lensandpen

IS BRANSON THE HILLBILLY VEGAS? MAYBE. MAYBE NOT.

by lensandpen • October 8, 2014

Booklet from the Baldknobbers, a family act that remodeled a skating rink near Lake Taneycomo to perform country music and comedy for tourists. (click to enlarge)

Branson, Missouri has been called the “hillbilly Las Vegas.” For the purpose of illustrating our hillbilly book (in progress) – would that it were. If artifacts are mute and architectural remnants scarce what can we learn from Branson’s tourism business? Learning from Las Vegas is easier than learning from Branson. The entertainment and attractions here must read an audience that really doesn’t know its own mind. It could be called the capital of the Hypercommon. They react negatively to certain taboos, but they have not codified their preferences. Intellectuals attribute an ideological selectivity to the populace that, truth be told, they do not possess. Neither Branson’s entertainments, nor its audience, fulfill the contemporary, rougher definition of hillbilly. Since its early days as a tourist destination it sold a kinder, gentler rustic. Harold Bell Wright’s novel, Shepherd of the Hills, was Christian and bucolic. His night-riding mountaineer lowlifes were the villains. In this 1906 book, seminal to Branson tourism, he used the word “hill-billy” only once, and then nonspecifically.

Local shows – the Presleys and the Baldknobbers – used hillbilly in their 1960s advertising, as it was still an acceptable word for country music. Following Nashville’s lead, the Branson acts have all but abandoned the term although their string band stylings and comedy licks are still pretty hillbilly.

A 1993 advertisement for the Baldknobbers. It’s hillbilly comedy, but they don’t use the word (click to enlarge)

Such diffidence could apply to the whole history of sensitivities to disparaging caricatures of the American rural primitive. Branson’s attractions are said to be predominantly “country,” which in the distant past would have universally been called “hillbilly.” Then, as now, the word, its definition and significance, has been subject to inconsistencies and frequent revisions. As “hillbilly” and “redneck” have become smooshed together in popular jargon, the Branson Chamber of Commerce isn’t encouraging the employment of the word.

Rural white people are often considered unenlightened conservatives. “Traditional” might be a better adjective. Branson must bear the criticism of sophisticates no matter what it considers itself. “Hillbilly” will be resurrected and used by slumming urbanites to describe the mixed pop, mid-cult vacation magnet with a taste for rural nostalgia. Some things hillbilly have always had a nostalgic, even sentimental, flavor. Other rustic memories are less savory. Intertwined sweet and sour recollections of backcountry life have contributed to the longevity of this persona. Such ambiguities give him a pulse long after simpler, less contradictory pop culture creatures have flatlined and been buried and forgotten. The current notoriety of the appellation may have repressed its usage in promotion, but the heritage of hillbilly/hillfolk hides in the shadows of Branson’s glitzy show facades and new modernist corporate structures.

The twelve-story Hilton Branson Convention Center Hotel separates the spanking new Branson Landing Shopping Mall from the old downtown. Combining the past with the present is a time-honored craft in Branson.

Branson has always preferred its rustics to be folksy. Tim Smith won a 1990 contest to sculpt something that embodied Ozark heritage. The stone piece was originally located along Lake Taneycomo but was moved downtown when Branson Landing was constructed.

Hillbilly pawnshop, Hollister, Missouri just across little ol’ Turkey Creek from little ol’ Branson.

THE BASKET KING: A ROADSIDE SOUVENIR ENTERPRISE FROM THE PAST

by lensandpen • October 6, 2014

The Basket’s King’s long emporium is on the south side of highway 54, about 10 miles west of Camdenton, Missouri. This is a road traveled by many Lake of the Ozarks tourists. (click to enlarge)

Delmar D. Davis has been purveying souvenirs to Lake of the Ozarks tourists since 1947. His long, crowded gift shop features white oak baskets made locally. This is a dying craft according to Davis as labor costs make them non-competitive with imports. His store is filled with graniteware, cookbooks, wooden decoupage plaques of wolves and eagles, Frankoma pottery, and out-of-date hillbilly calendars. This combination of authentic folk baskets and tasteless novelties may seem incongruous, but we’ve encountered it before in our survey of American rusticity.

Although Davis’s current stock of locally made hickory baskets is extensive, he told us there were few makers left these days. His crafters can make more money at a job. His prices are reasonable, and don’t include a folk-craft premium though they are authentic old time type Ozark type baskets.

