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.