Harold Bell Wright’s erstwhile melodrama jump-starts Ozark tourism

 See The Ozarks  No Responses »
Apr 082020
 

Real photo postcard circa 1910 by G. E. Hall. Captioned on front, “At the Deer Lick, 33 Hall Photo Co.” Deer Lick is a location in the novel, The Shepherd of the Hills.

Printed on back of this very early Hall postcard is “The Shepherd of the Hills series,” Made by G. E. Hall, Notch, Mo.” At that time the entire region from Galena to Branson and surrounding hills and river bottoms of Taney and Stone counties was known as the Shepherd of the Hills Country.

In his just-published Volume 2, A History of the Ozarks, The Conflicted Ozarks, Brooks Blevins gives credit to Harold Bell Wright’s 1907 novel, The Shepherd of the Hills, for fixing an image of the Ozarks as a homeland of dramatically primitive but appealing Americans. Blevins attended a performance of the Shepherd of the Hills outdoor theater near Branson in 2013: “It wasn’t Chekov; no one goes to the ‘Shepherd of the Hills’ thinking it’s going to be. But it was entertaining—and melodramatic, syrupy, platitudinous, and predictable, just like the beloved novel on which it as based.” Blevins goes on to point out some real history about the truly dramatic night-riding Baldknobbers is worked into the sentimental storyline.

Locals began representing themselves as the real characters in Wright’s book. Photographic images of them at the landmarks where the novel took place helped perpetuate the idea the region was populated with somewhat backward but appealing characters, whose lives were uncommonly dramatic.

Lens & Pen books are available for purchase on this website on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble. See sample pages from our new book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, on our website: hypercommon.com

 

POWERSITE DAM and Lake Taneycomo

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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

 

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Delights of Road Trip Research

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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