It is a bit disconcerting to find jokey hillbilly, made in Taiwan, novelties just across the aisle from classic pioneer crafts, and we have a high tolerance for such incongruities. It’s a central tenet of our HYPERCOMMON theory that as America’s popular culture evolved without the constraints of high culture it gleefully mixes kitsch and things with esthetic merit indiscriminately.

We bought this attractive small hickory basket for less than $20. (click to enlarge)

Originally souvenirs were artifacts made by exotic peoples brought back by explorers. In the early days of tourism most souvenirs were items made to sell, but had some resemblance to local craft traditions. Global trade opened the door to the importation of low cost trinkets made in developing countries. Purveyors of locally made souvenirs, like the Basket King, are rare these days. Art and demonstration crafts are still produced here and there in vacationland but they carry a prohibitive price for the souvenir trade, and do not always have a heritage tie-in.

Delmar D. Davis, a sailor in World War II and pioneer souvenir seller in the Lake of the Ozarks area, is an engaging personality. Notice to documentary filmmakers – the Basket King would make a great subject.

Davis’s billboards are distinctive. If you don’t catch all the writing as you speed down the highway, don’t worry. Another one will soon come in view

Of course, Davis Baskets has a “your face here” cutout painted plywood hillbilly. In fact, there are several. Lake of the Ozarks never promoted its indigenous population as much as Branson. But hillbillies weren’t completely unknown as a theme either, especially in the 1950s.

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DICTATORS AND DAMS: Mobutu Dams the Congo River

by lensandpen • October 3, 2014

Central governments naturally wish to publicize their major public works achievements. This is doubly so if they are repressive and have a reputation for corruption. Such untrusted regimes inevitably have unstable currency. All this, along with the normal cult of personality dictators cultivate, means that the image of dams often appears on their country’s untrustworthy money along with a portrait of the strongman.

Wouldn’t the pharaohs picture a pyramid and Ramses the Whatever on their bills if they had issued paper money?

Mobutu Sese Seko (whose much longer full name means ‘The warrior who knows no defeat because of his endurance and inflexible will and is all powerful, leaving fire in his wake as he goes from conquest to conquest.’) with the help of the United States and Belgium overthrew Patrice Lumumba, elected ruler of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960. Mobutu shot Lumumba. In 1971, he renamed the Congo Zaire and shortened his name to Mobuto Sese Seko. Before he fled in 1997 to escape a rebellion that three other African countries supported, he amassed a personal fortune some estimate at fifteen billion dollars US.

When Mobutu fled he probably didn’t take much of his own currency with him. While Zaire money didn’t set world records for hyper-inflation, it did reach 24,000 percent in 1994, before dropping to a few hundred percent. One factor that curbed inflation was the firm that printed this money would no longer extend credit to Mobutu’s government.

One of the big construction projects Mobutu looted was the damming of the Congo River at the world’s largest by volume waterfall, Inga Falls. Inga Falls is an excellent location for dams, but the project lacked economic justification.Two enormously costly hydroelectric dams, Inga 1 (1972) and Inga 2 (1982), were built but have been plagued by shoddy construction, breakdowns, silted reservoirs and a lack of paying customers for their electricity. The thousands of natives displaced by the huge reservoirs have yet to receive their promised compensation. Inga 1 and 2 have still not recouped their costs, are producing 20% of their expected output, and are a continuing drain on the Congo’s economy.

In spite of these difficulties an even larger hydropower plant is moving forward. The Grand Inga Dam if built would produce twice as much electricity as China’s Three Gorges Dam. Apart from the environmental issues, it carries a cost estimate of eighty billion dollars, which is quite disproportionate for a public works project in a very poor country.

Exactly what Mobutu’s personal rake-off of the Inga dam projects is unknown. Such projects have huge budgets and present a massive opportunity for bribery and corruption. Sadly it isn’t only dictators that accept payoffs for water resource projects. Politicians and bureaucrats of democracies are tempted as well.
When researching Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, we found evidence of misdeeds by both the instigator and the builder of Bagnell Dam. Walter Cravens, the banker who started the project, and Louis Egan, president of Union Electric, who actually built the dam, both ended up in federal penitentiaries for financial crimes.

Leland & Crystal Payton ISBN: 978-0-9673925-8-5 304 pages 7.5×10 435 illustrations For more information on Damming the Osage, click here.

