Northern has vanished but is not forgotten as this book shows.

The book is available for $20 postage paid from Larry Murphy (larrymurf37@gmail.com), 2895 Claflin RD., Suite 200, Manhattan, KS 66502. (785-477-0517)

The Murphys are at work on another book on the Kansas City, Clinton, and Springfield railroad.

These intimate local histories are valuable because they preserve not only the raw facts—dates, places, economic implications, but the mythos of our romance with technology. Generously, the Murphys have donated copies to regional libraries.

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Lens & Pen Press is having a half price sale for all titles. Visit our store at www.dammingtheosage.com to see the selection. Sale is 50% off original price, postage paid.

Outlaw Geography and Their Poetry

 Damming the Osage  No Responses »
Sep 102021
 

Younger’s Bluff at Monegaw, real photo postcard.

 

 

Youngers Lookout is an often-photographed feature of the Monegaw Springs area.

Cole Younger, the last surviving member of the James-Younger Gang, is said to have had his picture taken here in the early 1900s after his release from a Minnesota prison. The attachment of his name to this bluff may date from that event and not the gunfight of 1874 with Pinkerton agents, which occurred some three miles away.

Known as the Rosco Gun Battle, one Younger and two Pinkerton detectives were killed. Two monuments mark the spot along the lonely St. Clair County road where it occurred.

In 1897, Cole Younger, serving life with brother Jim in a Minnesota prison after the disastrous 1876 Northfield bank robbery that finished the James-Younger gang, wrote a sentimental poem:

 

 

‘Tis twenty years and more, Jim

Since we breathed the air of home.

Or gazed upon the hills and vales

We loved to oft to roam . . .

 

One grim old cliff I have in mind

That stands majestic, grand,

While far below the fair Osage

Sweeps o’er her silver sand.

 

There countless names are carved with ours

Where we have stood with awe

And gazed upon its marble face,

Near dear old Monegaw!

Many names of vacationers are carved into the sandstone bluffs along the Osage. We’ve looked, but never found any of the Youngers’ names.

 

From Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir. Lens & Pen Press is having a half price sale for all titles. Damming the Osage is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

Joseph W. McClurg, 19th Governor of Missouri

 Damming the Osage  No Responses »
Aug 172021
 

Joseph McClurg was governor of Missouri from January 12, 1869 to January 4, 1871.

 

 

 

Joseph W. McClurg and partners grossed half-a-million dollars a year at their Linn Creek Big Store before the Civil War. The well-educated, dapper gentleman was a strong Union supporter. When hostilities erupted, rebels burned his store and warehouses.

After the War, McClurg was elected to Congress three times and governor once. Attempting to revive his store on the river in the 1870s, he found the new railroads made his steamboat-based enterprise obsolete. The soft-spoken, religious, teetotalling McClurg could be considered the most distinguished figure in early Osage valley history. Certainly, he was the only personage in the region photo­graphed by Mathew Brady.

 

 

From Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir. Lens & Pen Press is having a half price sale for all titles. Damming the Osage is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com/buy-the-book/ for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

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