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

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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.

Origin of Ha Ha Tonka Mythos

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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.

Dalton Family Gathering at Arnhold’s Mill Fishing Club, 1920s

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Dec 102019
 

The Dalton family has been prominent in Missouri history. In 1925, they gathered in front of Arnhold’s Mill, a favorite family vacation destination. Photo courtesy of Mary Anderson.

Sidna Poague Dalton, second from right, became a Missouri Supreme Court justice (1950-1965). He was also an amateur archaeologist who discovered a transitional Paleo-Indian projectile point, which is named for him (the Dalton Point). His wife Edna is on the back row; three of their four kids are also in the picture: Ruth Rusk Anderson, aka “Rusk”, Jane Dalton Hess and Jim Dalton. Sidna’s brother Sam, far left, owned Dalton Coal and Concrete. Lelia, their sister, married George Denman. Their sons, John and Jim, are in the front row. Jim went on to be Mayor of Nevada, Missouri – much later in life of course.

Before Bagnell Dam created Lake of the Ozarks, there were few tourist attractions in this region. Arnhold’s Mill was a commercial mill site certainly, but also an early fishing camp/resort on the Niangua River in Camden County not far from Ha Ha Tonka’s springs. In 1896, J. W. (Joshua Williams) Vincent, editor of the Linn Creek Reveille, published a history of Camden County he had compiled by interviewing early settlers. In it he stated: “The Arnhold Mill, probably the most noted in the county, was founded in 1833 by a man named Kieth.”

George and Dorotha Arnhold, German immigrants, bought what by then was called Cleman Mill in 1878. Its scenic location, abundant game, good fishing and congenial owners attracted sportsmen from across the state. Eventually, cabins were built on the nearby hills to accommodate visitors who showed up in season. It was a family-friendly resort as evidenced by the Dalton family photo posed in front of the mill.

Ruth Rusk Anderson was Mary Anderson’s Grandma. She was 6 years old in 1925, when this photo was taken. She told Mary about “a fishing camp she went to as a child that she loved, and the heartache she felt when it flooded.” Arnhold’s Mill was covered by the backed-up waters of the Osage when Bagnell Dam closed.

Mary Anderson sent us these photos of the family vacation at Arnhold’s Mill in the 1925. She has scanned and made available to family members a horde of family snapshots. The Dalton and Poague families are prominent in Missouri history and this greatly adds to the genealogical archives of the family.

 

 

 

 

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Ha Ha Tonka: One family’s memories

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Sep 082019
 

This wonderful family photograph, which was sent to us by Tim Helton, shows young Sally Raines with her mother, Gladys Mary (maiden name Wells) Raines near Ha Ha Tonka before it burned. Per Tim Helton, Gladys (Wells) Raines’ father, William Maurice Raines (University of Missouri, Class of 1917), 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 does not remember where this picture was taken – only that they were nice people and put her up on that horse – because she didn’t have anyone to play with!”

Seen in the above Helton/Raines family snapshot from the 1930s, Ha Ha Tonka was built as the second home of the Snyder family of Kansas City. Robert McClure Snyder purchased 2,500 acres in 1904 on which to build his vision of a European stone castle in the Ozarks. He did not live to see it completed, dying in an automobile accident in 1906.

The Snyder Family sued Union Electric when Bagnell Dam created Lake of the Ozarks, which backed up into the spring branch full of introduced trout. The suit bounced in and out of courts for more than a decade. We covered the lawsuit extensively in Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir.

Ha Ha Tonka, now Missouri’s most popular state park, features a great spring, several large caves, and the stabilized ruins of the Snyder’s stone castle. The history of Ha Ha Tonka is indeed one of the more conflicted tales of the Osage basin.

Damming the Osage and all Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

NETFLIX’S OZARK vs. the real Lake of the Ozarks

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Sep 022017
 

With great anticipation we began to binge watch Netflix’s 10-part series titled, Ozark. The promos for this turgid story of money laundering and murder set at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks set the scene: “A financial adviser drags his family from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks, where he must launder $500 million to appease a drug boss.” (Starring: Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Sofia Hublitz).

A few establishing shots were grabbed at Lake of the Ozarks, but the series itself was filmed in Georgia thanks to that state’s generous tax credits for filmmakers. The first episode, set primarily in Chicago, made us ambivalent – not fully engaged. Should we finish the episode? Should we even go on to Episode 2? To our utter amazement, the last scene of that first episode showed Marty Byrde’s (Jason Bateman) first sight of the Lake at a spot we recognized as Lover’s Leap, a precipitous bluff near the drowned town of Linn Creek.

In Damming the Osage, we used a vivid linen postcard of that scene. Chrome sunset colors aside, some changes to the landscape have occurred since this 1940s image was printed. The distinctive rock has lost one upright piece; a small tree is growing through the cracks; and the tree where the postcard model leaned is gone, the grounds charred by a recent campfire. A modern condo building marks the confluence of the Osage (straight ahead) and the Niangua rivers (coming in from the left). Run your jet ski up the Niangua arm of the Lake and you’ll find the remains of Ha Ha Tonka’s trout lake at the base of the bluff where the ruins of the castle are.

Neither of us had ever been to Lover’s Leap (it is not easy to find and is on private land), but this seemed an opportune time to plan a road trip and seek it out – especially since we were headed to Jefferson City to participate in the total solar eclipse and Lake of the Ozarks is right on the way.

Next post will be extensive passages from J. W. Vincent’s Lover’s Leap Legend in Tales of the Ozarks. Vincent was the owner and editor of the Linn Creek Reveille newspaper from 1880 to 1933. Bagnell Dam was built during his tenure and his opposition to the dam is well documented in his paper. Before that controversy, he published a modest booklet of stories that included one account of how the precipice Marty Byrde stood on got its name.