Images of the Past

Tags

detail, history, interpretation, photography, St. Louis

Researching my next book, I came across this trove of photographs in the online magazine Monovisions. 

There’s something about the visual image that arrests in a way that verbal descriptions never do. I lose myself in a narrative or descriptive account, letting my imagination recreate the scene; but with a photograph or map I find myself studying ever more closely, seeking out meaning in the slightest detail.

This photograph was identified as “ca. 1900” and located on Market Street. Let’s assume that the street address on the photo – 1310 – follows the same numbering system in use today. Here’s what’s there now:

A pocket park next to City Hall.

I’m tempted by the story, how the city went from Image A to Image B, but I’m also irresistibly drawn to the image itself. The life in that photograph! The man peering out from the dark interior on the left – is he the proprietor? And what draws his attention? The blurred passerby near him, or the two loafers propped again the liquor window farther down? I can’t make out the posters in that window, but they appear to be promoting a circus that’s coming to town. Below that, California wines are advertised. California wine, in Missouri, at that time? I never imagined.

The enormous billboard on the roof is another infinite attraction. The Forest Park Highlands will be opening for the season soon! There’s a matinee at the Imperial! And who can resist Tomlinson’s Dead Shot and Quick Relief Oil? I’d buy a bottle just for the name.

And these pavers, identified as working on Compton Avenue north of Meramec in 1906, spiffy in their neckties. Why so many paving stones out? I’m guessing it had something to do with getting a good fit of the stones, with pride in one’s craft. Judging by the spires of St. Anthony of Padua in the background, this looks to be the block today:

Those stone paving blocks are still underneath the asphalt, I’ll bet. That would be Gasconade Street crossing, which puts the location way south in St. Louis, down in Dutchtown. A solid and respectable address even then, with gaslamps, limestone foundations, and a big brick neighborhood church. You can see in the background how the paved street will improve the place, as the rutted dirt track leads up the hill to St. Anthony’s.

Finally (for my purposes, anyway: there are more photos in the article), an unidentified street in the early twentieth century. It’s just the beginning of the motorized era; a sleuth more expert in early automobiles could probably identify the year by the look of the light cargo carrier in the right foreground. But carriages still dominate. Ahead of the man in the motorcar is another man in a one-horse gig, following a wagon that appears to be laden with sacks of grain as it labors up the muddy, tracked hill. But most fascinating of all is the heavy wagon coming in from a side street to the left, with an enormous wooden barrel. Delivering? Taking away? Whatever the task, I wouldn’t want to be that horse.

The marvel about old photographs is how the edges, the details, reveal as much or more than the putative subject. The cock of a hat, the item in a window, the passing glance, all speak to us.

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An Indispensable Book

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Branson, Crystal Payton, float trips, Galena, James River, Kimberling City, lakes, Leland Payton, rivers, Seymour, Springfield, Table Rock, White River

Readers of books on Ozarks culture and geography are probably familiar with Leland and Crystal Payton, whose earlier works, Damming the Osage, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, The Beautiful and Enduring Ozarks, and others, explore elements of the Ozark experience in a reflective and sympathetic though unromanticized way.

Now the Paytons are out with a new book, James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, which treats the James Fork (or James River, depending on your choice of nomenclature) much as Damming the Osage dealt with its river: exploring its culture, its notable inhabitants, its controversies, its geography and hydrology, its history, and ultimately its submersion into a manmade lake, in this case Table Rock Lake, which swallowed up many miles of what had been one of Missouri’s great float streams. The James gets less attention than other Ozarks rivers; it doesn’t have the national recognition of the Buffalo, Current, or Eleven Point, nor the long sinuous might of the Osage. But the stories gathered from along the James, and the variety of its topography as it flows west from near Seymour, skirts the southern edge of Springfield, then abruptly heads south through Galena to its meeting with the lake near Kimberling City, make for a book that should be on the shelf of anyone with an interest in the Ozarks, its streams, or its people.

