“MIX AND MINGLE” AT ASH GROVE’S MAIN STREET HERITAGE FESTIVAL

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Although I arrived at the Ash Grove festival late in the afternoon there were still a few folks milling around on Main Street. There were, like many country trade centers, empty buildings, but none looked like they were about to fall in. Some had going businesses. Others displayed relics of the town’s past in their windows. Overall, the scene did not fulfill the stereotype of villages on the verge of economic and cultural collapse. Writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis may have erred when, a century ago, they located all that is dysfunctional and antiquated about America exclusively in small towns. Could it be that cultural stagnation and backwardness may manifest itself in urban and suburban environments as well? A place like Ash Grove that takes civic pride in former residents Nathan Boone (Daniel’s son) and notorious gangster Ma Barker displays up-to-date diversity. It mixes historical eras with wild abandon. The place fits our HYPERCOMMON slogan – ordinary isn’t.

Although I arrived at the Ash Grove festival late in the afternoon there were still a few folks milling around on Main Street. There were, like many country trade centers, empty buildings, but none looked like they were about to fall in. Some had going businesses. Others displayed relics of the town’s past in their windows. Overall, the scene did not fulfill the stereotype of villages on the verge of economic and cultural collapse. Writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis may have erred when, a century ago, they located all that is dysfunctional and antiquated about America exclusively in small towns. Could it be that cultural stagnation and backwardness may manifest itself in urban and suburban environments as well? A place like Ash Grove that takes civic pride in former residents Nathan Boone (Daniel’s son) and notorious gangster Ma Barker displays up-to-date diversity. It mixes historical eras with wild abandon. The place fits our HYPERCOMMON slogan – ordinary isn’t.

“Is this Ash Grove?” asked the woman in a red dress behind the wheel of a small car that pulled off on the shoulder beside me. “This is Halltown,” I told her. She didn’t understand my directions until a young girl produced a Missouri road map from the glove compartment and I showed her the way to Ash Grove. “I’m performing at some kind of festival there. Come see me.” She did a U turn and headed back east following my directions.

bl454When I finished taking pictures of Halltown I went on to Paris Spring Junction. (Click on the links to see those posts). Later that afternoon I did end up in Ash Grove, and I did see a picture of the lost woman in red propped up by the door of a café. There was no Sing-a-Long Sweet Memories of Silent Movie Music coming from inside, so I did not hear Teresa Arth sing and play the piano. There was a strolling harmonica player, though.

The light was perfect, but it would not last. Things were definitely winding down at the Ash Grove Main Street Heritage Festival. Attendance was sparse, but the old buildings looked good through my viewfinder. The century old structures were an intriguing combination of decay, restoration, and unfinished restoration, many enhanced with stylistic choices not yet categorized by architectural historians. Such esthetic chaos may disturb purists, but American development has been wildly eclectic from the beginning. Bricolage, an arty French word, describes the practice of incorporating readily available materials or styles into an object or work. Unfamiliarity with the theory hasn’t stopped the citizens of this small town from bricolaging the hell out of their buildings, the collections of artifacts in those buildings, and culture.

Click on any image to start slide show.

Esthetically as well as socially, Ash Grove’s festival was indeed “mix and mingle” as 105.9 KGBX’s press release said of the event. I pulled it up on the web after getting home:

Back Roads to Main Street Heritage Festival
October 18  – 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Main Street – Ash Grove

CELEBRATING AND SHARING A FASCINATING HERITAGE

Notable Missourian Nathan Boone, son of Daniel Boone, early settler – here…. Birthplace of notorious 1930’s gangster Ma Barker, on FBI’s Most Wanted List – here……Civil War bushwhackers’ terrorizing raids – here……Main Street shoot out between horse thieves – here.…..Murder over missing foxhound said to be basis of book and movie, “The Voice of Bugle Ann” – here.……Enterprises that distinguished our area nationwide, Ash Grove Portland Cement and Phenix Marble Quarry – here.

Celebration of this fascinating heritage begins on Historic Main Street. It is a mix and mingle of Civil War to 20’s and 30’s eras in fashion, buggies and vintage vehicles, live music – fiddle — ragtime piano -Irish folk songs, plus foods from the days of biscuits always on the table, sarsaparilla a favored drink, and nothing was better than catfish fried up in a pan.

