A 1940s view from Table Rock. (From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River) Into the 1940s, visitors continued to visit and pose for photographs on the flat rock above the White River valley – where there was still no sign of earthmoving equipment, much less a towering blockage to the…
Real photo postcard, 1920s, by Payne Johnson, Branson Mo. (Photo courtesy of Lens & Pen Press) “Table Rock Dam will be built across the big sand bar.” Most bluffs along Ozark rivers are named. Table Rock Bluff had a relatively flat top (hence the name). The spot was accessible by road and afforded an impressive…
Dancing at an Ozark picnic, 1920s. Real photo postcard by George Hall. (Photo courtesy of Lens & Pen Press. From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River) Unlike the posed hillbilly family real photo postcard last month, this is a straightforward document of the surviving folk culture on the upper White River,…
Hall postcard of posed hillbilly family (Photo courtesy of Lens & Pen Press.) The idea the Ozarks is inhabited by primitives has been perpetuated in books by educated travelers like Schoolcraft, in popular songs like the “Arkansaw Traveler,” and in souvenir postcards, like this one by George Hall. We have incorporated many quotes by Lynn…
CHARLEY BARNES, famed James River fishing guide, with brothers John and Herbert (Photo courtesy of Lens & Pen Press) Robert Page Lincoln profiled Charley Barnes, James River guide and john boat builder, in a long article titled “Floating Down the River” in the March 1948 issue of Fur-Fish-Game magazine. Barnes was born near Mt. Vernon…
“Largest ever” float trip for L. B Price Mercantile in 1923. (Photo courtesy of Lens & Pen Press. From “James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River,” which examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale…
Two girls from Iowa on vacation at Lake Taneycomo in the 1920s. Lake Taneycomo is a 22-mile riverine lake stringing upstream on the White River through Taney County from Powersite to Branson and, today, to Table Rock Dam. Powersite Dam, near Forsyth, closed in 1913. At that time, it was the largest dam/reservoir in the…
Finished in 1913, Powersite was Missouri’s first venture into hydropower. A consortium of St. Louis investors engaged the Ambursen Hydro-Electric Construction Company of Boston to build one of their patented hollow, reinforced concrete structures. As would be the case eighteen years later on the Osage River, the original investors were replaced by a more substantial…