LABOR IN VAIN: A Curious 1901 Anti-Dam Children Story

by lensandpen • October 1, 2014

What an unusual fable of the folly of blocking rivers is this little story published in an English periodical called The Prize in August 1901. Its lithographed color cover, printed in Holland, shows Georgie Mays and his sisters, Flossy and Maggie, attempting to improve a brook by shoveling rocks and dirt into it so as to create a lake to better sail their toy boats on. Unfortunately their early education has not included courses in engineering and their dam won’t hold. When kindly Aunt Edith comes over to check on the urchins, Georgie looks up and sighs:

‘Oh, dear, Aunt Edith, I wish the water would stop running for a little while. We want a wall strong enough, and high enough, to keep our boats from drifting away.’

Aunt Edith evidences an early environmental sensibility and informs the young would-be water resource developers:

‘Ah, Georgie,’ was the reply, ‘this water started a long, long way off to come to the sea, and it means to reach it, it will not be stopped, dear; your wall is useless.’

This appeal to the poetry and justice of unfettered nature awakens the lad’s organic conscience.

‘Just for a moment Georgie looked vexed, then he laughed, and said brightly, ‘Yes, of course, it has come from far off—miles and miles, and I will not try any longer to hinder it from getting to the sea, where it is meant to go. It is a brave little stream to keep on running, not letting anything stop it, is it not?’

‘Yes, it is,’ agreed the juvenile would-be dam builders. Their wise and eco-informed Aunt closes with a metaphorical platitude comparing free-flowing rivers to moral obligations.

‘I hope, little folk, you will take a lesson from it, and let nothing stop you from going on in the right way, and doing the things which you ought to do.’

It is a “brave little stream” indeed. This admonition to let the waters flow to the sea would seem to go against the spirit of technological progress of the late Victorian era. Of course at the same time there were conflicted figures like Teddy Roosevelt who simultaneously did much to preserve wilderness while building the Panama Canal. We suspect there is far more children’s fiction of this era, especially written for boys, that involves stalwart lads heroically wresting control of nature for the benefits to humanity and rewards to themselves.

LABOUR IN VAIN.

GEORGIE Mays, with his sisters, Flossie and Maggie, were spending a week with their aunt at Farcombe Bay. One of their favourite places for play there was near the sand-banks, close to the little boat-house, and not far from the foot of Potter’s Hill, down which a stream ran into the river on its way to the sea.

The children loved to watch this stream hurrying along, over mounds and stones, and down the steps, under the little wooden bridge, and they wished to sail their boats upon it, but they had been warned that, if they did so, the boats would most likely be carried out to sea; for the river made no pause, but ran along at a steady pace.

Well, after thinking over the matter, a new idea came to Georgie, and he said to his sisters,

‘I know what we must do; before we try to sail our boats here, we must make a dam—a strong wall, you know, to reach across the stream, then they cannot get away.’

‘I see what you mean, Georgie,’ answered Flossie, ‘and we had better make the wall just here,’ and she pointed where the stream was narrow and shallow.

So a few minutes later the three children had their shoes and stockings off, and tucked up their other garments, so as to have their legs quite free, and then they set to work to make a wall; but although they worked hard for quite half an hour, they did not bring the task near its end, for, as I have said, the water made no pause, and as it ran past them, it broke down their barrier almost as quickly as they built it up, and at last Maggie got vexed and she left off working, and went and sat down, then Flossie left off, too, and stood still in the water, and Georgie kept on working, and as they were watching him their auntie came upon the scene.

She guessed at once what Georgie was trying to do, and she smiled when he looked up and said with a sigh—

‘Oh, dear, Aunt Edith, I wish the water would stop running for a little while. We want a wall strong enough, and high enough, to keep our boats from drifting away.’

‘Ah, Georgie,’ was the reply, ‘this water started a long, long way off to come to the sea, and it means to reach it, it will not be stopped, dear; your wall is useless.’

Just for a moment Georgie looked vexed, then he laughed, and said brightly, ‘Yes, of course, it has come from far off—miles and miles, and I will not try any longer to hinder it from getting to the sea, where it is meant to go. It is a brave little stream to keep on running, not letting anything stop it, is it not?’

‘Yes, it is,’ agreed his companions, and Aunt Edith added—

‘I hope, little folk, you will take a lesson from it, and let nothing stop you from going on in the right way, and doing the things which you ought to do.’

