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Category Archives: Ozarks

Favorite Ozarks Books – 13

17 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Arkansas, History, Missouri, Ozarks

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Brooks Blevins, Civil War, history, Ozarks, reconstruction, slavery, war

History Ozarks - 2

I’ve written earlier about the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, which was a most welcome addition to my bookshelf. The second volume came out this fall, and I’ve been working through it; I’m happy to say that I like it even better than the first.

Subtitled “The Conflicted Ozarks,” this volume takes us through the history of the Ozarks during the Civil War into the troubled years afterward, ending after the great timber boom of the 1880s. A third volume that will bring us into the modern years is promised.

A particularly illuminating part of this book is its treatment of slavery in the pre-Civil War Ozarks. I grew up hearing the common phrase that slavery in our part of the country “wasn’t that bad” because slaveowners typically owned only one or two slaves, rather than participating in the large-scale plantation system that existed farther south. According to this view, “slaves were treated as part of the family” and were happier with their condition than the unlucky slaves of the Deep Confederacy. Blevins addresses this conception with sensitivity, noting the essential differences between slavery in the Ozarks and other areas of the country, but also pointing out that even small-scale slavery is still slavery, and that slaveowners of the Ozarks, like slaveowners elsewhere, didn’t hesitate to break up slave families through the sale of spouses and children when it suited their economic interest. In fact, because of its intimacy, Ozarks slaveowning could evolve into deep personal animosity and mistreatment, with all the power on one side of the equation.

The book also gives a comprehensive cross-border treatment of the war itself. We tend to hear about the Civil War in the Ozarks from a single-state viewpoint, or even from a narrower one such as the history of the war in a particular region or from the perspective of a unit or campaign; it’s helpful to read about the war in a broader context. Similarly, the diverging paths of Missouri and Arkansas after the war are well described, along with ways in which the two states remained similar.

The first volume of this trilogy was challenged by its scope; covering prehistory, early Native American history, the colonial period, and the years of American rule up to the beginning of the Civil War is a daunting task. This volume, with its much more confined time period, feels tighter and more narratively coherent, and the vast increase in number and type of source material makes itself felt as well, with Blevins bringing in all kinds of material, from official documents to personal letters and diaries. The breadth of research is just a thrill.

Like its predecessor, this book belongs on the shelf of anybody who wants to be a serious student of Ozark history.

 

Remembering Robert E. Smith

25 Friday Oct 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Missouri, Ozarks, People, Personal

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art, Crystal Payton, Leland Payton, poetry, Robert E Smith, Springfield

Several years ago, I posted a reminiscence of Robert E. Smith, a unique character and “outsider artist” with an unmistakable painting style and a sensibility that was nearly impossible to categorize.

I didn’t know this at the time, but it turns out that my fellow Ozarks writers Leland and Crystal Payton had a much longer and closer relationship with him. They recently posted some thoughts about him on his birthday, on their website, HyperCommon. Here’s a link. They also posted a link to a profile of Smith that they published in 1993, which contains many of his insights and comments about his artwork. Here’s a link to that one.

May they continue to flourish, the outsiders, the uncategorizable, the eccentrics and the oddballs. What a drab world it would be without them!

Favorite Ozarks People – 15

01 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Missouri, Ozarks, People, Personal

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Bill Knight, Fredericktown, libraries, memory, Ozark Regional Library

Joe Brewen and Bill Knight

I have a distinct early memory of the Fredericktown branch of the Ozark Regional Library. When I was a kid of nine or so, I was a frequent habitué of the library, partly because my mom worked there part-time and partly because I was intoxicated with the rows and rows of books, an infinite amount of knowledge or so it seemed, free for the taking. (They also loaned out other things, of course, and I remember showing up at the checkout desk with a couple of full-sized art prints only to be turned away because such things were reserved for grownups. I have no idea what I intended to do with a couple of framed art prints.)

The day I am remembering came after I had discovered the juvenile historical fiction of Joseph A. Altsheler, a popular novelist of the early 20th century whose books were fat, action-filled, and intensely romanticized. In theory, these books were way beyond my reading level; I had to creep out of the kids’ section and into the “teen” section to get them. But I gobbled them up like an addict. So I loaded up my usual week’s supply – three or four books, I would guess – and headed for the checkout desk.

