Crockett's Bluff : A 1930 View From Above

From David Prange's Crockett's Bluff As I Remember It

This view, looking north from the top of the [August] Prange water tower, was made in 1930 by Louis Prange, a cousin of David Prange whose Crockett's Bluff As I Remember It is to date the only known memoir of a Crockett's Bluff resident.

It shows a relatively flourishing community on the banks of the White River that can be seen in all its relative majesty drifting down around the bend at the right.  On the left one can see the Prange sawmill, the [Adolph or "Pete"] Prange store, the wagon shed, the Lutheran church, the Pool store, and the River.  Just down the lane to the west and up a gentle rise from the Lutheran church sat the house where I would be born five years or so later.

Fortunately for us, Louis was apparently on a mission to capture and record what central views of the Bluff looked like from the air.  More stores can be seen in this southward view -- on the right the Schwab store and the wagon shed and on the left the Inman store and, most significant, the irrigation canal that extended out into the prairie and the rice fields, and that served as a "swimming hole" for every child in the Bluff well up into the 1960s and 70s.

This was the Crockett's Bluff into which I was born but a Bluff that was already in the process of rapid change as the Great Depression came to an end and the World War II years began.  My earliest recollections do not include either a Pool store or an Inman store.  My family would in 1941 migrate first to DeWitt; then briefly to Conway, and then to Little Rock where we would live until the war's end in 1945.  When we returned to the Bluff that summer we would find no Adolph Prange store.  The entire family had by 1944 migrated to California.

1930's Road Work: Where?

These interesting photographs are of elaborate road work going on either in Crockett's Bluff (or perhaps in St. Charles) during the late 1920's or early 1930's.  They contain a few buildings and landmarks that might offer clues.  They come courtesy of Jean Prange from an album that belonged to her mother-in-law "Miss Cora" Prange Swindler.

A clear view of a storefront and a distant house.  Could this have been the WPA project [see note below]that transformed the dirt road through the Bluff to gravel?   Nice shot of the state of the art machinery at work.

Mules at work and clear views of structures on both sides of the road.

Schwab family house?

If the major storefront here is the Prange store, then the mystery is solved.  Was the structure on the canal side of the road the Inman Store?  What appears here to be a power pole would date it after the arrival of electricity at the Bluff.  Even I can remember when it arrived at our place.  (At least, I think I can.) 

[In his memoir David Prange alludes to the red clay of the Hill Road before the marvelous improvements brought by the WPA graveling of the road through the Bluff: 

"The Hill Road designation was not due to having been named for the Hill family, which was in residence there, but because within the first one-half mile upon leaving the Bluff three hills were encountered which were uniformly situated and almost equal in the height of about fifty feet.  To navigate the Hill Road during and immediately after a rain was a very real challenge because it was comprised of red clay.  At a later time, during the Great Depression, the WPA graded the road to be more level after which they surfaced it with loose gravel."  

So, these pictures could very well be of that WPA effort -- historical indeed!

Footnotes of a Recent Visit

Images acquired from a visit to the Bluff in 2011.  The W.R. Smith family farm was located to the southwest several miles well out of the Bluff, but they were members of the Lutheran Church that was located at the end of our driveway beside the Adolph Prange Store on the bank of the river.

W.R. and Elsie Smith "around 1950"

Crockett's Bluff School class  late '30's?

BR: Duke Trice _ Lewis Rush, Willine Graves _ Harold Rush _ Shelby Woodiel.  FR: _  _ Ida Carolyn Prange _ _ _ _.

Janice and Carlotta Smith

Prange home in snow about 1930.

Grand Prairie Historical Society Meeting

A fall meeting of the Grand Prairie Historical Society was held October 20, 2011 at the Schwab's Store building at Crockett's Bluff.  As one of the society's newer members, having only heard of its existence on a few months ago, I was pleased to be able to attend.  When Eddie and Thelma Schwab retired in the mid 1980s their store was closed.  Throughout my childhood from the mid 1930s until then it was the center of activities in the Bluff.

 

Darrell Gardner, a son-in-law and wife of their daughter Vickie, addresses the group regarding the general history of Crockett's Bluff, as well as the history of the store and the Schwab family that began in America with Eddie's father Sebastian whose blacksmith operated for years near the back entrance of the store.  (Someone noted on a picture made  in the 1930s of the store from the top of the Prange water tower that Sebastian could be seen -- to those with a keen sight -- moving through a gate when the picture was taken.)

