Crockett's Bluff Easter Egg Hunt: circa 1930?

This image provides an excellent example of the merit of old photographs, regardless of their condition.  Unfortunately this one suffers from a flaw in the development process, quite sharp and clear in its lower half and yellowing and losing its sharpness in the faces of the figures in the back row.  It appears to be an Easter egg hunt at the great Prange yard at the Bluff directly across from the Prange water tower, for so long the landmark of the Bluff.

Not great quality but clear enough to preserve images of people, two of my brothers and others I would know well in my youth -- though it was probably taken before I was born.  Youthful ghosts from the past -- found in one of "Miss Cora's" albums -- thanks to Jean Prange.

The second from the left (standing) is my brother Bill.  My brother Shelby is standing slightly to his left and front with his hands folded.  I think next to Shelby is Betty Anderson with her brother Bud sitting on the ground (dark jacket) near August Prange (with his head tilted)..  Ida Carolyn Prange is in the center obviously, holding an Easter basket.  I think Neva Graves' sister Willine? is directly behind her, second from right..

I don't recognize anyone else, but there must be folks alive who do.  There are no doubt stories behind such a picture.  An annual affair?  Who might these other children be? 

DPW

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.