James Fork of the White is an oversized book, 352 pages with full-color illustrations from start to finish. Many of the illustrations are photographs by Leland Payton, whose work has documented the Ozarks for decades. Payton’s photographic gaze is contemplative, sometimes wry, and often focused on the human artifacts that have marked the landscape over the generations: old bridges, buildings, the remnants of milldams and springhouses, signs, and sometimes (though not insistently) an actual human. The overlook-at-sunset-in-autumn photo is not to be found – or if found, is likely to be a tad off kilter. Just as valuable in the illustrations are the vast numbers of historical images the Paytons have collected, including postcards, maps, clippings, pamphlets, labels, and other ephemera. Taken together, the historic images and the contemporary photographs create a rich visual portrait of the James River watershed.

The text of the book, as with Damming the Osage, consists of brief vignettes about people, incidents, and landscapes within the region, grouped together into chapters that converge on a broader topic: the geography of the region, the upper river, the Springfield section, and the famous float trip stretch from Galena to Branson, for example. Each chapter covers a number of topics within that broad subject area, each typically taking two to four pages before moving on. Like the images, the text covers an immense variety of subjects. There were some I was dimly aware of, some I was familiar with, and many, many that I’d never heard of before. The Paytons, who live in Springfield, have made this river a particular project of documentation, and this book covers everything from forgotten industries and settlements to recent controversies over pollution and development.

I found the saga of the creation of Table Rock Dam and its lake particularly interesting. I suspect I am not alone in assuming that Table Rock originated in the wave of flood control public works projects of the mid-twentieth century, part of the “big dam foolishness” chronicled in Elmer T. Peterson’s book of the same name, but I was surprised to learn that the dam had its roots much farther back. The book details the plans of multiple entrepreneurs to dam the James as early as 1908, plans which were thwarted and resuscitated over the decades as the winds of politics and economics shifted. James Fork of the White treats the creation of Table Rock Lake with evenhanded understanding. The lake has brought immense economic development to Branson and the surrounding area, but that development came at the cost of the permanent inundation of hundreds of miles of valleys, farmland, and settlements. The James Fork’s legendary Galena-to-Branson float, itself a tourist attraction in its own right, was lost to the more mechanized allure of deep flat water, stocked trout, and big bass fishing.

James Fork of the White is a book I will return to again and again, both for the richness of its images and for the variety of its information. For residents of Springfield and the White River valley, and for anyone interested in Ozarks history and culture, this is an indispensable book.

The Humble PawPaw

Tags

Darren Osburn, George Washington, pawpaw, The Language of Trees, trees

My friend Darren Osburn sent me this photo of some unripe pawpaws recently, which got me thinking. I remember eating pawpaws as a youngster; I liked the taste, which vaguely resembled that of a banana, but the seeds had to be worked around. A crude but reasonably effective way of telling when they’re ripe is to watch for raccoon scat—once you start to see pawpaw seeds in it, you know the pawpaws are ready. As with persimmons, eating an unripe one is a mistake made only once.

My mom used to sing “Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch,” which some of you may remember. It’s a children’s tune about poor little Susie (or Nellie in other versions), who is way down yonder, etc., picking up pawpaws and putting them in her pocket, accompanied by hand gestures to match. Poor little Nellie had the good sense to pick the pawpaws off the ground, which meant that they were ripe, rather than off the tree.

My reading tells me that the pawpaw is the largest indigenous native fruit in North America and that chilled pawpaws were one of George Washington’s favorite desserts. There is also a dinosaur called the Pawpawsaurus, so named not because it dined on pawpaws (although it was a herbivore), but because its fossils were found in a rock formation in Texas known as the Paw Paw Formation. Still, I like the idea of pawpawsauruses roaming the earth in bygone times.

 

Favorite Ozarks Images – 14

Tags

Anemone, Missouri, Ozarks, photography, St. Francis River, Wildflowers

Rue anemone on granite

In honor of the approach of spring, here’s a photo I took some years ago at the Silvermines Shut-Ins. I was taken by the patterns of the water over the granite and the contrast with the anemone blossom that had drifted in from somewhere.

