Crockett's Bluff School 1938 or 9?

Crockett's Bluff School in late 1930s

Top row: Teacher Duke Price, Blank, Lewis Rush, Willene Graves, Blank, Harold Rush, Blank, Shelby Woodiel
Front row: Blank, ?Prange, Ida Carolyn Prange, Blank, Blank, Blank, Blank.
(Identifications would be appreciated)

Birds in the Bluff

     When I was a boy in in the old house on the hill overlooking the White River in Crockett's Bluff in the late 1930s and 40s, we took birds for granted  - domestic as well as wild.  There were birds aplenty flittering about thoughout the days and nights in every season  in a genuine "free range' environment.  Though many folks had "chicken pens," chickens have a way of freeing themselves to wander, a freedom that many households allowed, only to gather them into the pens at the end of the day to sleep in their nests in a "chicken house", away from the various four legged vermits that wandered about the country side at night, sheds at least with a roof and stalls for egg providers.

In the 1930s in places like the Bluff  almost any animal, wild or domestic, was considered edible.  There was not, to say the least, a lot of money at hand.  There were fruit trees, pears and apples in the remnants of the old orchards established by the Prange family, the previous owners of  the land. We raised chickens, of course, and there were always fish from the lakes and the White River, but most larger migratory fowl - mallards and Canada Geese, as well as doves and quail - were eaten, and I can recall having racoon with sweet potatoes (quite tasty, actually).

So-called bird watching was unknown, and I cannot recall anyone who had a bird house.  Their sounds were routine background noise, especially  the Whip Poor Wills and Mourning Doves   that seemed to have, along with the Bull Frogs over the hill in the Prange pod,  a general audience to themselves from the ancient oak trees at the back of the garden during that lovely half hour or so on a summer night when the sun had set before night fell.

During my most recent visit to the Bluff a few weeks ago on the occasion of the funeral of my brother Shelby, I fought the swarms of gnats to at least drive through the old home place, now owned and neatly maintained by my nephew Gary Woodiel.  The old house and all the outbuildings are long gone,  but the remnants of the oldest trees still stood, the pecan near where the old house stood and the old oak on the edge of the hill where I used to park the school bus which I drove during my senior year at St. Charles High School.

As we drove down the short drive past the metal "Woodiel Lane" sign it was obvious that Spring had arrived in all its richness, leaving every local botanical species glowing in  lush greenness.  But as we reached the top of the rise to which in my childhood was our front yard, everything changed.

Suddenly, it was apparent that in almost any direction one looked, among every dozen trees or so, there was a birdhouse of some style in a variety of bright colors!

The Bluffs Themselves

A 1980s? shot made from the plane of a friend of Ken Shireman who flew us over one fine afternoon while I was visiting the Shiremans in Stuttgart.  Fairly good shot of the bluffs themselves and touches of the non wooded areas from the area around the Crockett's Bluff canal in the Schwab Store area at the upper right down to the area of the old Woodiel home spot and on down to the bottom of the road landing to the river at the base of the hill where the hunting lodge is still located.

This original Henry Prange family barn rests solidly still - half its roof visible on the Google Earth image - a few yards west between Schwab's Store and the Prange residence.  It was the scribbled inscriptions within it on its walls and rafters that caught Darrell's eye, particularly the 1916 dates and autographs posted there with brushes in apparently the black stove-polish-like  that was used to mark the Prange logo on the rice sacks stored there in the early decades of the 1900s.  If it was a functioning barn at that date, it had to have been built somewhat earlier, and there's no other structure of any kind in the area known to date back before 1900.

Helen Spence, Dayton Bowers, and a Mysterious Quilt

       When I think of the evolution of photography in America, I tend to think of Matthew Brady whose striking images of young frequently illiterate young men, such as my great grandfather, who enlisted in the Confederate Army in Alabama at about 18, and though badly wounded near the war's end, nevertheless survived.  The Civil War was there to be captured, and Brady ventured southward from New York with this relatively new device, to capture it in images.