Come in historic full attire…enter the 10:00 am costume contest (for all ages and gender)… and a free order of biscuits and gravy is yours. Costume up your whole family and not only is your breakfast covered but so are the Halloween costumes.

No costume? Get in the spirit of the day with a flapper headband or gangster hat from the Headband and Hat shop. Don’t forget your camera to get a photo of your new look with flapper, Sara Vega, professional model.

Listen to the story telling and watch the re-enactments of stories from our heritage….join in the games and competitions….see artisans demonstrate their skills…make and take a painted gourd… make a planter from Ash Grove cement and paper… AND keep an eye out for Ma Barker’s boys – they’re usually up to no good.

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As well as the display of a log cabin quilt that was being raffled off for a good cause, there was a photo exhibit on Main Street. Clothes pinned to clothes lines were photographs taken by the citizenry. Voting was underway to select the best images for a community calendar. Sunsets were the most popular subject.

Click on any image to start slide show.

Even if I had missed the opening act, the coda of the celebration was a provocative visual display of old, new, in between and outside the boundaries of time. It certainly wasn’t one of the laid-out-on-a-slab villages I’d photographed for Ozark Prairie Border. Ash Grove has a pulse.

Googling Ash Grove, I pulled up a dissenting opinion. “Agricultural commerce has abandoned Ash Grove. It isn’t a sleepy community. It’s in a coma,” wrote freelance reviewer of live music, Bill Glahn. He pronounced the town of 1,500 a victim of corporate greed that has killed the family farm and sent factory jobs overseas. Glahn is active in Occupy Springfield, a franchise of Occupy Wall Street, so it’s not difficult to discern his political leanings.

He motored up to Ash Grove from Springfield on Labor Day of 2010, “to make some kind of photographic record that this place actually existed before it crumbled into dust.” The anti capitalist protest group didn’t begin until September 2011. So he wouldn’t have been able to start a subchapter – Occupy Ash Grove – to protest the pernicious influence of big business on small towns. After my brief sojourn I don’t get the feeling the place was or is ripe for revolution.

Mural proclaiming Ash Grove’s debt to the coming of the railroad. Although the homestead of Daniel Boone’s son Nathan has become a popular state park just north of the town it was the arrival of the Missouri Pacific railroad in the late 1800s that spurred an era of prosperity, and is embedded in local memory. As well as a decent farming resource (which blogger Glahn prematurely dismissed) a nearby vein of excellent limestone was mined for building stone and crushed as aggregate. During the Depression construction virtually ceased in America and farm commodities suffered a price collapse. Ash Grove has more than survived. Though the train no longer stops and the quarry has closed, it has highway access to Springfield, a small city with a surfeit of shopping and gobs of jobs.

Mural proclaiming Ash Grove’s debt to the coming of the railroad. Although the homestead of Daniel Boone’s son Nathan has become a popular state park just north of the town it was the arrival of the Missouri Pacific railroad in the late 1800s that spurred an era of prosperity, and is embedded in local memory. As well as a decent farming resource (which blogger Glahn prematurely dismissed) a nearby vein of excellent limestone was mined for building stone and crushed as aggregate. During the Depression construction virtually ceased in America and farm commodities suffered a price collapse. Ash Grove has more than survived. Though the train no longer stops and the quarry has closed, it has highway access to Springfield, a small city with a surfeit of shopping and gobs of jobs.

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

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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.

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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.

Click any image to start slide show.

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bl501Across 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.

Click any image to start slide show.

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.

DEWEY JACKSON SHORT: FROM DONKEY CART ENTREPRENEUR TO U.S. CONGRESSMAN

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We have discovered that the young man standing up in this real photo postcard by famed photographer George P. Hall is in all likelihood the celebrated “Orator of the Ozarks,” oft re-elected Congressman Dewey Jackson Short. It’s likely young Dewey picked up many of his pithy Ozark sayings consorting with the float fishermen he serviced with his donkey cart business. Catering to tourism had been his first paying job. Throughout his political career he remained an advocate of bringing vacationers to the Ozarks. This promotion culminated in securing the funds to build Table Rock Dam whose waters would back up nearly to Galena, ending the famous float trips Dewey once serviced.

