Tag Archive for Stone County

Branding the Ozarks, Small Towns

THE OLD MILL IS GONE, BUT HURLEY YET DISPLAYS RELICS OF OBSOLESCENCE

January 5, 2015 • 2 Comments

Had the son of the owner of the water mill at Hurley Missouri been more careful with his brush fire I could have photographed an earlier and more conventionally nostalgic relic of technology. The rambling three-story, crudely built, added-on, and deteriorating structure built in 1892 burned to ashes on April 3, 2005. Don Christenson had purchased the property in 1997 and embarked on an ambitious restoration when it was ignited by his boy’s careless cleanup effort. A newspaper article at the time said the heartbroken son was going to earn money to rebuild it for his dad. Obviously that didn’t happen. 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.

In the lot next to the overgrown watermill ruins is a neat small stone filling station with an old green car in front and a faded orange visible gas pump. A rusted iron-wheeled saw completes the exhibit of dated objects but not so ancient as the medieval technology of watermills. Other obsolete machines and implements are scattered about the grounds. The walnut buying operation is closed, but has a sign that indicates when it will reopen. A machine that holds the nuts deposits the shells into an old two-ton baby blue Ford truck with a yellow hood and faded red bed. Gathering food from the woods is even more ancient than the utilization of waterpower to grind grain.

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Across the road is a café, and behind it the Spring Creek Farm and Home business, which is in the early stages of ruination. Its milling machinery did not grind wheat for baking bread. It processed trucked-in grain for cattle feed. After the Missouri-Pacific Railroad came through Hurley in 1905, bringing flour that was grown and milled in Kansas with more efficiency than the small Stone County farms and watermill. The old watermill began primarily producing animal food. What outside competition doomed the Spring Creek Farm and Home enterprise, we haven’t learned.

Even if this recently deceased business has plastic, concrete block, and tin building materials instead of the more venerable stone and wood of classic ruins, time is lashing the remains. The untreated wounds of neglect are evident. But there are enough scarred and weathered wood components to wish for an 8 x 10 view camera and slow film.

At the back of the defunct agricultural service a muddy road plunges into a young forest. On the hills are steps, foundations and collapsed frame houses. There was a time in the Twenties and Thirties when the railroad brought some opportunities for these frugal subsistence farmers. Hurley then had twice its current population of 170. 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 Railroad, between Crane and Springfield and surrounded with very fertile productive land, and it claims, in proportion to size, 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. Of course such a town and community has a good school and religious services and the business firms listed below carry a complete stock of merchandise, machinery, lumber, feed, etc., to supply the surrounding country.

A recollection of Hurley 1920-1990 by Ray Gold on www.rootsweb.ancestry.com tells of this hardscrabble but not demoralizing Ozark existence:

No two people will remember the same things just alike, and there is good reasons for that. We were all real close to our families, because of poor roads, poor transportation, very few telephones, no electricity, no TV, no money, and many other reasons. We really didn’t miss any of this stuff, because we didn’t know anything about it. Everyone lived about the same way as their neighbor. We all had out houses and no running water in our homes. If we were lucky we had a cellar full of canned fruit and vegetables, an old cow for our milk, and a smoke-house full of hog meat and lard. That is a few of the reasons we never got very far from home. When we were real young, everything was strange to us if we were ten miles from home. So we just rememberd things that happened in our small world.

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There is a larger than average quantity of such recollections from this part of the Ozarks. Mary Scott Hair, aka “Samanthy,” wrote a paid column beginning in 1948 in the Crane Chronicle that recorded 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.

Such rural experiences related by Stone County old timers were not unique to the Ozarks. As Hurley was on the fringe of the Shepherd of the Hills country whose mythos idealized plain folk, these natives may have been incentivized and more confident writing down the minutia of their bucolic existence than small farmers in regions not celebrated in books and promoted by Arcadian tourism.

Branding the Ozarks, Tourism

A SUNRISE STROLL BY THE “Y” BRIDGE ALONG THE JAMES RIVER

December 3, 2014 • 0 Comments

Click to enlarge.

Fog obscures the James beneath the Y Bridge at Galena Missouri. There is a riffle under the bridge, but I do not hear it. Looking off the west end of the bridge I can make out a small house and several trailered flat-bottomed boats in the yard. Exiting the bridge I take a left. A few hundred yards down that road looms a huge rusty sign. Incredibly, most of the fragile white neon tubing still outlines the letters. It reads BILL ROGERS MOTEL CAFÉ FLOAT …

There’s no sign the motel is still renting rooms or serving fried eggs and bacon to floaters. A row of rooms is still behind the sign but they have been painted yellow. On a 1950s postcard they are coral. On the back of the chrome postcard is “BILL ROGERS MOTEL RESTAURANT FISHING SERVICE On James River write box 233, Galena, Missouri phone Elmwood 7-2641 air conditioned 15-unit Motel, electric heat, Large, air conditioned Restaurant, Fishing, Tackle and Supply Store. All these have been added to our long-established Float Fishing Service in the Float Capital of the World.”

This whole 1950s Bill Rogers operation looks like an improvident business decision. While Galena could once claim the title of “float capital of the world,” Dewey Short’s big lake was about to swallow up almost all the floatable James River. The 6,323 foot long, 252-foot high dam near Branson would back the White River up the James to within five miles of his “long-established Float Fishing Service” in 1958.

