Springfield’s Sequiota Park, once a Fish Hatchery

 Beautiful Ozarks, James Fork of the White, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Aug 012023
 

Domino Danzero photograph, circa 1922, of his family picnicking at Sequiota Park. In spite of changes in name, ownership, and utilization, the cave and spring at Sequiota Park still retain a natural ambience that visitors find picturesque.

In 2011 the Springfield-Greene County Park Board held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the completion of a $1.8 million “facelift to the much-needed natural water environment of Sequiota Park.” Considering the variety and intensity of utilizations of the place over the last century, that expenditure seems justified.

Fisher Cave, as the larger cave on the property was originally known, was bought in 1913 for $10,000 by H. E. Peterson, who renamed it Sequiota, which he claimed was an Indian word. The Frisco line ran a motor car service to what they called Se-qui-o-ta Park. Springfieldians flocked to picnic, fish in the small lake, and take boat rides in the cave whose water level was raised by a four-foot dam. More than a thousand feet can be viewed by boat. Cave explorers have mapped another 1,600 feet of passages.

The Missouri State Fish Commission bought the property in 1920 for $23,000 and used the strong spring that flowed from the cave to create a fish hatchery. Both smallmouth bass and rainbow trout were raised. When Table Rock Dam was completed and its discharges proved too cold for native fish, the Shepherd of the Hills Trout Hatchery was built below the dam. Sequiota’s hatchery equipment and manager went south in 1959 to the new facility at Branson. Springfield was deeded the property. It has continued to attract crowds, although boat tours of the main cave are limited and seasonal to protect hibernating endangered gray bats.

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

THE JAMES: TRANSFORMATION OF AN OZARK RIVER

 James Fork of the White  No Responses »
May 072023
 

Printed postcard, 1907. The genesis of the square-ended (and, as above, sometimes pointed), flat bottomed boats specifically for commercial floating on the James and White rivers is poorly documented. Many theories have been advanced as to how they were developed and how they came to be called “johnboats.”

We chose to profile the James River in a 352-page all color book because its watershed contains the largest town in the Ozarks, several impoundments, and the region’s most famous and oldest tourist destination: The Shepherd of the Hills Country now known as Branson.

Each phase of development has in varying degrees impacted the next. The resulting culture is a product of art, literature, technology, commerce, national trends, and politics, intersecting with each other and the region’s own natural resources. It’s a compelling and complicated tale. The messages are applicable to the entire Ozarks and even beyond. Perhaps the most intriguing transformation is the change from free-flowing river to reservoirs.

Today, suburban Springfieldians in canoes floating the James often take out at Galena where the river becomes a lake. In the pre-Table Rock Dam 1930s, outfitters like the Galena Boat Co. provided boats for 75¢ per day, tents 75¢, folding chairs 10¢, and guides $3.00, for a downstream adventure that attracted sportsmen and sportswomen from across the nation. Their brochure advertised: “The trip from Galena to Branson may be made in five days if but few stops are made, but it would be more enjoyable to allow a week if possible – floating leisurely along on clear, cool waters that rush through small necks, gush over rocky shoals, and simmer into large, gleaming, lazy pools. “

Table Rock Lake favored largemouth bass over smallmouth and motorboats replaced poled johnboats. Because of the new reservoir’s proximity to an established tourist attraction, and its deep, clear waters, it became the most visited of the Corps of Engineers White River projects. There is a forgotten history to this impoundment. Shortly after Empire District Electric closed Powersite Dam, they announced they would build a larger dam at Table Rock. Lake Taneycomo became such a tourist draw the business community rejoiced. When the federal government took over building high dams, supporters altered their advocacy of private hydro-power to match the Corps’ flood control justification. James Fork of the White chronicles such environmental changes and how our perceptions of, and interaction with nature adjust to these transformations. The story of this major Ozark stream is an ongoing saga, its ending unwritten.