The clerk at the desk took one look at me, with my head barely clearing the counter, and the stack of five-hundred-page books in front of her, each branded with the tell-tale “J” on the spine (instead of the “Y” books I was properly entitled to), and then looked at her co-worker at the desk. Something unspoken passed between them, and she stamped all the books and handed them back to me.

That was when I first recognized the possibility of libraries. A library can turn the most ordinary of transactions into an unexpected opportunity. Its very existence is a statement that doors are never fully closed and that thoughts are ultimately free. Many of us need to be reminded of these facts from time to time; the recent PBS documentary Ex Libris does a wonderful job of it, and if you haven’t seen it yet you should.

But back to the Fredericktown library, and one of my favorite Ozarks people. I’ve been back to that library several times in recent years, putting on programs, leading workshops, and attending ceremonies (that’s what’s going on in the photo above, my cousin Joe Brewen on the left presenting two copies of War of the Wolf to the library – it’s a history of the U.S.S. Seawolf, the submarine on which our uncle Mike served during World War II). My contact person for all my visits has been Bill Knight, who is the other person in the photo.

Bill has been a wonderful asset to the Fredericktown branch, as a recent article in the Fredericktown Democrat-News attests. He’s curious, humble, open to new ideas, intelligent, and devoted to the best interests of the library patrons. He isn’t alone in possessing these qualities, though; all the people quoted in the article have them as well. But Bill gets to stand out in this post because he has just retired from the library. A celebration was held in his honor Friday afternoon.

Bill Knight epitomizes the values of a library, and I am grateful to have gotten to know him. It’s heartening to know that those ideals I first experienced as a child are still alive and in practice.

 

Chain Migration

14 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in History, Missouri, Ozarks, People, Personal, Rural

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chain migration, cultural geography, German, history, immigration, Missouri, Russel Gerlach

I’ve been re-reading Russel Gerlach’s classic study Immigrants in the Ozarks, originally published in 1976 and now out of print. As you might imagine with any 43-year-old work of scholarship, it has some things I would quibble with, but by and large it’s a fine study and the source of some excellent basic information. I was taken aback, though, at his casual use of a phrase that has taken on harsh political connotations in recent years.

He quotes an earlier work, Wilbur Zelinsky’s The Cultural Geography of the United States, published in 1974:

Once a viable ethnic nucleus takes hold in a given location, chain migration may be triggered. If communication lines are kept open between the new settlements and relatives and neighbors back home, positive information may induce the latter to pack up and follow. In this way, a great many . . . rural ethnic neighborhoods have been expanded.

Nowadays, of course, “chain migration” is used almost as a dirty word in the debate over immigration. I didn’t realize that the phrase had such a long history or neutral use. But a moment’s reflection made me realize that I should not have been so surprised. Chain migration, the phenomenon if not the term, has been the American norm. My own family story is one of chain migration. One adventurous son makes the journey; writes back that there’s opportunity to be had; his brother (my great-grandfather) follows; makes a start; writes home; more family members follow. Most of us, if we look back far enough, are chain migrants.

Sometimes even entire communities were the product of chain migration. As you drive the back roads, you’ll see the evidence of this phenomenon in the names of towns and settlements, some now gone, some still flourishing:

Altenburg

Bavaria

Belgique

Dresden

German

Kiel

Krakow

Rhineland

Swiss

Westphalia

Wittenburg

And the list could go on and on (and no, Japan was not named by a group of homesick Japanese settlers!) Everywhere I turn, I see evidence of chain migration’s effects.

 

Favorite Ozarks Books – 12

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Ozarks, Writing

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books, Brian Walter, Donald Harington, essays, reviews, University of Arkansas Press

Guestroom Novelist coverThe Guestroom Novelist: A Donald Harington Miscellany, ed. Brian Walter

This review first appeared in OzarksWatch magazine, Series 2, Vol 8 No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2019).

Just about anyone who loves Ozarks writing has encountered the novels of Donald Harington, whether through The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (perhaps his best-known work), With (my favorite), or any other of his fourteen novels, characterized by Harington’s audacious story structure, inventive style, and interconnected references to his other novels. Now comes The Guestroom Novelist, a collection of nonfiction work by and about Harington, edited by Brian Walter, professor of English at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy.

