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.