We have discovered that the young man standing up in this real photo postcard by famed photographer George E. Hall is in all likelihood the celebrated “Orator of the Ozarks,” oft re-elected Congressman Dewey Jackson Short. It’s likely young Dewey picked up many of his pithy Ozark sayings consorting with the float fishermen he serviced with his donkey cart business. Catering to tourism had been his first paying job. Throughout his political career he remained an advocate of bringing vacationers to the Ozarks. This promotion culminated in securing the funds to build Table Rock Dam whose waters would back up nearly to Galena, ending the famous float trips Dewey once serviced.

In our post on the remarkable Y Bridge that brought tourists across the James River into Galena, Missouri, we mentioned that Dewey Short spoke at the dedication in 1927. The year after he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. During his twenty-four years in Congress Short became nationally known for his colorful speeches, which drew inspiration equally from Shakespeare, the Bible, and vernacular hill speak.

Dewey Short: Orator of the Ozarks, Vol. 1 by Robert S. Wiley. Very interesting account of political and cultural life in the Ozarks between World War I and World War II. Out of print but available used on amazon.com

Dewey Short: Orator of the Ozarks, Vol. 1 by Robert S. Wiley. It is a very interesting account of political and cultural life in the Ozarks between World War I and World War II. Out of print but available used on amazon.com. Click on image of book cover to go to book listing on Amazon.

Though Short had degrees from American colleges and had studied at Oxford and Heidelberg universities he mixed his quotes from the classics with down home witticisms. In Dewey Short: Orator of the Ozarks, Vol. 1 Robert S. Wiley quotes an example of Short’s folky injections given at a Republican banquet and reported in a 1928 Sedalia Capital :

He compared the g.o.p. elephant with the Democratic mule, which he termed a jackass.

“Compare the two,” he said. “The elephant is really an intelligent animal. It can perform in circuses and has been used as a domestic animal – but on the other hand the jackass, can do nothing but bray and kick. It is without ancestry, or posterity.”

Looking through this very readable account of the first half of Congressman Short’s career, when researching the Y Bridge, we came upon the following passage:

Often in later speeches he would reminisce about driving his team of jennies (female donkeys) as a youngster. He would meet salesmen at the train and help them haul their wares and eh would make long hauls of ice from the ice house on James River where winter ice from the James had been packed in sawdust to await summer’s demand for that rare commodity.

By 1911, when he was 12 years of age, Dewey had established a checking account with the bank of Galena. His diary of 1912 discloses that he was busy that summer catering to tourists making float fishing trips on the James River and buying and selling ice.

We remembered the stellar Hall photograph we used in our book on the development of Ozark tourism. Could the nice looking young man driving the donkey cart be young Dewey Short? How many donkey cart operations could one Ozark village support?

See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image by Leland and Crystal Payton. There are hundreds of old images of recreation from the 1800s to the present day in the “Land of a Million Smiles.” Available at a discounted price, postage paid from Lens & Pen Press.

See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image by Leland and Crystal Payton. There are hundreds of old images of recreation from the 1800s to the present day in the “Land of a Million Smiles.” Available at a discounted price, postage paid from Lens & Pen Press. Click on image of book cover to buy a copy.

Short authority, Robert S. Wiley, still practices law in Crane, Missouri. We sent him a copy of See the Ozarks and asked his opinion. He wrote back:

Thanks for the beautiful book, well written and informative. Thanks for directing my attention to the Hall photo on page 7. From other photos in my collection, I believe your photo is one of Dewey with his wagon and team of donkeys.

Wiley explained in a phone conversation that he has a photo of young Short driving a four-wheel, two-donkey cart, the rig he likely used when hawking ice. The enterprising youngster, Wiley noted, saved his money for college. He was not only a fiscal conservative at an early age, in high school he gave a hawkish speech on “Our National Defense” delivered on the eve of World War I. His picture was on a tourist postcard when he was twelve and at seventeen his oratory was printed on the front page of the Stone County Oracle.

The crisp image by Hall was one of our favorites already. But that it is an image of the renowned Orator of the Ozarks Dewey Short was a pleasant surprise.

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

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Click to enlarge.

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 bl409box 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 bl408an 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.

bl411When 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.

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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.

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.

 

 

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

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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.

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 23rd 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.

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.

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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.

Click on any image to start slide show.