Harington was first and essentially a novelist; Walter recalls an early moment in their friendship when he asked him, “What kind of projects are you working on now?” Harington swiftly replied, “’Projects!’ I don’t do ‘projects.’ I write novels!” Thus one might wonder what can be gained from reading a collection of nonfiction from someone who didn’t expend much of his own mental capital in the genre.

It’s a reasonable question, and one not easily answered. The book is divided into three parts: “Essays, Articles, and Speeches”; “Reviews”; and “Interviews,” with the interview section taking up two-thirds of the book. And the largest part of that largest part consists of interviews that the editor himself conducted with Harington in 2006 and 2007.

The first section includes the title essay of the book, “The Guestroom Novelist in America,” which was first delivered as a lecture in 1990, and which appears in print for the first time here. Strictly speaking, it’s not about Harington’s own work, but about other writers, the kind of writers whose novels never quite achieve the level of recognition and sales they deserve, and are consigned to the shelf in the guest room where they sit, neglected and only occasionally read and rediscovered. But Harington considered himself the “epitome” of guestroom novelists, so the essay provides insight into his self-regard, anxieties, and view of the publishing marketplace. A recurrent note in the book is Harington’s somewhat self-justifying complaints about the vagaries of publishers and agents. Other essays don’t age as well, serving as artifacts of Harington’s concerns at a particular point in his career without offering retrospective insight into his literary contributions.

Likewise with the reviews, which were mostly written for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette between 1996 and 2006. Harington appears to have written them mainly to supplement his income, and some have a tossed-off feel while others are more considered.

But for the fan of Harington’s novels, the treasure of this book is the interviews. Harington was deaf from childhood, so interviewers had to submit questions in writing. As a result, his answers have a more considered quality than many transcribed oral interviews. One lengthy set of “interviews” goes even further. A section titled “The Linda Hughes and Larry Vonalt Interviews” is presented as a transcript of a series of television interviews conducted in May 1979 with two literature professors at the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri University of Science and Technology). Walter tells us these interviews “turned up unexpectedly in a search of Harington’s hard drive,” but whether the documents are actually TV interview transcripts is extremely doubtful. It seems more likely that Harington created the “interviews” as a way of discussing his early novels during a visiting professorship at Rolla, basing it on conversations with the two professors, or possibly wrote them later (Walter points out that the interview files use a less-than-common technology for the 1970s). In any event, they provide considerable insight into Harington’s creative preoccupations.

Similarly, in the long interviews Walter conducted with Harington, entitled “The Stay More Interviews” after the name of the fictional community where most of Harington’s books are centered, Harington goes into great length about his characters, plots, and literary goals. Authors are rarely the best guides to their own work, operating more by instinct than by system and over- or under-estimating their achievements; but these interviews provide sensitive readers with excellent insight into what Harington thought he was doing in his novels, which can then be tested against the readers’ own perceptions.

Donald Harington is often described as the Ozarks’ greatest novelist, a description that is hard to dispute. This book is a useful contribution to his thoughts and opinions, but it will appeal more to the dedicated Harington fan than to the uninitiated. Those folks should begin with some of his novels and see if they catch the bug, then return to this book if they crave a deeper dive.

 

 

 

Hail the Local Historian

04 Saturday May 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in History, Missouri, Ozarks

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history, Lesterville, local history, memory

I just finished reading Lesterville Community: The Early Years, an oversized, 413-page book that I can guarantee will never be a best-seller. And that’s fine! Because what’s important about this book, and the many books like it, is that it exists in the first place.

The authors, John Jamison (now deceased), Paul Adams, and Wade Hill, all longtime Lesterville residents and graduates of Lesterville High School in the 1950s, have collected documents, stories, photographs, and memories of all things Lesterville-related up to the mid-20th Century, producing a comprehensive portrait of the community’s early settlers, schools, businesses, churches, and pretty much everything else. If you want to know when the first public school was established in Lesterville or who built the garage on Old Highway 21, this book will tell you.

Local historians – and every community, every county, has them, the stalwarts of the local historical society and the keepers of the obscure artifacts – don’t always get much respect from their professional counterparts, who see them as dabblers or region-specific obsessives, who fail to see bigger trends in their determination to record every name on every plat map and census record. But those local historians serve a valuable purpose. They excel at giving a deep feeling for a place, its essential characteristics and its essential people, and the good ones know how to tell a compelling story.