Seriously, You Should Check Out This Website

Tags

Crystal Payton, Hypercommon, Leland Payton

If you’re interested in Ozarks culture and heritage, and aren’t afraid of some thoughtful analysis to go along with that interest, you should bookmark Hypercommon.com, a multi-media website recently set up by Leland and Crystal Payton. The Paytons are long-time collectors of Ozarks memorabilia, writers and photographers on contemporary and historical Ozarks subjects, and deep analysts of the economic and political decisions that have shaped much of the Ozark landscape. This website engages all their interests, and every post is interesting. Ozarks geeks, check it out. Hypercommon.com.

Favorite Ozarks Images – 13

Tags

Missouri, nature, Ozarks, photography, rivers, St. Francis River

Near the St. Francis River, Madison County, Mo.

Two New Books by Leland Payton

Tags

art, books, creativity, Missouri, nature, Ozarks, photography, writing

I was fortunate enough to obtain advance copies of these two new books recently, and I’ve been dipping into them section by section and page by page ever since. They are both essentially photo books, although both contain judiciously selected text (essays, comments, reminiscences) as well.

Subtlety is something of a lost value in our current esthetic environment. The outré and shocking gather attention and acclaim, encouraging a spiral of provocation in which each new art work must be more shocking than the last. But these books are subtle, and they take time to appreciate.

I’ve gone back and forth as to which is my favorite, but I think I’ve finally settled on Ozark-Prairie Border (176 pp.). This book depicts the area between Kansas City and Springfield, where the Ozarks slope down to wide bottomland and prairie, and where the beauty of the landscape takes more than one look to see. One response many people might have to some of these photographs – a wire fence enclosing a grassy field, a dilapidated building in a small town square, a bulletin board in a country diner – is “I could have taken that picture!” But would you? Would you have seen the unexpected richness of color in that field? Or the rhythm of the rural architecture, the beauty in small things that is celebrated here? The images on these pages reward contemplation. They are visual meditations on the rural places of western Missouri, and I find myself looking at them again and again.

Missouri Squarely Seen (114 pp.) ranges more widely and narrowly at the same time. It covers the entire state – landscape, people, buildings – but all images were taken with a square-format camera and retain that shape. Like the form of a poem, the square format of the image both constrains and challenges the photographer, demanding and rewarding a fresh compositional approach. The photographs in this book are rarely conventionally beautiful; in fact, the traditionally “photogenic” subjects are often treated ironically. In the square format, the Kansas City skyline, ripe for panorama, occupies only the middle fifth of the frame, with a street in the lower two-fifths, a kid climbing a weedy embankment beyond the street, and a Fifties-postcard-blue sky stretching much too far above the buildings for a conventional composition. The result is a somewhat comic distancing and diminishment of the classic landscape view. In some cases, though, the square image does not distance us, but rather focuses our attention on some person or object placed at a strategic spot within the frame.

Payton has a remarkable eye for color, and both these books are filled with richly saturated images in which the colors collide, harmonize, joust, or disappear into unexpected darkness. Both books are rich, rewarding, and beautifully produced. If you love photography, or Missouri, or both, you should get yourself copies. They’re available from Lens & Pen Press.

Time for Learning

Tags

nature, plants

I pride myself on knowing most of the flowers, trees, and shrubs of the Ozarks. So I was caught aback when this plant caught my eye while I was on a walk:

At first I thought it was poison ivy, but the red berries threw me off. I wondered if there was a variety of poison ivy that had red berries, or perhaps that it was poison oak, but a little research disproved both those theories.

After searching and searching both in my reference books and online, I finally spotted it — it’s fragrant sumac! No wonder I mistook it; it’s in the same genus (Rhus) as poison ivy and oak. Turns out that fragrant sumac is used as a native ornamental as well, although these plants were growing wild. I don’t know why I never noticed it before. My guess is that I have seen it many times, but only registered the three-leaf clusters, thought “poison ivy — stay away!” and never looked any closer.

So something new learned. Always a wonderful moment, and I never tire of the joy of learning new things.

More from Roaring River

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favorite_places, Missouri Writers Guild, Ozarks, parks, photography, Roaring River

This gallery contains 3 photos.

Roaring River – 2

Tags

favorite_places, Missouri, nature, Ozarks, photography, Roaring River, springs

This gallery contains 2 photos.

I have written earlier about Roaring River here. Just visited there again this week, and was struck once again by …

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