Printed postcard, 1930s
The copy on the card reads, “The Pinebrook Inn, 50 Rooms Private Baths. Siloam Springs, Missouri.“ We may have come down too hard on John Woodruff, Springfield’s fabled developer. He relentlessly promoted Springfield, was instrumental in the creation of Route 66, and was honorable and honest in his business dealings. But he was wrong in his negative literary judgment of Vance Randolph and other Ozarks local-color-school writers. He clashed with Randolph, who he thought promoted a backward or hillbilly image of the Ozarks. In our book James Fork of the White, we’ve got a panoramic photo of the Pinebrook Inn from the 1930s and a contemporary photograph of the site in ruins. It burnt to the ground a few years ago. Our write up (page 144) encapsulates his resort aspirations:
“For all his antipathy for Ozarks rusticity, John T. Woodruff had a taste for country life. In 1922, he bought an unfinished health resort at Siloam Springs, Missouri, near the North Fork River, seventeen miles from West Plains. Woodruff finished the impressive four-story Pinebrook Inn, built a nine-hole golf course, constructed a dance pavilion and dug a swimming pool. Excavations to attempt to increase the flow of the place’s ten medicinal springs apparently had the reverse effect. Few believed by this date that drinking mineralized spring water cured diseases anyhow. Nevertheless, the progressive businessman advertised that “Siloam Springs water is recommended by physicians and praised by thousands of people who have been benefited or cured by using it.” He would spend the rest of his life waiting for guests to find the money pit in the middle of an isolated patch of cut-over mixed pine and oak forest. “
Ruins of Pinebrook Inn in 2016
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