RURAL RUINS JUNKIES

by lensandpen • September 29, 2014

Book Cover – In spite of a fairly good cover design we didn’t finish the small town project. (click to enlarge)

Rural Ruins Junkies was the working title for a book on small Midwestern towns that we did a cover for, but never finished. We made half a dozen trips to western Missouri and eastern Kansas taking photographs of villages that were a faded memory of what they once had been. Visiting these declining small towns brought back fading memories of how some twenty years earlier we made a living “liberating” antiques from rural inhabitants. On this present junket we were able to accomplish some research for our book Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, but other than confirming that small towns were in decline we gained no insights.

The following few paragraphs are remembrances of these capitalistic forays of long ago.

NOTES MADE AFTER A TRIP THROUGH SOME SMALL TOWNS OF MISSOURI AND KANSAS, AUGUST 30-SEPTEMBER 2, 2009:

The summer of 2009 was cool and wet, at least in the Midwest. In a rented white Nissan Altima we leave Springfield, Missouri and head west. On the upper Neosho and Verdigris rivers we will search for places where the Osage Indians had villages after losing Missouri by treaty and before selling their Kansas lands and buying their present reservation from the Cherokees in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). There will be little indication of these sites. With the cessation of fires set by the Indians, ragged lines of trees crisscross the former prairies along fencerows and roads. Nevertheless we will photograph the landscapes and nearby waterways where books locate – often vaguely – mid-nineteenth century Osage towns.

Mural of Osage Indian camp, Oswego, Kansas. The Osage basin extends several hundred miles into eastern Kansas, and there is recognition by locals of that fact. (click to enlarge)

There had been in southeast Kansas squatters, like Laura Ingalls family, before the red men had been bought out. A few scattered little houses on the prairie, but no proper communities – only trading posts. Soon after the chiefs put their mark on paper, railroads slammed down their rails and began delivering thousands of land-hungry sodbusters. Towns sprang up along the tracks to ship agricultural products out and bring manufactured products in. Few of the earliest balloon-frame wood businesses have survived, but there is a surplus of brick and stone structures from the turn of the nineteenth century. We are not unfamiliar with such places.

Driving down brick streets lined with vacant buildings in various stages of disrepair, we become uneasy. Possibly a couple of fifth century Visigoths visiting Rome for the second time might have had this feeling. Things are not the same. Today we take photographs. Once we took old tin advertising signs and ornate quarter-sawn oak display cabinets from now boarded-up storefronts. Decades back Crystal liberated thousands of hand-pieced quilts from such Midwestern village residences and surrounding farmhouses.

Selling pictures has never been easy – and today the market is impossibly flooded. The old stuff we used to buy on our safaris we could turn in ten days, doubling our money. When we turned that plunder, we’d run out and score again. Motoring on to the next distressed little town, we would confess regrets but get no absolution. Some might say pillagers like us are incapable of guilt and undeserving of forgiveness.

In our defense, we were benevolent vandals. We paid for our booty. Still, our rapacious ways drew outrage from, of all people, an independent Hollywood movie producer, an Army artillery officer who did two tours in Vietnam, and a multi-millionaire Kansas City grain trader. Institutional capitalism is more socially sanctioned than the naked individual pursuit of profit. Such chastisements revealed unfamiliarity with country people’s awareness of what things were worth. Admittedly we exploited our advantages of having cash, current price information and mobility. But our sanctimonious critics showed ignorance and condescension believing rural people to be easy to fleece.

Auction house in Oswego, Kansas theater. There was at one time a lively business redistributing the old stuff left behind by a shrinking population. (click to enlarge)

We will not need to haggle over the price of a Marx tin toy or a double weave coverlet and be reminded that small town antique dealers were the descendants of horse traders and land speculators. There are almost no antique stores left. The few dealers that haven’t given up the ghost or gone to eBay aren’t able to stock a whole shop with vintage items. Pickers like us have picked these places clean.

Even the women we bought antique textiles from often negotiated. To our moralizing acquaintances it seemed unethical for us to buy 1930s never used Wedding Ring or Dresden Plate hand pieced, hand quilted bedcovers for $90 and then sell them on the phone to a San Francisco shop for $175 plus UPS. The widows who sold them knew the nieces who would inherit them might let them go at a garage sale for $20. Elderly rural folks are surprisingly well traveled. At Silver Dollar City or antique shows or shops they learned pretty well what retail prices were. Farmers’ wives knew wheat at a grain elevator or cattle on the hoof brought less than bread or steaks.

