Printed on back: “Views of White River Dam, Camp Ozark, by A. K. Bishop, Forsyth, Mo.” Written in pencil, “Taneycomo Dam, Ozarks, June–1912.” Real photo postcard.
Powersite Dam, originally called White River Dam, was built by the Ambursen Hydraulic Construction Company of Boston. It is a hollow cement-slab and buttress structure. As we wrote in James Fork of the White, “Powersite Dam was not architecturally blatantly industrial. The narrow, twenty mile-long lake it created became regarded as part of nature, indistinguishable from the free-flowing river it replaced.”
The dapper gents in the photo seem to find something hilarious about “Three toots of whistle means blasting.” Numerous similar real photo postcards were taken of the activities connected with building the dam; some large albums exist that have been put together from them. Allen Kitchel (A.K.) Bishop died in 1925, but his wife, Grace May (Lefler) Bishop, continued their postcard business in Branson under the name of the White River Art Company, selling primarily hand-tinted, colored views printed lithographically.
The construction phase brought in cash to the local economy and afterward boosted Branson and Hollister tourism. A village of shacks was constructed to house and service workers. Later Corps of Engineers’ dams took massive amounts of farmland and were more controversial.
Lens & Pen books are available on this website on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble. Our most recent book is James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River.
See sample pages from our forthcoming book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, on our website: hypercommon.com Available in February.