DPW with Raymond Sweetin, Jr. of Stuttgart at the meeting.

Notes on the Eason Family's Continuing Saga

This  marvelous image is of Jesse Eason in front of a Crockett's Bluff store in 1926.  Vickie Schwab Gardner passed this along, having received it from John Cover whose grandfather John A. Eason was Jesse's older half brother.  John Cover's details are listed below.  - DPW

"Floyd Eason told me the photo was taken in 1926 at the old store in Crockett's Bluff.  Floyd was Jesse Eason's youngest son.  His older son was called J.L. Eason  Both sons are dead now, but both lived into their 80's. 

"I have attached the picture of my grandfather John A. Eason's younger half brother Jesse Eason.  I think Jesse was the oldest child of my great-grandfather John L. Eason's second marriage.  My grandfather was about three when his mother died and his step-mother was Etta Watkins Eason. 

"Grand-dad's biological mother's gravestone is in your Crockett's Bluff cemetery;  Emma Caroline Lowe Eason.  I helped some of my mother's younger sisters replace the old hand carved stone with a more modern one about thirty years ago, and would you believe we got her death date wrong by two years!  She died in 1891 but somehow we gave the stone mason 1893.  My grandfather was born in 1887, but some places he is listed as born in 1888.  

"The old John Loyd Eason land in Crockett's Bluff is still in my Eason family.  Robert Eason, my mom's older brother, ended up with the land and passed it down to Maurice Eason who still owns it.  I don't know where it will go when Maurice is gone, but he does have a daughter that I do not know except by name."-John W. Cover

[Like the individuals and incidents in so many posts on this site, this one produces questions.  For example, which of the "old Crockett's Bluff stores" would have been functioning in 1926?  Inman?  Prange?  Schwab?  And what is that apparently freshly killed beast that Jesse has attached to his saddle?  Bob Cat?  I welcome -- in the "Comments" space below this article -- your added information, your questions, and your general reactions to the site.] 

Further note re early Bluff stores:  In Crockett's Bluff as I Remember It David Prange, in captions to two photographs made from the water tank in about 1930, notes four stores: from the north, the Poole Store and the Prange Store; from the south, The Schwab Store and the Inman Store.  In addition, there must have been the August Prange (company) Store that can't be seen in the picture. DPW 8.24.11

Eason Family Note: September 3, 2011

John Cover's notes re his maternal Great-Grandfather, John Loyd Eason, pictured above, taken in 1931:

John Loyd ( b. 1863, d. 1943) would have been 68 years old in the picture, and the baby he is holding is Maurice Eason the older son of Robert L. Eason (b. 1910).  Robert was my mother’s oldest brother, and the oldest child of John Abner Eason (b. 1888, d. 1969) and Mary Malinda Watkins Eason (b. 1894, d. 1962), with mom (b. 1919, d. 1964) being the next child (they lost 2 or 3 between Robert and mom). Great-Grandfather John Loyd Eason arrived at Crockett’s Bluff in 1878 along with his brother, Samuel Abner Eason. In the 1880 census he (John Loyd) was listed as a boarder in the home Nancy Crockett, the widow of David Crockett who died in 1869.

Schwab's Store: The Center of Activity for Decades

[Note: this post is -- like many others on this site -- "under construction" -- expanding as new stories and pictures come to the surface.  Clearly, Schwab's Store was the center of all activities in Crockett's Bluff for half a century until it was finally closed in the late 1980s. ]

Vicki Schwab Gardner and her father Eddie at the center of activities near the entrance to the store (in the mid 1950s?)  The best image I've seen of the store as I remember it in my youth.  One of the most general of general stores of those times -- complete with a pool room in the back and an unforgettable pinball machine up front.

I've been told this shot was actually made by Eddie Schwab from atop the Prange water tower with a primary view of the Prange Farm store and an excellent view of the gardens behind the Schwab Store.  Late 1930s or '40s

Through an Old Man's Eyes

The following memoir by Jim Spencer was forwarded to me by Jeanie Marrs Vasseur who lived much of her childhood a stone's throw from the White River in Crockett's Bluff across the river road from Mr. George Gosnell, the subject of this recollection.  It was originally published in the Lightnin' Ridge Journal in June 2004. 