When the White River Division of the Iron Mountain and Southern Railway cut through Stone County before World War I, it opened the possibility of sportsmen detraining at Galena and engaging one of the services that provided a flat bottomed wooden john boat along with a colorful, yarn-spinning, gravel bar cook for an epic five-day float the 125 miles down the James, then the White, down to Branson. The train would haul the boats back and take the fishermen to Galena or wherever they called home.

Real photo postcard of James River circa 1915. Taken by George Hall. Camp Yocum was several miles upstream from Galena. The family settled in the region before 1800 and reputedly issued their own “Yocum Dollars” made by melting silver US and Spanish coins. These were used for trade with the Indians, principally the Delaware. No known examples have survived.

The improvement of roads and modern bridges like the Y made this celebrated ritual even easier. Sports writers immortalized the James and this float for decades. Movie stars, Catholic bishops, and affluent urbanites flooded to Galena to indulge in the ritual.

Congressman Dewey Short’s 4,100-acre chunk of flat water hasn’t completely stopped floating the James, but it cut it off at the knees. There’s almost nothing of the free flowing James below Galena, but there is still a decent one-day experience canoeing from Hootentown down to the Y Bridge takeout. In high water one can put in further up the cliff-lined, forested free flowing James.

The very unusual Y Bridge is readily detectable in this Google Earth satellite image. To the north is the new very sound, but less aesthetic bridge that crosses the James River on Missouri Route 76. After photographing the Y Bridge I wandered south from the west, Galena side of the old bridge.

Click on any image to start slide show of Galena’s river front. Truncated as it is by Table Rock Reservoir, the James is still an attractive, wild, and fishable but shorter float.

Branding the Ozarks, Tourism

ON THE “Y” BRIDGE IN THE FOG: A DIMLY SEEN ART MODERNE MASTERPIECE

December 1, 2014 • 0 Comments

I’m in a still photo, nothing moves. Sounds are as muted as the monochromatic fall colors. Is the sun up yet? The fog makes it hard to tell. Standing on the closed-to-vehicular-traffic bridge across the James River at Galena, Missouri I remember a vintage photograph we bought years ago.

Galena’s 1927 Art Deco bridge was the result of booster civic organizations’ agitation for improved roads to encourage tourism. It helped augment the railroad delivering vacationers to this region of the Ozarks already known as the Shepherd of the Hills. Harold Bell Wright’s romantic novel was set in Taney and Stone counties.

A crowd of some three thousand assembled here on the 23^rd of November 1927 for the grand opening of the new Y Bridge. Probably the unrecorded remarks made by the highway engineers and a Missouri Pacific Railroad superintendent stressed the technical accomplishment of the structure. When built it was the longest concrete arch bridge in the state. The concluding speaker was Dewey Jackson Short, who would run the next year for the U.S. Congress.

This was a golden opportunity to display his oratorical skills to a large group of voters. Unfortunately we have not been able to find the speech he gave to the throng of Ozarkers. Short’s command of English became nationally recognized during his subsequent twenty-two years in Congress. Not only did this self-styled hillbilly have degrees from several small American colleges, he studied at Harvard, Heidelberg University, and Oxford University, and he was a Methodist preacher.

If anyone knows if his remarks were preserved we’d love to hear from you.

The Springfield News Leader did report that Short understood the wonderful bridge would deliver tourists with money in their pockets to the formerly somewhat inaccessible region: “Short concluded his speech with a special plea for further development of the tourist industry in Stone County. He declared that the continuing possibilities of tourist dollars flowing from improved transportation made the local tourist industry stand beside the cow, the fruit, and the hen in local importance.”

Doubtlessly the arch conservative Republican who would later become renowned for his vitriolic opposition to Roosevelt and the New Deal’s expansion of the federal government didn’t dwell on the fact the financing of the bridge was a joint state and federal arrangement. As an apostle of old fashioned self-reliance, Short was in theory opposed to federal handouts in any form. People, he lamented, “seemed to be suffering with the gim-mes. It is gim-me this, and gim-me that.” Throughout his career, however, Dewey seemed OK with barrels of dollars rolling in from Washington to his southwest Missouri district. Later many millions of federal funds went into a much larger chunk of government-poured concrete called Table Rock Dam. Recognizing the Congressman’s seminal role in authorizing and funding this huge water resource project they named their architect designed visitor center after the Honorable Dewey Short.

A 1920s real photo postcard taken from a hill across the James from Galena. Not only is the bridge notable for its fork on the east side, it’s a splendid example of Art Moderne design.

Probably no speaker at the dedication commented on the Art Deco design of the Y Bridge. Art Moderne, as this neo-classical variety of Deco is called, became the preferred form for all manner of buildings throughout the country that were subsidized by the Roosevelt administration. The Y Bridge that helped to open up the Ozarks to tourists is a rare 1920s example of what became called Depression or WPA Modern. Thousands of post offices, schools, courthouses and other bridges were constructed in this style. Few are in such good shape or have been preserved unchanged like Galena’s Y Bridge.

A construction company in nearby Republic originally got the contract to build the bridge. They planned to use creek gravel in the concrete, which didn’t meet specifications. The Koss Construction Co. of Des Moines, Iowa said they would employ local labor as much as possible, but would use the required crushed limestone. Possibly they did in the load-bearing part, but the rails look suspiciously like they used the native orange-brown chert that can be seen on the gravel bar below.

Click here to read the National Register of Historic Places registration form for the Galena Y-Bridge. It’s a model of well-researched local history and goes into great detail about the role of the bridge in early tourism. Needless to say, the Y Bridge was enthusiastically included in the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

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