Water driven mills were a necessity in isolated Ozark valleys. They were a community gathering place and Ozarkers are enormously nostalgic about these symbols of frontier (or near frontier) subsistence lifestyle. Few are left. Floods took out many and they were not maintained after being abandoned when improved transportation delivered commercially ground flour.
Had the son of the owner of the watermill at Hurley, Missouri, been more careful with his brush fire, we could have photographed an early and conventionally nostalgic rural relic. The rambling three-story, crudely built, added-on, and deteriorating structure built in 1892 was being restored when it burned to ashes on April 3, 2005. The site today consists of a few fire-scorched and rusty pieces of machinery set among some foundation stones. Invasive weeds and sumac are already being replaced by trees. In another decade finding any evidence there was ever a historic mill here will require archaeology
There was a time in the 1920s and ’30s when the railroad brought opportunity to this village five miles east of Crane. A 1927 Stone County booklet pronounced with only a little puffery:
Hurley is said to be the most mutual, cooperative and moral town in Stone County. It is a small town on the Missouri Pacific between Crane and Springfield and surrounded by very fertile, productive land, and it claims proportionally, the largest trade of any town in the county. A stream of clear spring water runs through the center of the town sufficient to grind out the best flour, meal and feed; and the pretty homes and streets are all clean and the inhabitants healthy.
Mary Scott Hair, a cousin of Dewey Short, wrote a paid column beginning in 1948 under the pen name “Samanthy” for the Crane Chronicle recording the life and times of Hurleyites. Her father had once owned the Spring Creek Mill, and she and her husband and daughter worked a small farm nearby. In a 1982 interview printed in Bittersweet she summed up her life: “I have lived in Hurley all my life and I probably won’t live anywhere else. I am rooted and grounded in Hurley. My younger days were Hurley’s best days. Sometime I wonder whether or not it was all make believe.”
Taken from James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, now on sale for $17.50 (half price) postage paid, at www.beautifulozarks.com