Through an Old Man’s Eyes

By Jim Spencer

            When you leave the pavement and take the winding gravel road that eventually leads you down to the river, it’s not long before you pass a brush-choked old home place on the right. Nothing is left to show of it now, but a friend of mine once lived there.

            In the early 1950s, when my family came almost weekly to our cabin on the river, my first order of business upon arrival was to run down the hill to visit Mr. Gosnell. We’d sit on his front step and talk, and after a while Mrs. Gosnell would bring us fresh oatmeal cookies and cold well water. We were great pals despite our slight age difference. I was six at the time. Mr. Gosnell was 101.

            He was the only person I ever knew who actually remembered the Civil War. “I was born too late to get to fight in it,” he said regretfully. “I was only 13 when it ended. I did throw a rock at that S.O.B. Sherman one time, though.”

            Until Mr. Gosnell was 98, he fished trotlines and limblines in the river. He say ramrod straight in a cane-bottomed chair, paddling up and down the swift river in a one-man cypress boat. They say he was one of the best fishermen on the river, even at 98.

            Mr. Gosnell remembered the river and its surrounding forest the way I’d like to be able to remember them, all virgin timber and lousy with deer and bears and panthers and turkeys. He found in me an appreciative audience, and I listened spellbound to many a tale of adventure in the wilderness. I suspect now that a lot of those tales were invented on the spot to thrill a six-year-old boy, but I guess they could have been true. Some of them, anyway.

            But their truth was unimportant then, and it still is today. If Mr. Gosnell told a whopper now and then, I figure he earned the right. Anyone tough enough to last for more than a century in an environment as harsh and unforgiving as those untamed bottoms can stretch the truth with every breath if that’s what he wants to do.

            But oh, what stories he told: Of Indians traveling up and down the river. Most of whom were friendly but some of whom were not. Of the time they hunt the Union soldiers from the limbs of the gnarled red oak that still stands on a red clay hill above the river. Of the wolves and panthers and bears that came into the very yard in which we sat, killing and carrying off chickens and shoats until they, too, were killed for their trespasses. (The popular version of the soldier-hanging incident says there were nine men hung that day, but Mr. Gosnell maintained it was only five. “Damned if I’ll tell a lie,” he said, “for four miserable Bluecoats.”)

            He told me of other things, too, things I could close my eyes and see as he talked, things I will never see first-hand because like Mr. Gosnell, I, too, was born too late. He told me of ducks falling into tiny potholes and sloughs until they blotted out the sky and blanketed the water, returning stubbornly time after time while Mr. Gosnell shot them by the hundreds for the markets in Memphis and Little Rock and St. Louis. He told me of Canada geese sailing into his smoking guns along the gravel bars and sand bars, and he told me of killing them by the dozen. He told me of the infrequent but terrible raids of millions upon millions of passenger pigeons, and of the temporary but near-total devastation they wrought on the mast-laden oaks and pecans along the river. “I hated to see those things come,” he told me. “When they got through, there wasn’t enough food left to fill up a cat squirrel. But they sure were good eatin’.” Those pigeon stories were the most outlandish of all the stories he told me, and I now suspect they were probably the most truthful as well.

            He was much too old to take me anywhere, but he described a lot of his favorite places to me. I found some of them when I got old enough to roam those bottoms myself, and I’m still finding some of them today. Every time I do, it gives me a little thrill.

            “There’s a little slough back in the woods ‘bout a quarter and a half a quarter southwest of Holly Lake,” he told me one fall morning as we munched cookies on the step. “Used to be a lot of bears back in there on account of there were lots of striped oaks and hackberry trees, and bears like striped oak acorns and hackberries. I never paid much attention, but I expect a fellow could kill a mess of squirrels in there, too, in a dry year when the pecans and white oaks didn’t make.” During a dry year 25 autumns later I recalled what the old man had said, and one morning I walked southwest from Holly Lake. Sure enough, the slough was there. Sure enough, the squirrels were, too.

            My oldest friend is long dead now. His old heart finally gave out on him at 104, and they said he kept his wits about him to the very end. I feel privileged to have known him, because he was one of the last of a vanished breed – men who made their way in the wilderness with hook and trap and gun without changing either themselves or the land on which they lived. A century earlier, Mr. Gosnell would have been a mountain man, trapping beaver, fighting Indians, meeting his compatriots at rendezvous each summer. The only thing men like Mr. Gosnell were ill-equipped to handle was the very thing that killed them off, one by one – the inexorable advance of the monster we know as civilization.