 

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

JOHN MORRIS ON JIM OWEN

 James Fork of the White, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jan 102023
 

1950s mailing piece for Jim Owen’s famed float fishing enterprise

After the publication of James Fork of the White, we acquired this brochure with the photo of Jim Owen holding up a stringer of bass. It is not dated but it refers to Bull Shoals as “one of the best fishing lakes in the United States.” It also states that Owen can arrange five- or six-day trips on the James River. The four-panel promotion for his float services must have been produced between 1951 (Bull Shoals) and 1958 (Table Rock Dam, which ended long James River float trips). If we’d had it then, we would have noted his enthusiasm for the new reservoir was surprising, given his long opposition to Corps of Engineers projects that turned free flowing rivers into ponds. The cigar chomping float trip king went with the flow – or, in this case, lack of it. “As usual ole’ man Owen is ready to take care of your fishin’ on the new lake.”

Bass Pro founder John Morris recalled Jim Owen’s influence on the evolution of Ozarks outdoor recreation in a 2012 interview with Ed Fillmer, video journalist. “He was a very colorful character. Great promoter of the natural beauty and the Ozarks. The guides – sometimes they would have to paddle hard through eddies, but mainly drifting through the river, there’s not too many rapids. A little bit of hillbilly thrown in there.”

Fillmer commented, “All along, Owen was a conservationist, stressing to his guests, nature’s balance in the forests and rivers of the Ozarks. For example, Owen insisted they keep only enough fish to enjoy in that evening’s fish fry, returning the rest of the catch to the river.”

Morris: “In a way, that ties back in to helping to preserve what we have here, these resources, these rivers and streams and how important it is to take care of our rivers and water.” Modern fishing tournaments, which the Bass Pro CEO once competed in, are catch-and-release.

Bass Pro’s White River Fish House, a floating restaurant on Taneycomo in Branson, “is kind of a salute to Jim Owen,” said Morris. The restaurant displays an historic Owen Boat Line johnboat, with photos and memorabilia.

Like Morris, Owen had many irons in his Ozarks’ campfire. He somehow found time to be Mayor of Branson, bank president, breeder of foxhounds, car dealer, a movie theater operator, restaurateur, and, with Charlie Barnes, a manufacturer of johnboats.

Johnny Morris’s empire has exceeded Jim Owen’s portfolio a thousand-fold, but both entrepreneurs artfully adapted Ozarks traditions to the consumer taste of their era.

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

“So long, free flowing White River!”

 James Fork of the White  No Responses »
Sep 072022
 

Dewey Short and other VIPs say goodbye to the free-flowing White River

Photograph by Townsend Godsey.  Congressman Dewey Short and unidentified colleagues looking at the White River. On the back is written, “Table Rock dam site 9-14-4″

Dewey appears to be pointing out the location where the long-delayed dam would be built. Only a month earlier the President had signed the Flood Control Act of 1941, which included both Table Rock and Bull Shoals. Headline of the October 11, 1952, Kansas City Times announced: “Start A Big Dam Barbecue And Music At Launching of 76-Million-Dollar Reservoir.” Mayor Claude Binkley of Branson remarked he had ‘hurried to the Ozarks twenty-six years ago’ to be here for the construction start.”

Although a Republican dedicated to smaller government (mostly), like most politicians the lure of bringing big buckets of federal money to his district was strong. Congressman Short did get the appropriations for Table Rock Dam flowing again. Construction got underway in 1954, and the White River was backed up behind a $65 million, 252-foot-high dam three miles above Table Rock in 1958. Dedication ceremonies were held on June 14, 1959, when the powerhouse was completed.

Short had been a fiery opponent of FDR’s New Deal except when the federal handout was in his district. Dewey self-identified as a “hillbilly.” The term better fit his bank-robbing brother, Leonard, who perished while on the lam.

 

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, which examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River. 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.

