Early View of White River Dam, aka Powersite Dam

 James Fork of the White  No Responses »
Jan 132020
 

White River Dam, real photo postcard, Hall Photo Co., circa 1916

The first hydroelectric dam in the Ozarks was simply called the “White River Dam.” Soon after, the name was changed to Powersite Dam. A March 12, 1913 article in the Springfield Republican reported the Branson Club, a local business organization decided the name “Taneycomo” (derived from its location in Taney County Missouri) would attract tourists. They even compared the twenty-mile lake created by the run-of-the-river dam to Lake Como in the Swiss Alps.

Dam building on the White River was started in 1911 by St. Louis investors organized as the Ozark Power and Water Company. Henry L. Doherty and his gigantic Cities Service combine acquired it when the backers encountered financial difficulties. His utilities in southwest Missouri were branded Empire District Electric.

George Hall was an innovative photographer. A vertical, rather than horizontal, image with a small figure in the right-hand corner is a remarkable composition. His portrait of early tourism in the Branson/Galena area, aka Shepherd of the Hills Country, is unequaled. Over a couple of decades, he photographed politicians and local folks, important events and daily life, characters of legend and local fame—tourist sites and daily life. He printed postcards from his photographs and sold them locally. Real photo postcards are printed on sensitized photo postcard paper from the original negative of a large, roll film camera, creating a super sharp image.

 

Lens & Pen books are available on this website on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble. Our most recent book is James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River.

See sample pages from our  forthcoming book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, on our website: hypercommon.com Available in February.

What lies beneath…

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Aug 292018
 

1940s Corps of Engineers booklet: “Table Rock Reservoir Area, White River Missouri and Arkansas, and how the U.S. buys it.”

Two boys cast fishing lines from their perch on the rocky slope of the “bath tub ring” caused by fluctuating water levels of artificial impoundments. They wait for a nibble watching the flat water of Table Rock Reservoir, perhaps wondering where the fish are hiding and what lies beneath the stilled waters of the lake that covers the once mighty White River.

Folks living in the White River and James River valleys had had fifty years to come to terms with the inevitability of losing working farms, grist mills, tiny towns and sylvan groves to rising waters when the dam closed. Still, this booklet by the Corps of Engineers seems particularly insensitive to the losses rural people faced as they gave up their land and lifestyles to the massive project. They do acknowledge that “the long-established procedures (for buying land in the project area) are not well understood by many in the reservoir area where land must be obtained in order to obtain storage to impound and control flood waters . . . ”

Tom Koob’s book, Buried by Table Rock, paints a picture of the life once lived in the valleys of the White and James rivers.

James Fork of the White and other Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

“Staff” of Jim Owen’s Float Service

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Jul 112018
 

Owen and his band of guides, raconteurs and artist Steve Miller hang out in front of Owen’s Hillbilly Theater in downtown Branson.

Owen’s roster included many who had pioneered floating the James and White back in the days when city folks detrained at Galena. Few guides worked full time. Some continued to offer their services to Galena operators. The Branson businessman’s aggressive advertising reeled in the most clients and in the twenty-six years he packaged trips he would use almost every river man at one time or another. Jim Owen became an institution, but some of his guides had reputations for their fishing acumen, campfire cooking skills, or country wit. A jokester himself, Owen encouraged colorful rustic behavior that fulfilled visitors’ expectations of being escorted downstream by a tractable variety of hillbilly.

James Fork of the White (p. 235)

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

BURIED BY TABLE ROCK – fascinating reveal of life before the lake

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Jul 022018
 

Most often reviews of books are done when the book is first published. So this review of Buried by Table Rock: Tales, anecdotes and facts about everything covered by the lake is late in coming, although Koob has recently published a revised edition. However, we discovered this small volume as we researched James Fork of the White, and it has been more than useful. It is a modestly published book, but an invaluable resource.

Tom Koob dug into newspapers, government records and—most importantly—he talked with the people, drove the roads, climbed the remaining hills, found the remnants of summer camps along the river. He gathered rare images to illustrate both past and present reality. He scanned the flat waters covering a once-peopled landscape and searched out the families and towns that once occupied it. River guides, mill families, and farmers recalled life with a river that gave them recreation, transportation, danger and sustenance. Nostalgic memories are tinged with regret at the loss of their river.

He identifies the visible remnants of places he describes in the text:

“Two small islands can be seen to the north from the Long Creek Bridge. The larger island is the top of Goat Hill, the site of the small town of Oasis. The smaller island, where a handful of trees cling tenaciously, is the peak of the slope that rose behind the town.”