Local historians preserve the collective memory of a place, in an era when memory seems to be in dangerously short supply. And sometimes they discover important but overlooked stories that escaped mainstream attention for some reason. So celebrate your local historian, and contribute to your local historical society! (And if you’d like to buy a copy of Lesterville Community, contact me and I’ll hook you up.)

TaumSaukReservoir_underconstruction

Taum Sauk reservoir north of Lesterville, under reconstruction in 2009 after its disastrous breach. Photo by KTrimble at English Wikipedia and used under Creative Commons license.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 11

14 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Missouri, Ozarks, Writing

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books, Down Along the Piney, John Mort, short stories, University of Notre Dame Press

Down Along the Piney 2

This article first appeared in Issue 8 of Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozarks Studies.

John Mort has quietly been assembling a significant body of work in novels and short stories that go back more than thirty years. A resident of Springfield, Mort has written fiction encompassing a wide range of subjects and locations, from Vietnam, where he served with the First Cavalry Division, to the American West, to the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks. That stream of work reached an important milestone in September with the release of Down Along the Piney, a collection of short stories that was the winner of the 2018 Sullivan Prize from the University of Notre Dame. This prize recognizes a collection of short stories from a writer who has previously published at least one collection.

Down Along the Piney is a collection of thirteen stories, mostly but not entirely set in the Ozarks. It follows in the path Mort set down in The Walnut King and Other Stories, his 1990 short story collection, and Goat Boy of the Ozarks, his 2011 novel that takes the premise of the short story “The Walnut King” and expands it into a novel-length fiction. (Readers who first encountered Mort through his 2013 novel The Illegal will find it interesting to read the story “The Hog Whisperer” in Down Along the Piney, as the story of “The Hog Whisperer” is retold in The Illegal from the opposite point of view.) Taken together, all these works develop a distinctive and engaging portrait of today’s Ozarkers.

The characters in Down Along the Piney often find themselves in desperate situations – not necessarily physically, but emotionally or spiritually. A poignant story entitled “Mission to Mars” focuses on a young man named Brad Naylor, once the “smartest kid in high school” in a small Missouri town, whose life could be measured by its lapses. Mort writes, deep into Brad’s consciousness:

Surely, if a kid worked hard enough and could think fast enough, he’d succeed. But a kid couldn’t think at all, and story of his life, Brad tripped himself up. He got a scared little Christian girl pregnant. She was cute. Wore those short skirts. They set themselves up in a rented trailer, and saved for a house, and tried, and tried, and tried, to join the middle class.

But Brad’s talent for self-sabotage exerts itself again a few years later when he steals from his employer, the local bank, to make some missed mortgage payments. The theft is discovered, and forgiven, as is often the case in small towns; but something in Brad’s nature doesn’t allow him to accept a life of predictability and limitation. As the story opens, we see him arriving in Florida, having run away from home and family, starting a new life as a short-order cook in a run-down diner. Brad is a fugitive, but not from the law. He is a fugitive from himself.

Pressed by their circumstances, the characters experience loss and longing. This longing may be for an actual place, or for an imaginary place, or for some quality that they sense – intuitively – is missing from their lives. “The Hog Whisperer,” one of the most significant stories in Down Along the Piney, portrays Carrie Kreider, a physically and socially awkward woman, whose oddities alienate her from the people around her although they prove surprisingly useful in her job at an immense hog operation in west Texas. But Carrie’s longing for meaningful human contact pushes her into decisions that most people would call foolhardy. Another story in the collection, “Red Rock Valley,” focuses on Donald Stone, an aging gay man who has lost his longtime partner. He is called home from Chicago to the Ozarks when his father is near death:

He checked in at the nurses station and saw the doctor—a tall, grave Kenyan he could barely understand—the one time he would. “Alvin does not like the catheter. He fights, and he is a very old man.”

“He was never in a hospital. Will he get through this?”

The doctor shrugged almost contemptuously and then caught himself, as if, in the past, he’d been criticized for his insensitivity. He shook his head. “What we can, we do.”

So, Donald thought. My father is a dead man, and that is why I am here.

But in this atmosphere of double loss, Donald seeks reconciliation with his uncomprehending family and healing for his psychic wounds.

