The Springfield hunting and fishing club once had their headquarters near Janesville.
It was a singular, even bizarre group, kind of an Animal-House-on-the-James.
One of its members, John Dunckel, a lumberman turned drummer, published a book — “The Molly Joggers: Tales of the Camp-fire” — in 1906 ostensibly based on the organization’s outings.
Most of its eighty-eight pages consist of ethnic jokes told in dialect – which is what one might expect from the pen of a traveling salesman at the turn of the last century.
Irish, Swedish, Dutch, and of course African-American stereotypes fill the book, but no hillbillies.
That word was just beginning to appear in print around 1906 and had not yet replaced the hick, rube, or mountaineer as the naïve rustic of choice.
Twice a year they pitched large tents along the James and an accomplished black cook named Shorty furnished repasts like “fried biscuits in butter, country-cured hickory-smoked ham, fried eggs, fried potatoes and onions with wild honey and sorghum on your biscuits for dessert, washed down by a cup of good coffee.”
This amused-at-their-own-antics group did range beyond their encampment at the junction of the James and Finley.
A November 6, 1899, piece in the Leader-Democrat gleefully related their outdoor adventures:
“The festive ‘Molly Joggers’ of Springfield are again out on their annual hunt. Their favorite haunts are the picturesque wilds of the lower James river.
“They sometimes extend their savage excursions down below the mouth of the James and the fierce and reckless hunters have now and then descended the torturous White river as far as Forsyth.
“The ‘Molly Joggers’ are a strange tribe of nimrods whose real character no one ever learns till he has been initiated into this fraternity of sportsmen and taken one trip with the hunters.
“Woe to the squeamish-hearted tenderfoot who rashly takes the vow to obey the regulations of this fraternity, and sets out with the ‘Molly Joggers’ on one of their autumnal expeditions.
“The ‘Molly Joggers’ at home are ordinary conventional citizens. Some of them are very prominent businessmen. They are honest and industrious, make money and spend it liberally.
“When required to do so by the proprieties of a social function, these gentlemen wear dress coats with practiced ease and exhibit those refined manners which the best form of the times demand.” (From “James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River.”)
(Vintage Ozarks is a feature by Leland and Crystal Payton at Lens & Pen Press, publishers of all color books on the Ozarks. “James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River” is a 352-page all-color book that looks at the effect of development on a famous float stream and our efforts to protect riverine resources. It is available for $31.50 postage paid.)