 

Only a few miles below Galena, Table Rock Lake backs up into the James River.
The tower that contains river stage recording instruments now has a solar power supply.
Looks like signs of a long-ago collision or two where the bridge bifurcates.
Looking west toward Galena at the end of the bridge.
The east end of the Y Bridge.
Historic marker for Galena at the end of the pedesterian traffic only bridge.

RUINS OF DOGPATCH USA – PART 2

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Billboard two miles north of the ruins of Dogpatch USA on Arkansas Highway 7, south of Harrison.

Billboard two miles north of the ruins of Dogpatch USA on Arkansas Highway 7, south of Harrison.

Across the road from the peeling Dogpatch USA billboard is a contemporary smaller sign illustrating the Edenic recreational opportunities of the Buffalo River country. This wild and scenic stream in 1972 became the first National River and is administered by the U. S. Park Service. (click to enlarge).

Across the road from the peeling Dogpatch USA billboard is a contemporary smaller sign illustrating the Edenic recreational opportunities of the Buffalo River country. This wild and scenic stream in 1972 became the first National River and is administered by the U. S. Park Service. (click to enlarge).

A keen observer of popular culture, Roger Brown, published an article called Dogpatch USA: The Road to Hokum, published in Southern Changes, The Journal of Southern Regional Council (1993). Brown actually set foot in the park shortly before its demise:

Dogpatch USA is a classic American roadside attraction. It’s a basket of cornpone and hillbilly hokum in a beautiful Ozark mountain setting. Nearby is a waterfall, limestone caverns, and a spring that flows clear and steadily into a creek that has powered a gristmill for more than 150 years. The decor is bumpkin kitsch.

Though Brown enjoyed the “hokum”, he found the place had “surreal” aspects that the patrons likely missed:

What most of the visitors didn’t fully realize, however, was that they were participating in a moment rich with a sort of postmodern poetics which has since become commonplace: The Arkansas syndicate that built Dogpatch USA was peddling colonial stereotypes as family entertainment, and at the core of the park’s attraction was a complex melody conjured by the dueling banjos of simulation and authenticity.

He interviewed Melvin Bell who bought the park from investors who acquired it at a bankruptcy auction held on the courthouse steps in Jasper after Odum went bust. The auctioneer’s wife once played “Daisy Mae” at Dogpatch. Bell thought the growth that was happening 45 minutes away at Branson would help Dogpatch. Brown also gave some credence to that incorrect idea.

Since 1906, Branson had aggressively pursued tourism with the assistance of Harold Bell Wright and the Missouri Pacific Railroad. A four lane highway now connected the Shepherd of the Hills country with an interstate highway. Silver Dollar City, Dogpatch USA’s competitor, didn’t lock in its image to a clever, but sarcastic comic strip. Folksy Romanticism was in. Irony apparently didn’t appeal to the generation who saw nothing wrong with protesters like leftist folk singer Joan Baez, who Capp had satirized as “Jonnie Phoanie”. Though Silver Dollar City tolerated some fringe hillbilly-ness the park played up a hillfolk portrayal a la Harold Bell Wright and emphasized native crafts. Al Capp might have done a takeoff on the hillbilly Las Vegas, as the neon lit booming Branson was misleadingly called. Early on, he had ripped Shepherd of the Hills in his comic strip.

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In the spring of 2014, we wandered through the abandoned Lil’ Abner themed venture in Northern Arkansas. That summer, newspaper articles began popping up announcing that the long closed attraction had a new owner. Charles “Bud” Pelsor and investor James Robertson and wife of Newbury Park, California had purchased 400 acres of the troubled property. Other sections had been already disposed of.

Pelsor, inventor of the Spill Proof Dog Bowl, had big plans. He announced he would restore the old grist mill and with grain milled on the grounds bake artisan bread. He wanted to fix the train tracks that once circled the park and buy back the little locomotive. Trout would be stocked and served at a restaurant. Fresh water mussels would produce pearls. Dilapidated buildings would be reborn. No more locals dressed as characters from a hillbilly comic strip would communicate with visitors in an anachronistic vernacular regional dialect. In other words, Pelsor is not going to go hillbilly with his theme park. The Harrison Daily Times ran an article titled “This Place is Magical” on September 3, 2014 that said: “The park will be geared to eco-tourism. They will plant gardens, orchards, and vineyards.”

Click any image to start the slideshow of Crystal Payton’s photographs of abandoned Dogpatch USA, May, 2014.