 

Virgin Bluff Dam-That-Never-Was

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Aug 092018
 

Real photo postcard by George Hall circa 1915. Virgin Bluff was a landmark on the Galena to Branson float. While tame compared to the shoals of the upper reaches of some Ozark rivers, the rapids just before the big bluff were sporty for the James.

While working on our last book, James Fork of the White, we encountered mentions of Virgin Bluff and a crazy scheme to drill a hole through it to connect with the James River miles downstream to generate hydroelectric power. The wild scheme envisioned by William Henry Standish (a.k.a. General Standish) about 1908 was to build a dam to back up the James and drill a tunnel from the bluff, through the hills to come out 30+ miles downstream. The river’s water coursing through that tunnel (rather than along what would become miles of dried-up riverbed) would turn generators to produce electricity to power Springfield. Stories of Standish’s fundraising and project development made local newspapers. He sought and found local investors, started preliminary work and pushed bills through Congress (despite President Teddy Roosevelt’s veto of one) in pursuit of wealth and fame.

Hustle as he did, however, the project was not to be. A short notice in a June 19, 1913 Ste. Genevieve paper is the only mention we found of this bizarre undertaking’s collapse:

Ozark Dam Site Changed. Springfield. – The Virgin Bluff Project involving the erection of a dam across James river and the digging of a tunnel which would shorten the course of the river nearly 30 miles has been temporarily abandoned, pending the possible obtaining of legislative authority to construct a dam near Hollister.

Early talk of a big dam above Taneycomo—the project that became Table Rock a half century later–finished off the troubled and underfinanced Virgin Bluff tunnel dam.

A more detailed account is included in James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River.

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

POWERSITE DAM and Lake Taneycomo

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Apr 252018
 

Powersite Dam went into service in 1913 on the White River near Forsyth, Missouri, the first hydroelectric dam in Missouri. Designed in 1911 by Nils F. Ambursen as the largest concrete buttress dam of its kind, the dam is still privately owned by the Empire District Electric Company.

Powersite was hardly a visual embodiment of modernism like the later high dams out West. It more resembled a big milldam. Its forebay was little more than a pool in the White River. As it was a run-of-the river dam, Lake Taneycomo’s shoreline fluctuated very little.

The narrow, twenty mile-long lake it created became regarded as part of nature, indistinguishable from the free-flowing river it replaced. A March 12, 1913 article in the Springfield Republican, “Lake Taneycomo Is Name Bestowed By Branson Club,” compared the lake to the more famous Lake Como in the Alps. The new lake “nestled among the bluffs of the beautiful Ozarks” was part of the White River, “which no more picturesque stream can be found.” The Branson Club created the name from Taney County Missouri.

Until Table Rock’s discharge of frigid water turned it into a trout environment, Taneycomo was popular with swimmers and bass fishermen. Rockaway Beach flourished as a summer resort from the 1920s through the ’50s, until Table Rock drastically changed the lake’s water temperature.

Some local promoters got it in their heads that the price of electricity near the plants would be so low that factories would automatically spring up. A headline in the Springfield Republican (November 18, 1911) proclaimed “Cotton Mills Will Come To White River: Dam Proposition Is to Furnish Power for Big Industries From New England.” None of this happened. Electric rates were not less close to the dam. Cotton production did not swell.

Adapted from James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River

 

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

Henry Doherty, Powersite Dam and the Empire District Electric Company

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Jan 152018
 

Harnessing the power of moving water for profit and community betterment has been an impulse for many an entrepreneur. On the White River, the first dam to close the flow was #Powersite, a small, almost run-of-the-river, dam that held back enough water to ‘fatten up’ the river without drastically affecting the flow or habitat.

Financial overruns caused the initial backers to withdraw their support for building Powersite. Enter New York banker Henry #Doherty who was ‘collecting’ small power companies in southwest Missouri and consolidating them into what became Empire District Electric. He financed the construction of Powersite.