            “I think I’m about ready to go,” the old man told me the last time I ever saw him. “The summers are hotter than they used to be, and the winters are colder. There ain’t no big trees left, and it’s been 20 years since I seen an eagle. A bear steak would ruin my stomach even if I could find one to eat, and the cold water from the dams has ruint the river. I seen the best of it, and now it’s gone. I might as well be going, too.”

            And go he did, not long after. But thanks to him, I “seen the best of it”, too, through the faded blue eyes of a worn-out old man. I can close my eyes and see it still, the way he described it to me 50 years ago, and I can’t walk those bottoms or float that river without remembering something or other he once told me.

            And every time I drive past that brushy vacant lot, I can smell fresh oatmeal cookies.

Clip from its publication in the Pine Bluff Commercial, Feb. 24 1981

Water Rising - Spring 2011

An email from my childhood friend Sharon Bullock Rush on Tuesday Evening, May 10, 2011:



"Dale,

Thought you would like to know that the water in Stinking Bay is almost as high as it was in 1927.  Two feet lower, and I think that it will crest tomorrow.

So that means all of the snakes are coming up the hill.  We have killed three in the driveway.  This morning my yard man was here picking up sticks and he killed three in the back yard.  I have to really look good when I go out side.  I always do.  

The farmers  have finally gotten back in the fields.  The fields were flooded and the roads were real bad.  Even I-40 was shut down.  The big trucks had to come from Hazen through Stuttgart to  DeWitt, Gillett, and to Lake Village and then head north to Memphis.  Now, that was a long haul!

Take Care,

Sharon

Water Rising May Floods 11

White River Flooding

Pictures Awaiting their "Thousand Words"

Many pictures, particularly those with some age and history behind them, are indeed worth a thousand words, as the old saying asserts.  Such words are at the same time worth even more when they are rich with detail and enlightenment -- or even simple nostalgia.

The following pictures are examples special to me.  Although I know something about them, others still among the living know even more than I, particularly about the circumstances of the moment captured in the image, as well as the subjects pictured.

Pictured above is my sister Maurine and my brother Neil on either side of Carlotta Smith at our old home place at the Bluff during the days, perhaps in the late 1940's, before the old water tank was removed from its platform near the back porch.  It's obviously summer and Carlotta's white sandals stand out above the bare feet of my siblings resting in the grass out of sight.  Special occasion?  Who made the picture and why?

This is the basic structure of the Lutheran Church that stood for years before World War II on the river road at the end of drive up from our house.  Sometime after the Prange family closed its store and moved to California the congregation diminished apparently to its end, and the structure was somehow moved four or five miles west of the Bluff to replace a previous structure of the Afro-American congregation at Poplar Creek where it stands today with several of the concrete piers that supported the west end of the original structure serving as an entry.  There must be former Bluff dwellers  still alive with knowledge of the details of this transformation.  If so, these details need to be recorded before they are lost.

These pictures made by Ken Shireman -- originally 35 mm slides recovered digitally -- capture a visit made by him and his sons John and Jason, along with my father S.A., to the river side houseboat of Tony Elmer? a half mile or so around the bend and down from the bluffs themselves, perhaps the last of its kind (that actually floated on logs) to survive in the Bluff area where there had been numerous such structures into the 1930's and early '40's.

The second picture of my father S.A. Woodiel and John Shireman obviously captures the excitement of  what might be John's first deer.  Details please?

The final image of this series is of Russell Marrs on an occasion when he was explaining to Ken the reason for dragging for shells from the White River -- the "pearl button" industry.  Though this procedure has been depicted over the years by others, it was an arduous enterprise -- genuine hard and hot work -- for many river residents during the depression years, especially.  There's much to be said about both the process and the "work ethic" that dragging for shells reflects.  [After "the war," several heroic individuals such as Russell and O.V. Gosnell created rudimentary diving helmets that enabled them to "dive" or decend on anchored ropes to simply gather the mollusks from the river bottom into long knitted sacks.    O.V. hired me at fifty-cents per hour (great wages at the time) as a lookout while he "dove."  My duties were to watch for steamboats and the maintenance of the simple engine that pumped air through a garden hose to his helmet below.  This, of course, is another story on my list.]