Another story in Down Along the Piney places this sense of loss right in the title: “Home Place.” Another strayed son, Wayne Dietrich, comes home to Texas County to review his relationship with his deceased parents and to try to make a new start in life. Fixing up the old home place, he reminisces:

In winter, late at night after Henry and Louise had gone to bed, he liked to prop his bare feet on the oven door, shifting them as they toasted. He read Jack London’s Klondike stories here, as the wind howled out of the woods and slapped snow against the kitchen windows, and the imperfectly dried slab wood his father bought from the sawmill shrilled with escaping steam. He heated cocoa, solved his algebra problems, and fretted whether girls named Susan and Miranda and Meg would go out with him.

“Where are they now?” he murmured, sipping soup as if it would restore life. He visualized each teenaged girl even though they all were in their thirties now, married and divorced and married again. The smart ones, the pretty ones, all left for the city and never returned. You couldn’t make a living in Texas County.

This sense of loss puts the characters into motion, sometimes in irrational or foolish ways, and puts them at odds with the prevailing desires of the people around them. They flee the real or imagined bonds that hold them down. They lash out at those who care for them, or retreat into stubborn insensibility. And occasionally, although this is rare in Mort’s stories, they engage in violence. In “Take the Man Out and Shoot Him” in Down Along the Piney, probably the closest we get in any of Mort’s stories to the hillbilly-noir gothic sensibility we see in other Ozark writers or narratives set in the Ozarks, a young man named Birdy, a former meth user from Shannon County, becomes involved with a right-wing Christian theme park called New Jerusalem near Eureka Springs.

Birdy had learned about Jesus and being saved long before, at the Granderson Treatment Center. If you went on about religion there, they treated you better, and he came to think of Jesus as his ace in the hole. Sometimes, he forgot about it, but down deep still believed he could be redeemed. He said, “I’d rather burn in hell than go back to Shannon County.”

As one can envision from this quotation, things do not go well for Birdy.

Two additional thematic tendencies deserve note. First, many of these stories can be read in terms of their religious imagery. Never didactic or overt, the stories nevertheless bring us characters who are experiencing conflict between what one must call their spiritual and their worldly selves. Some of these characters are specifically thinking about God; others are more generally contesting short-term desires with more abstract aspirations.

Another characteristic is that Mort’s work expands the cast of characters in Ozarks fiction. Not all of his stories in Down Along the Piney are set in the Ozarks, or include Ozark characters; but of those that do, there’s a rich range of characters: poor, uneducated country boys; those same country boys, grown into an aching middle age; the mid-level inhabitants of small town – firefighters, deputies, bureaucrats; fundamentalist preachers and members of their flocks; retired military men, fighting off with varying degrees of success the ghosts of the wars they fought; and to my mind the most significant, expatriates. As we know from our rural sociology, or from our literature, the longing for an absent homeland is an immensely powerful emotion. And in these stories we encounter many characters in economic or self-imposed exile from the farm or small town where they grew up. The sense of longing I mentioned earlier is particularly intense in these stories, even if the characters are sometimes unaware of what they are longing for. The Ozarks means something to these characters, living in Chicago and St. Louis, Georgia or Florida, and an important part of their story comes through their working out that meaning.

I would point to the final two stories in Down Along the Piney as examples of the importance of this impulse. In “Mariposas,” the main character is a fifteen-year-old girl named Portia, born in Arkansas to Mexican parents, who must return to Mexico when the father is fired from his job at a meat-processing plant for being too old and slow. Portia is not someone we would ordinarily think of as an Ozarks character; but she is just as Ozarks as the rest of us, nowadays, and her unhappiness in Mexico is a compound of alienation from the country most of us would describe as her “homeland” and a longing to return to the familiar surroundings of Dardanelle, Arkansas. Ironically, she sees the local girls in Angangueo as “hillbillies,” applying the familiar term of dismissal in the opposite direction of its typical use.

Angangueo, the “hometown” her parents return to, is the terminus of the monarch butterfly migration (thus the story’s title). And so one morning Portia accompanies her father as he guides a group of these tourists, Americans like herself though they would never recognize her as such, into the mountains to see the butterflies. The story’s ending is a gentle recognition of the central metaphor suggested by the title, that Portia and her family are themselves mariposas, migrating in perpetual circulation between their Mexican nesting grounds and their northern reaches for reasons that are unfathomable but impelling. The Ozarks are far from Angangueo, and yet they are not.