Our own environments have become more homogeneous. We have Homeowners Association suburbs with architectural and landscaping covenants; uniformity of fashion in national chain department store shopping centers; even local government policies aspiring to emulate those of major urban centers—sameness creeps over daily life and we hardly notice. But the lives and landscape Koob describes are regionally specific and adapted to Ozarks geography. As he said so clearly:

I have come to realize though, that the real story is something else. It is the story of a rugged land and rugged people. It is a tale of a somewhat isolated culture thrust into a modern world not necessarily of its own choosing.

The final pages have photos of the rising waters covering landmarks in the White River basin—Stallions Bluff, the Bridge at Mash Hollow at Cape Fair, and the James River Bridge at Cape Fair.

Those who read Tom Koob’s book will never look at Table Rock Reservoir the same way again.

You can find Tom Koob on Facebook  His newest book is a historical novel, Virgin Bluff. He has just published a revised edition of Buried by Table Rock. His books (The History of Fishing Table Rock; Buried by Table Rock; and Enon to Radium Springs) are available on Amazon Kindle

Why would a town up and move?

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Jun 022018
 

A good question. One asked and answered in a recent article by The Buffalo Reflex – because of dams built on the rivers that created lakes that swallowed the townsite. It’s as simple and complex and painful to those forced to move as that.

View of Bagnell Dam under construction

This first installment tells the story of Linn Creek on the Osage River, which we covered extensively in Damming the Osage.

The next installment will cover the move of Forsyth from the mouth of Swan Creek on the White River to a high bluff above what became the upper reaches of Bull Shoals Reservoir.

On our Damming the Osage blog, we posted a number of entries on Linn Creek.  Here are just a few:

Steamboat’s A-comin’! The Ruth at Linn Creek

Old Linn Creek 1909 – before Bagnell Dam

Old Linn Creek – flooded by the Osage

Steamboat landing in Linn Creek, 1911

Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir is available on this website, amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

 

 

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

 

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

Joseph Philibert Cemetery, final resting place for Granny Gore, “Cherokee Doctor”

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Jan 212018
 

If you turn west from Highway 13 on Joe Bald Road, you’ll pass the entrance to Joseph Philibert Cemetery. Named for the first white settler in Stone County, this hilltop cemetery is where the graves of twenty small graveyards in the Table Rock Lake basin were relocated.

Among the markers are those for William Carol “Tipton” Gore and his second wife, Nancy “Granny” Gore, “Cherokee Doctor.” Nancy Gore was born in Tennessee about 1820, married William Gore and they moved to Arkansas, then to Stone County about 1848. They settled near the confluence of the James and White rivers. Their neighbors were the Joseph Philibert (1812-1884) and William Gillis families who had a trading post where they bought furs from the Indians. The Philibert family graveyard was near the site of the trading post. Twenty-two graves were in the old cemetery when Table Rock Lake began to fill. Among those were the Gores.

Headstones were modest, and many burials were only marked with rocks to indicate a grave. A new marker was made for Granny Gore, a Cherokee medicine woman and wife of pioneer William Tipton Gore. Small family cemeteries in the basin of Table Rock Reservoir were moved to higher ground before the lake filled. Headstones and remains of twenty graveyards, such as they were, were dug up and relocated in the new Joseph Philibert Cemetery just north of Kimberling City.
                                                                  James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River

Granny Gore’s Ozark Folk Medicine by Sherman Lee Pompey:

And finally in the words of Granny herself, “You see, the good Lord made herbs an’ roots for the purpose of medicines. A lot of medicines that we used in the early hills was nothing more than the same thing or the artificial substitute of these things used today by modern medical science.”

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…

“An Indispensable Book” – Steve Wiegenstein on James Fork of the White

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Dec 052017
 

For an author, it’s deeply gratifying when a reader really understands what you’re doing and why. Steve Wiegenstein’s review of JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozarks River is that kind of review. Steve understands the subject and our own non-linear style of treating our topics.  Most importantly, he understand the Ozarks, the land, the streams, the people. Steve is the author of a series of historical novels set in a mid-nineteenth century Utopian community named Daybreak in a valley of the St. Francis River in Madison County.  The third in this series, just-published The Language of Trees, has earned high praise.

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

Styron review of JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE

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Nov 202017
 

We were pleased to see Harry Styron’s write up of our new book, James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, on his blog, Ozarks Law and Economy.  We spent five years exploring our own James River, once the preeminent float stream of the Ozarks. Harry understood the depth of the research we put into this book:

“Combining these graphics with a penetrating verbal narrative, the Paytons have given us what we all want and need to know about the White River’s largest Missouri tributary.”

Thank you, Harry Styron!

 

Available now at Barnes & Noble in Springfield, on amazon.com, and from our website, postage paid.

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