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.
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