This isn’t to say that walking away from a little white farmhouse with a black trash bag containing three generations of heirloom quilts that would soon decorate the bed of a Long Island stockbroker or a Santa Barbara divorce lawyer wasn’t heartbreaking.

Seeing these little Kansas towns falling further into disrepair gave us pause. When we looted such villages thirty years ago they showed their age. Today their portable and marketable contents long gone and their roofs leaking we realize that time is short to record their appearance. Perhaps we can deal realistically with our unresolved and conflicted feelings about America and our place in it.

Or is our country junket just the self-medication of rural ruins junkies?

Gallery of Small Towns by Leland Payton. Click on any image to start slideshow.

Failed small town businesses were frequently taken over by antique dealers.

There are few open individual antique shops today.

Antique shops in old buildings, Weaubleau, Missouri.

The consolidation of family farms left an excessive amount of implements, tools and household goods behind, more than the market could absorb.

Greenwood Hotel sign Eureka, Kansas, 1883. Recently this old building was restored, removing it from possible inclusion into a Rural Ruins book.

Abandoned gas station and closed bank, Howard, Kansas.

Howard National Bank.

Closed antiques shop in Howard National Bank.

Mural, Oswego, Kansas. Even the art that recalls the triumphs of small town life are fading.

Closed store, Wilsey, Kansas. There were often caches of excellent hand quilted quilts in such burgs.

Wilsey, Kansas.

For more about the Ozark Prairie Border click here.

For more information about Damming the Osage, click here.

Daisy Dukes and Daisy Mae

by lensandpen • September 26, 2014

Daisy Duke (Catherine Bach). Sexy mountaineer women have a long tradition. (click to enlarge)

In the nineteenth century, poor mountain women were portrayed as being less repressed than Victorian ladies. Hillbilly gals became even more sexualized in the twentieth century. Al Capp excelled at drawing curvaceous hillbilly babes. Li’l Abner’s lovesick girlfriend, Daisy Mae, set the standard. American girls imitated Daisy Mae’s revealing outfit at Halloween and Sadie Hawkins Day parties. Capp Enterprises did license such costumes but the 1952 Gimbels “Daisy Mae Dogpatch Denims” hardly resembled her hick haute couture. This “biggest fad of the year” line of casualwear (below) looked more suburban Connecticut than backwoods Dogpatch.

Lil’ Abner coloring book, 1940s. (click to enlarge)

A comely country girl scantily clad isn’t copyrightable. The “Miss Hillbilly” outfit in the Star Bread Co. ad is clearly a Daisy Mae knockoff. The hick on the bread package hardly resembles hunky Li’l Abner though. Daisy Mae Duke continued the tradition of hot hill country temptresses in CBS’s TV series of the early ‘80s, The Dukes of Hazard. Actress Catherine Bach created many of her fetching costumes. “Daisy Dukes” have become the name for revealing cut-off jeans.

1950s magazine ad for Hillbilly Bread. Note the Daisy Mae lookalike.

Daisy Mae Dogpatch Denim ad, 1952.

This content is edited from our 500 page book project, Hillbillies Rustics to Rednecks. Join our email list to be notified of its availability.

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YOU ONE-GALLUSED HILL BILLIES, BEHAVE

by lensandpen • September 24, 2014

Genuine Curteich – Chicago. “C. T. Art – Colortone” Postcard, early 1950s. (click to enlarge)

hill billy n. Uncouth countrymen, particularly from the hills. “You one-gallused hill billies, behave yourselves.”

This definition of a hillbilly is from an entry by University of Arkansas professor J. W. Carr in Vol. II of Dialect Notes, published in 1904. It is the earliest academic recognition of the word, which was likely coined in the preceding decade. “One-gallused,” denoting suspenders with one broken strap worn by a poor rustic, is earlier rural slang than “hill billie”.

Relax, self-identified hillbillies and hard country music fans. We are not assailing your proud but mythological heritage. Things hillbilly – music, humor, cartoons, feuding mountaineer fables – have been motivated by capitalism, facilitated by industrial technology, and distributed by mass media to serve modern sensibilities.