The final story, “The Hidden Kingdom,” follows a young man named Eddie, who is for all practical purposes wasting his life in a factory job in Georgia, until by a mere chance he wins the lottery. There is a fantastical quality to this story as Eddie sets out from Valdosta toward an unclear destination. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s going, and as he travels, everywhere seems to be the same: “McDonald’s, Papa John’s, Pet Palace, Walmart, Manny’s Chiquita, Paesano’s, Mattress Land, Home Depot, Kroger, Walmart, Baptist Church, Culver’s, Bank of America, Verizon, Checkers, Target, Comfort Inn, Wendy’s, Jack in the Box, Dickey’s.” But his direction is west and north, and finally he reaches a place where the chain stores end. A tiny town on the Piney River, sort of a rustic utopia with a winery, a canoe rental, a dulcimer shop, and of course a drug treatment center. Eddie the Ozark Odysseus has come home, and as he says near the end of the story, “Maybe you came to this woebegone, dreamy place before entering Heaven. You walked through the deserted town and topped a hill. You looked back and couldn’t remember where you parked. You walked on, free at last, toward the singing.”

            Down Along the Piney is an admirable addition to any bookshelf of Ozarks writing, with stories that are sad and sweet in roughly equal measure.

John Mort at reading

John Mort, reading from his work at the University of Notre Dame bookstore.

Christ of the Ozarks

28 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in History, Ozarks

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Arkansas, art, Christ of the Ozarks, Eureka Springs, Gerald L. K. Smith, religion, statues, True Detective

In the final episode of the third season of HBO’s crime drama True Detective, there’s a fleeting overhead shot of a landmark that most Ozarkers would instantly recognize.

09-02-06--ChristofOzarks

By Bobak Ha’Eri – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:09-02-06–ChristofOzarks.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2047158

No, that’s not the image you see, nor the image you’ll see if you drive out to this statue. What you’ll see is this:

Christ of Ozarks back-view

from TripAdvisor

Yes, Christ is looking the other way. How’s that for a ready-made metaphor?

The “Christ of the Ozarks” statue sort-of overlooks Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It faces in the direction of Eureka Springs, anyway, although it’s hard to see from most parts of the town. It’s an easy statue to criticize, with its oversized head, weirdly neutral expression, and boxy shape, almost as though it’s actually a radio tower disguised to look like a statue of Jesus. And is that a bosom? But aesthetics are not really that statue’s point, anyway.

Religion has played an enormous part in the cultural story of the Ozarks. Historians identify Baptists and Methodists as the largest of the early denominations, with significant pockets of Catholics and Lutherans in particular areas. In later years, Pentecostal denominations such as the Assemblies of God and others experienced great growth. By the time the “Christ of the Ozarks” was erected in 1966, the area, like the South in general, had been entrenched for more than a hundred years as a bastion of no-nonsense Protestantism. Even today, a new arrival is likely to experience the “have you found a church home yet?” question within minutes in a conversation with neighbors.

The religious influence has been, pardon the phrase, a mixed blessing for the area. On the one hand, the deep-rooted Christianity of many of the people I have known and loved has been a constant example of our better capabilities, our capacity for kindness, love, generosity, and unselfishness. Unfortunately, there’s also the intolerant and judgmental side as well, and sometimes those two components coexist side by side.

When I look at the statue, I see the weird history behind it. The brainchild of far-right radio evangelist and anti-Semite Gerald L. K. Smith, the statue was intended to be the centerpiece of a religious theme park that would include a replica version of Jerusalem, a premise that John Mort plays with in his short story “Take the Man Out and Shoot Him” in his new collection Down Along the Piney. Jerusalem never got built, although the park does have a “Holy Land” tour featuring selected replicas of Biblical scenes, the statue, and a Passion Play. I’ve searched their website and can find no mention of the park’s founder. Just as well – the Ozarks don’t really need a designated memorial to a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer who founded the America First Party, in 1943 no less.

This statue has a triumphalist vibe to it, like some kind of Hittite monument, and quite frankly it gives me the willies. Oversized statuary always makes me question the message of the image. Mount Rushmore comes to mind, of course, with its pantheon of heroes; the nobility of expression on those faces recalls us to the potential of America’s greatness, although I’ve sometimes wondered if their crowding on the mountainside also implies that no one will ever achieve that greatness again (Where would we put him/her?). The massive monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia, likewise, places its figures into a setting of godlike heroism, although the meta-message there seems pretty disturbing.