The dam closed in 1913 but White River waters remained warm allowing for fishing and swimming and water sports. The newly formed riverine lake was called #Taneycomo – some said it was a nod to beautiful Lake Como in northern Italy, but the accepted explanation is a mash up of Taney County Missouri. More than forty years later a much bigger dam, Table Rock, was built upstream bringing drastic changes to the #WhiteRiver, Lake Taneycomo and the James Fork of the White.

Like Bagnell Dam, Powersite Dam was started by men who soon encountered financial difficulties and sold out to bigger concerns. The St. Louis investors who organized the Ozark Power and Water Company engaged the Ambursen Hydraulic Construction Company of Boston to build it. Nils Ambursen, a Norwegian immigrant engineer, had designed a hollow cement slab and buttress structure used successfully elsewhere. Replacing the original backers was Wall Street accumulator of energy companies, Henry Latham Doherty. Doherty had already acquired a handful of small utility companies in southwest Missouri that were branded Empire District Electric Company. The White River operation kept its original name until being folded into the Empire group in 1927.

Cutline for this 1933 press photo reads “Col. And Mrs. Doherty watched happily a Christmas party which the Dohertys gave at Coral FLA.”

The next year Doherty organized the National Committee for Birthday Balls, which sponsored dances across the country to raise money for Franklin Roosevelt’s Warm Springs Foundation to treat victims of polio. The president had been paralyzed from the waist down himself with the disease since 1921.

Henry L. Doherty built his holding company Cities Service into a gigantic combination of all three sources of energy–gas, oil, and electricity. His charm and friendship with FDR kept him from many of the problems capitalists had during the New Deal.

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River…

Congressman Dewey Short and government officials survey Table Rock dam site

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 102017
 
 
Congressman Dewey Short and unidentified colleagues looking at potential White River dam site in 1941.
On the back of this Townsend Godsey photograph is written, “Table Rock Dam site 9-14-41”
 
Dewey appears to be pointing out the location where the long-delayed dam would be built. Only a month earlier President Franklin Roosevelt had signed the Flood Control Act of 1941, which authorized civil engineering projects such as dams, levees, dikes, and other flood control measures and which included both Table Rock and Bull Shoals dam projects. Headline of the October 11, 1952 Kansas City Times announced: “Start A Big Dam Barbecue And Music At Launching of 76-Million-Dollar Reservoir.” Mayor Claude Binkley of Branson remarked he had ‘hurried to the Ozarks twenty-six years ago’ to be here for the construction start.”
 

TABLE ROCK BLUFF 1940S BEFORE THE DAM

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Oct 102017
 

 Photo from Table Rock Bluff, 1940s.  Still no dam.

Soon after the completion of Powersite Dam (1913) creating Lake Taneycomo, Empire District Electric announced that they would build a larger dam more than twenty miles upstream at Table Rock. However, Table Rock Dam was not built at Table Rock, but about two miles farther upstream on the White River. It was not built by Empire District Electric, but by the Army Corps of Engineers, at a site Corps engineers thought would be better from an engineering standpoint.
The federal government ultimately took dam building away from private companies in the late 1930s. World War II and then Korea delayed construction of many projects. Again, local dam advocates became nervous that the feds would repeat the stalling tactics of Empire District Electric. Construction finally kicked off in the early 1950s.

HOLLISTER FLOOD – 1943

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Sep 162017
 
Hollister flood, 1943
 
The major Corps of Engineers dam-building era was a combination of dubious hydrologic theory propelled by the desire to create jobs during the Depression. Because our ancestors had foolishly developed the floodplains, there was much community support for flood control dams.
Springfield lawyer and land speculator William H. Johnson started building a Tudor-style complex by the train station in 1909 to accommodate tourists. As the faux half-timbered buildings were in the floodplain they were periodically immersed when Lake Taneycomo overflowed.
 
Table Rock Dam has kept the historic district, as it is now called, dry. Still some Hollister and Branson properties have suffered flooding, necessitating government buyouts. Believing the dam would afford complete protection, some people built even closer to the river, ignoring the Corps’ warning.
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