Don’t believe the advertising. Disregard the packaging. Unwrapped, this anti-modern icon is revealed to be a hybrid rural/urban interactive product assembled from many sources. Our uncouth, but musical, countryman is not exclusively of the Appalachians, his legendary association with the mountain South notwithstanding.

Hillbilly humor for instance has been influenced by New England books and plays, minstrel shows, and vaudeville. Country music, originally called ‘hillbilly’, has undeniable southern white roots, but has had players, fans, and management from other demographics. Folks with a rural family background are especially interested in accounts of that rude past. Authentic or contrived, they don’t seem to care. Few, however, wish to return to the harsh privations and poverty of subsistence agriculture as the “Who Longs For The Good Old Days?” postcard asks. Visions of Arcadian rusticity are more likely to be floating in the heads of educated urbanites.

Only comic strip hillbillies are true primitives. Country musicians from the start embraced improvements to transportation and communications. They have since shown an extraordinary capacity to respond to changing public taste and unfolding commercial opportunities. Though this genre ritualistically acknowledges rural traditions, its performers and their audiences are forever evolving and adapting to new circumstances.

This pop culture icon is a product of the machine age’s alternating nostalgia and disdain for our agrarian past. Hillbillies are not really an outsider, other, or folk phenomenon. Hillbillies are interesting, sometimes captivating, even if they are manufactured rustics. There is no one hillbilly type, but many and they continue to evolve.

Just as the country was slipping into a catastrophic financial chasm in the late 1920s, mass media discovered the public had an insatiable interest in the outlandish behavior of impoverished rustics. The hillbilly is the incarnation of anti-materialism. Yet he lives self-satisfied within a family, in a community, somehow surviving though ignorant, foolish, and often a vessel of bad habits. He does possess frontier skills and is stubbornly self-reliant. It was during this tragic time that the colorful mountaineer character thrived providing some consolation to a populace who felt its streamliner train ride to modernity had gone off the rails.

Hillbillies are a six-pack of fun, but with hangover potential. Droll, but given to outbursts of violence, they are a blend of half a dozen stock American characters. Unlike African-Americans or Native Americans, these rustics are yet allowable stereotypes. The rains of reform have not sanitized this personification of multi-dimensional incorrectness. Nor has he been completely forgotten.

This content is edited from our 500 page book project, Hillbillies Rustics to Rednecks. Join our email list to be notified of its availability.

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BUFFALOS OF BUFFALO – Part 2

by lensandpen • September 22, 2014

Minimalist buffalos on a fence, Buffalo, Missouri (click to enlarge)

After discovering a startling, hundred and fifty foot or so long, grazing buffalo painting on the side of a new flea market we returned the next Sunday to pursue photographing these symbols of Buffalo, Missouri. Actually it wasn’t until we had gotten home and looked at Crystal’s digital shots of the eye-catching mural on a computer screen that we decided to return. The hunting was good.

Renditions of bison are scattered all over town. A variety of styles were evident from sketchy, minimalist drawings to every-little-shaggy-hair kind of realism. There were naïve versions; others looked to be borrowed from the clip art now readily available on the Internet. Downtown there was another mural, a more conventional rendition than the flea market art by Susan Owensby. This work on a brick wall was signed Ron and Laura Allison.

In the late 1970s we often drove through Buffalo on our way to some place else. It was still pretty much a farming trade center then. The largest employer was a poultry processing center that has since closed. An improved highway has facilitated commuting to Springfield. New businesses are out on 65 highway, but the old downtown isn’t burdened by buildings about to collapse as is the case in many small towns.

The abundance of buffalo imagery we take to indicate a resurgence of civic pride. Nothing says Buffalo like a buffalo. Perhaps civic boosters have learned from progressive municipalities like Springfield that a “vibrant” art community is good for business. Buffalo had its third annual art fair this year. But there seems to be no top-down imposition of standards on the depictions of bison. Even if it’s an idea introduced from the outside, it is undeniably popular.

Rural Ruins Junkies was the working title for a book project we started a few years ago. Then we were visiting more isolated villages that were fast crumbling into photogenic ruins. This was not a particularly original idea, and it brought back how we had once traveled the rural Midwest picking antiques from such environments. Under Confessions we’ll post a fragment of writing we did that contrasts with our more upbeat coverage of Buffalo.