The choice of immensity is intended to be overpowering, to bear down all doubts and questions. Don’t like this Jesus? Too bad. He’s going to be gazing down at you with that blank and inscrutable expression wherever you go. But the question remains: Why erect a two-million-pound Christ over a region that has been unflinchingly Christian for generations? It’s not as though the people down below need inspiration.

Every theme park needs a landmark, I guess.

face-detail-of-christ

from TripAdvisor

 

I Should Really Stay Away from the FSA Archives

12 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in History, Ozarks, People, Photos, Rural

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art, Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Farm Services Administration, Great Depression, John Vachon, Ozarks, photography

A recent inquiry, which I will write about later, sent me to the Library of Congress‘ Farm Services Administration digital archive, looking at images. I’ve posted a few before. This is an amazing archive of photographs by some of the greatest photographers in twentieth-century America. It’s truly a bottomless pit for the curious browser. Here are a few that showed up when I searched the archive using “Ozark” as the filter term:

Children of Ozarks Farmer - Missouri 1940

Children of Ozarks Farmer – Missouri, 1940

Ozark Children

Ozark Children, 1940

Ozark Farmer and Family 1940

Ozark Farmer and Family, 1940

Ozark Mountain Girls 1940

Ozark Mountain Girls, 1940

William Stamper and Wife

William Stamper and Wife, Who Have Lived in the Ozarks for More Than Fifty Years, 1936

Woman with Spinning Wheel

Rehabilitation Client at Spinning Wheel, 1935

 

Map Time!

27 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in History, Missouri, Ozarks, People, Rural, Writing

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Current River, economics, history, Jefferson City, lumber, maps, Ozarks, Poplar Bluff, railroads, Van Buren

img_1518

My affection for old maps goes back a long way, as any of my longtime friends and family can testify. Maps are fuel for the imagination, and I still use historic maps a lot.

I’ve developed a new talk that I’m ready to start giving to libraries and civic groups – it’s about the timber boom in Missouri that began in the late 1880s and continued into the teens, and the cultural and environmental repercussions of that boom. Needless to say, historic maps play a part. The one shown here is an 1877 railroad map of Missouri.

The solid line is the Iron Mountain Railroad, which had only reached as far as Pilot Knob before the war, but had by 1877 been extended all the way into Arkansas. The dotted lines are “projected” railroads; and by “projected” we can go all the way from “overtly planned” to “wishfully imagined.” I re-read Dee Brown’s classic Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow recently, and it was striking in his research how haphazard the railroad expansion was; if a speculator could get enough backers, then a railroad in that area would be built, regardless of need or connection to existing lines. Railroad mania extended to the local level in the form of county governments that would grant all kinds of incentives to railroad companies, including bonds that would burden the counties for decades afterward when the company went bust. David Thelen’s Paths of Resistance describes many instances of counties across the state that gave tremendous financial assistance to sketchy railroad companies, often assisted by liberal amounts of graft, followed by taxpayer revolts in later years as the bond payments came due. Indeed, some of the incidents of courthouse-burning that occurred in the state during the latter part of the 19th century can be attributed to taxpayers trying to wipe out the county’s tax records in a spasm of felonious retribution. (Other instances occurred because of another type of crime-covering, which I will devote a later post to.)

For the purposes of my talk, though, the item of interest on that map is the projected railroad between Van Buren and Poplar Bluff. In 1877, it was an item of fancy, although lines would eventually be built from Williamsville to Van Buren and from Neelyville (not shown on the map) to Doniphan. But the central development in the timber boom was what became known as the Current River Line, which came in from the west, snaking in from Willow Springs to Mountain View to Birch Tree to Van Buren and eventually to a town that didn’t even exist yet, the timber-milling hub of Grandin. That was the line that opened up the southern Ozarks to the timber boom.

I gave this talk at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City last weekend and was fortunate that Gene Brunk, a longtime forester in Missouri, was in the audience. Gene’s grandfather was a fireman (a boiler-stoker, that is, not a firefighter) at the smaller of the two Grandin mills, and Gene had some wonderful photos and stories to tell.

 

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