Irish Wilderness – More on the Mystery

 Irish Wilderness  No Responses »
Jun 012020
 

While organizing our extensive collection of Ozarks ephemera we found this June 1952 issue of the Ford Times with an article on “Missouri’s Irish Wilderness,” by Don Cullimore. As the article seems to be largely devoted to the springs and stream (“The Narrows”) where aquarium plants were harvested, we didn’t reference it in Mystery of the Irish Wilderness. Cullimore mentions the lost colony of Irish immigrants founded by Father Hogan in the article. The purpose of the Ford Times, however, was to encourage folks to drive their Fords to new places, so this article focuses on the Morgan family’s “spring-water moss farm” (Myriophyllum harvesting, for use in home aquariums)  in a remote and scenic location, on the Eleven Point River in Oregon County, Missouri.

In 1951 and 1952, Cullimore and Dan Saults, editor of the Conservationist, with photographer Don Wooldridge, researched and published a series of 12 articles about the Irish Wilderness for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They drove the roads with E. R. Barrow, step-grandson of original Irish settler, Billy Griffin, exploring the locations and recording the stories of that early settlement. The result of their deep dive into its history was a remarkable series of articles encompassing what was known or could be discovered at that time about Hogan’s settlement. Those articles we read and referenced in Mystery of the Irish Wilderness.

Their articles and the continued interest of Cullimore, Saults and a coalition of environmentalists led to the inclusion of these legendary forested hills in the national wilderness protection system: The “Irish Wilderness Act of 1984”. Sec, was passed by Congress, “2, (a) In furtherance of the purposes of the Wilderness Act (16 U.S.C. 1131-1136), certain lands in the Mark Twain National Forest, Missouri, which comprise approximately sixteen thousand five hundred acres, as generally depicted on a map entitled “Irish Wilderness”, dated March 27, 1984, are hereby designated as wilderness and shall be known as the Irish Wilderness.”

Today – the aquarium plant business is no more. The Morgan family opened the aquaria plant farm in 1951 and continued in business until 1978. The United States Forest Service purchased the area in 1972.

Mystery of the Irish Wilderness: Land and Legend of Father John Joseph Hogan’s Lost Irish Colony in the Ozark Wilderness is available on amazon.com or discounted on this website, postage paid.

To learn more about the remarkable Catholic priest who established this Ozark colony and later became the first bishop of Kansas City, our book “On the Mission in Missouri and Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir” reprints both of his memoirs in full. We included additional biographical information found in our research. Also available on amazon.com or discounted on this website postage paid.

Irish Wilderness and Eleven Point River – 50 years a Wild and Scenic River

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Sep 032018
 

This afternoon Google alerted us to an article by Andy Ostmeyer in the Joplin Globe: Worthy companions for a wild river: Eagles escort float down one of country’s inaugural wild and scenic rivers

In loving detail Ostmeyer recounts his float on the Eleven Point River, which flows through “the Irish.” This jewel of a river was among the first eight rivers designated National Wild and Scenic Rivers when Congress passed that legislation in 1968.

Ostermeyer’s musings as he floated the river  addressed the Eleven Point’s past (which brought mention of our research for Mystery of the Irish Wilderness), its present and future prospects. We appreciate his mention of our work as we too give thanks for the land, the people and the river than flows through it.

 

 

Mystery of the Irish Wilderness ($18.95, ppd) and other Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

Thomasville, Missouri – then and now

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May 092018
 

When John Joseph Hogan was looking for land for Irish immigrants in 1857, his second exploratory trip to the Ozarks took him from Shannon County as far west as Thomasville. He noted the “broad alluvial valley” spreading out around the headwaters of the Eleven Point River.

When Hogan and his friend Father Fox rode through tthis valley in 1857, it would have been planted in corn, not pasture grasses as it is today.

Just over a year ago, Thomasville was hit with the massive floods that affected the Irish Wilderness and much of the central Ozarks. Recovery is slow coming to the small town with a long history.  It was laid out in 1846 and named for George Thomas who settled there in 1817. Thomasville is the oldest settlement and first county seat of Oregon County.

Mystery of the Irish Wilderness is available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

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