At any rate that Sunday Buffalo shoot revealed a less melancholy small town than we had imaged when working on Rural Ruins Junkies. Seeing this excess of civic symbolism did not erase our recollection of fading small towns, but it did mitigate the fatalism. Our experience in Buffalo dovetails with some observations made revisiting Branson – i.e. the Hypercommon hypothesis. Nostalgia can be overly pessimistic. The Buffalos of Buffalo, an exercise in iconography that was only incidentally esthetic, exuded a small bit of hopeful energy in their variety and abundance.

Bar with Anthony Bail Bonds sign, Buffalo, Missouri (click to enlarge)

Such unschooled graphics may not be conventionally acceptable as folk, naïve, or primitive art, but its assertion of naïve confidence in commonality is arresting.

We will, by the way, stop again in Buffalo and document the abundance and variety of the many Bail Bonds businesses.

Click any image to view a gallery of Buffalo photographs by Crystal Payton

Buffalo Motel sign, Buffalo Missouri

Buffalo Inn & Suites, Buffalo, Missouri

Dallas County Schools sign, Buffalo, Missouri

Painted buffalo sculpture high school, Buffalo, Missouri

Buffalo Missouri Chamber of Commerce

Buffalo Missouri City Hall

Cut out sign, Buffalo, Missouri

Bison sign, Buffalo, Missouri

Buffalo sign, Buffalo, Missouri

Buffalo on Buffalo Prairie Care Center, Buffalo, Missouri

Mural, downtown Buffalo, Missouri

“Bison Pride – catch it”, decal downtown Buffalo, Missouri

McDonalds, Buffalo, Missouri

Gas station, Buffalo, Missouri

BUFFALOS OF BUFFALO – Part 1

by lensandpen • September 18, 2014

Buffalo Motel, Buffalo Missouri, 2007. (Click to enlarge.)

For decades travelers on U.S. Highway 65 have been reminded they are motoring through Buffalo, Missouri by an eye-catching, neon-outlined Buffalo Motel sign. This county seat of about three thousand got its name – one might guess – from a pioneer encounter with a bison. This is a forested region that once had strips of prairie, buffalo habitat, which were kept free of trees by fires started by the Osage Indians. By the time America acquired these lands the Osages had eliminated such big game in western Missouri and were pursuing these beasts hundreds of miles into western prairies. There might have been a few stragglers, but the big herds had long been gone from this region.

A credible account of the origins of the town’s name is on the website of the City of Buffalo. Mark Reynolds of Tennessee, it states, was the first white settler. “Mr. Reynolds found a stake on one of the Blue Mounds that had been left there earlier by some unknown traveler and he placed the nearby skull of a buffalo on that stake. Hence the name, Buffalo Head Prairie.”

Wikipedia has another explanation. “Buffalo was laid out in 1854 by Joseph F. Miles. It was named after Miles’ birthplace at Buffalo, New York.”

When the Buffalo Inn & Suites was built it too used a more abstracted buffalo on its sign. Obviously the citizens believed the genesis of its name had something to do with the hulking prairie animal.

Crystal Payton photographing the Buffalo Missouri flea market mural. (Click to enlarge.)

This August, coming back from a trip to document an alleged abandoned cemetery on the shores of Truman Reservoir, we turned into a new flea market parking lot and discovered a small herd of buffalo had rumbled into town. On the side of a long, corrugated metal building, under a purple and magenta radioactive sky, were seven buffalos in various tranquil poses. The tufts of grass sticking through the gravel of the parking lot looked like an overgrazed buffalo prairie. The mural spoke to Crystal. While the senior photographer with the heavy, detachable lens Nikon went inside to futilely look through stalls of crafts and garage sale merchandise she took a series of shots with her little Sony camera. These images would later prove that the one with the most expensive camera doesn’t always grasp the photogenic potential of a given built environment.

Crystal also photographed a billboard that depicted a buffalo for Buffalo Prairie Dentist, “Smiles above the rest. Welcome to Buffalo,” at the entrance to the flea market parking lot. The bold mural was signed “Susan Owensby, June 2014.” The Buffalo dental billboard looked new too.

What’s with all this embrace of buffalos, we wondered. We’ve been driving through Buffalo for more than twenty years and were not aware of the current fad of buffalo branding. The next weekend we drove back and found the town had indeed gone buffalo crazy.

We’ll cover this in Part Two of the Buffalos of Buffalo.

Click on any image below for a gallery of Crystal’s Buffalo mural photographs.