THE LOST SPRING CREEK MILL AT HURLEY

 James Fork of the White, Lens & Pen Press  No Responses »
Aug 192023
 

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

Congressman Dewey Short – Hillbilly and Orator and proud of it

 James Fork of the White, Lens & Pen Press, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 092022
 

Press photo, May 9, 1938, showing Congressman Short, Rep. Dudley White and their wives at a DC barn dance.

Dewey Short was “an avowed Hill-Billy.” Neither he nor renowned folklorist Vance Randolph ever disavowed the term. Unlike the transplanted Kansas folklorist, the educated congressman was an Ozark native. Like politicians from Andrew Jackson on, he exploited his backwoods credentials. The cutline of this press photo, “Chicken and Fixin’s YUM YUM,” notes they were dressed in “approved rustic styles” at a D.C. barn dance. Galena’s famous son alternately postured as an Oxford schooled philosophy professor and a Stone County hillbilly. And he was both.

Born in Galena to a family of 10 children, he served in the infantry in World War I, then graduating from Baker University in 1919 and from Boston University in 1922. Short also attended Harvard University, Heidelberg University, the University of Berlin, and Oxford University. Dewey rose to national prominence as the Representative of Missouri’s 7th congressional district.

In 1942, the St.  Louis Star and Times sent a reporter down to Galena to find out, “Just who is Dewey Short, this 44-year-old, one-man hillbilly band from the Ozarks, who has been elected for four straight terms in Congress from the Seventh District in Southwest Missouri?”  Encountering Jackson Short, Dewey’s father, the reporter “came to the right place.”  Writer Ralph S. O’Leary noted that “the oratorical gifts” for which Dewey Short was noted came from his father, “who talks fluently and decisively.” Dewey’s own speechmaking talents earned him the moniker, “Orator of the Ozarks.”

 

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

DANCING AT PICNIC IN THE OZARKS, 1910s

 Beautiful Ozarks, James Fork of the White, See The Ozarks, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 202022
 

Real photo postcard by George Hall

Unlike the posed hillbilly family real photo postcard we shared in June this is a straightforward document of the surviving folk culture on the upper White River, circa 1910.  Hillbilliness is based on these anachronisms.

Locals at this hoe-down appear to be wearing store bought clothes. Once the railroad made its way to southwest Missouri, Stone Countians had access to prêt-à-porter clothing just like the tourists.

Music and the moves it inspires have always been part of life in the Ozarks. Some of the Arcadian resorts built dance floors and natives joined in with visitors. Distinctions between locals and visitors were not always clear when melodies filled the air and boots and shoes started tapping. That tradition continues today in music festivals in the hills as well as regular weekly gatherings like Friday night parties at the old McClurg general store. The decades old weekly gathering was recently well represented at the Smithsonian Folklife Fest, on the Mall in Washington.

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

Gentry Cave in Stone County

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jun 052019
 

Real photo postcard by Galena photographer, D. F. Fox.

Gentry Cave, a remote cave—on private land and hard to get to—three miles south of Galena in Stone County, was described by Louella Agnes Owen in Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills (1898). Hiking through the woods after the mail coach’s wheel broke, the intrepid lady cave explorer found the “broken” landscape captivating:

“The topography was . . . very beautiful with the dense forest lighted by the slanting yellow rays of the afternoon sun. The way leads up to the “ridge road” which is at length abandoned for no road at all and descending through the forest, more than half the distance down to the James River flowing at the base of the hill, we come suddenly in view of the cave entrance, which is probably one of the most magnificent pieces of natural architecture ever seen.”

From James Fork of the White: “She found the cave interior worth the walk but does not mention the abundance of bat guano that would later provide the basis for an unusual industry. During the lean Depression years, one C. L. Weekly and two hires shoveled tons of dried bat manure into hundred-pound bags and shipped it off to be used for greenhouse fertilizer. He got $35 a ton. “

The commercial exploitation of bat guano was also the first impetus for the development of Marvel Cave, which became the centerpiece of a much later tourist attraction in Stone County—Silver Dollar City.

In Caves of Missouri (1956), J Harlan Bretz discusses Gentry Cave’s geology: “A rock shelter at Camp Ramona, 85 feet below cliff top and 50 feet above James River contains four of the five entrances to this joint-controlled cave system. Words are useless in describing the detailed interaction of passages; the cave pattern is too complicated. … One place in the cave showed cherty gravel, but there is no other evidence for vadose occupation of this splendid phreatic cave system. No red clay remnants and very little dripstone were seen anywhere in the cave.”

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THE SPRING AT REEDS SPRING. Real Photo Postcard, 1940s

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Apr 112018
 

The Stone County Booklet of 1927 describes the small but then-bustling commercial burg of Reeds Spring:  “Lying in a nook among the beautiful hills and around a mammoth spring of clear, cold water, where only a few years ago the cattle were want to loiter, lies one of the best trading points in Stone County.”

With its railroad connections, Reeds Spring was also a center point of the tomato canning industry, which provided employment and much needed cash to that rural economy, with twenty-two canning factories within twelve miles. Highways put Reeds Spring on the route to the Shepherd of the Hills Country and Branson. Signs decorate the spring’s shelter, promoting major tourist caves of the region – Spanish Cave, Fairy Cave (today called Talking Rocks Cavern) and Marvel Cave – are promoted . . .  and don’t miss Mother’s Cafe.  Businesses serving tourists – like souvenir and novelty shops – flourished.

Today the town has been bypassed by major highways, but has attracted artists and creative types. The spring is still a focal point of interest, its sheltering roof and shed now painted a warm brick red.

James Fork of the White is available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

Delights of Road Trip Research

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Aug 022017
 

As the release date of James Fork of the White approaches, I’ll be posting some samples of what you will find in the book. All research is not done in libraries or other books.  To write a book on a river, you have to learn the river, its people and places. Over the last several years, we have explored the watershed of the James, its tributaries – large and small, the byways, backroads and the small and large towns of its landscape.

We met people and pets, sportsmen with their catches and families recreating on the banks of creeks, playing at Table Rock, or floating the river. We found remnants of past mercantile enterprises. We ate chicken at Crane’s Broiler Fest, joined the crowds at River Jam and sought out the source of the river in Webster County.

Greene, Christian, Barry, Stone, Webster, and Taney counties. Creeks and larger streams. Dams that slow or halt the flow; a dam that wasn’t built. Drainage systems and sewage treatment. We visited them all…

Railroads, highways, dam projects, tourism, the growth of towns, agriculture, industry, media and art, political will, and cultural values—all interact. The river we see today is an outcome of all these forces. Even though transformed, and still changing, the watershed of the James Fork of the White is still in many places scenic and beautiful, and where it lacks aesthetics, it is interesting.

James Fork of the White, introduction

Hogs and Hillbillies

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Jun 272017
 

Real photo postcard by Hall. Probably taken in Stone County, Missouri, but Arkansas sounded more primitive. The hog’s board collar is to keep it out of fenced gardens. Cattle and hogs were released in the woods to feed themselves. The destructive rooting of feral pigs was, and still is, an environmental problem.

Though the hillbilly icon didn’t emerge for several decades, the Ozarks has been depicted as a primitive place inhabited by people living a pioneer lifestyle since the early 1800s. This mythos was rejected by progressive Springfieldians, but in Galena, and the White River Hills, it was a component of tourism.

Arkansas was held to be slightly more regressive than southern Missouri but only slightly so.

(Page 72 in the forthcoming book, James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River.)