       As Fortune would have it, Dayton Bowers was about six when my greatfather enlisted, and the War Between the States would be history before he would discover the artistic possibilities of a camera.  In stark contrast to the horrors of battlefields, Bowers ventured southward from Indiana  to Arkansas in the post war years to capture the lives and fortunes of folks in the vast Grand Prairie in Stuttgart and DeWitt and the smaller towns along the White River like Crockett's Bluff and St. Charles.

       Thanks to the efforts of Denise Parkinson, the significance of his images, as evidence of the richness of  life in this part of Arkansas, particularly that along the White River, in the first decades of the twentieth century, has been "rediscovered."  DPW  5.27.18

       [The fascinating conversation below has been lifted, with Denise's permission, from a Facebook exchange between Denise and Jeanie Marrs Vasseur, and Billy Rabeneck.  Both Jeanie and I were born in Crockett's Bluff, though neither of us actually lived on or in a White River houseboat, as did Denise.]

‎Denise Parkinson‎ to The Rediscovered Archives of Dayton Bowers

· December 15, 2015 ·

This photo of Helen Spence (standing) and her sister Edie Spence was taken around 1915 by Dayton Bowers. It's a detail of a photo of several people and appeared in my book, Daughter of the White River. The quilt in the background was used as a backdrop in several photos I have seen by Bowers, who traveled to St. Charles throughout his career.

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Jeanie Marrs Vasseur My mother's old photos. She told me that it was of Cesiro Spence and my grandfather, taken @ 1917Manage

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Jeanie Marrs Vasseur . The older gentleman is my great grandfather, John Peter Townsend 1854-1922Manage

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Denise Parkinson Wonderful! Did they live in St Charles too?! That's the same quilt!i have seen the top photo before! Thank you 😍

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Jeanie Marrs Vasseur They were woodsmen and lived on the river. This photo was taken (I think) at a timber camp on White River.

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Jeanie Marrs Vasseur Denise, I would not be surprised if all three pictures here were taken at the same time, Compare the pattern at my grt grd father's elbo with the pattern of the seated girl's picture (probably same chair!)

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Billy Rabeneck I wonder if the picture of Helen and Edie was taken from a larger picture? I can see another person's shoulder to the right, like maybe this was a school class picture? A Sunday school class picture or something larger.

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Billy Rabeneck It also occurs to me that this could be Eva, and Wesley Spence (Helen and Edie's half-sister, and half-brother) to the right as well. Edie and Helen's mother was Ellen Woods, and Eva and Wesley's mother was Jeannie Ealum. I think Ellen died at some point, and then Cicero Spence married Jeannie. Jeannie and Cicero evidently divorced because Jeannie, Eva, and Wesley moved to Missouri, and Jeannie remarried.

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You were right, Billy, at least according to Mrs. Hallie Gosnell Keithley - as far as we know the oldest surviving Crockett's Bluff resident - in her Life Story of her father George Gosnell. p. 32 where she labels the four.  I have to say this image of Helen is astonishing.  Waiting for the snap of the shutter?

Life on the White River: Two Revealing Images from the 1920s and '30s

Undated photograph of a family on their houseboat, presumably along the White River. Ark Post Museum State Park  

· 

     This image was posted on Facebook by Denise Parkinson who, like me, remembers houseboats up and down the White River in our younger days.  I have become fascinated, largely thanks to her and a fellow Crockett's Bluff descendant Jim Prange, with the photographer Dayton Bowers who maintained a studio in DeWitt from the 1870s to his death in 1924.  Clearly, one of the pioneers of the art form: more skilled (better cameras?) than Mathew Brady and with a more artistic eye.   This image, like the one below of Helen Spence and her father Cicero and others, which was made by Bowers,  has a number of the same details, particularly in the attention paid to its composition.

     Both images have been carefully staged with captivating attention to detail.  Both designed to reflect a lifestyle.  Would that the houseboat gathering above had been just a bit closer to the camera.  How interesting would be the details of the clothing, particularly those ties worn by men on the roof, two seating in a semi-yoga position, with another squatting to their right  and two others standing behind in casual positions with a leg crossed.

     Below on the lower porch, the elders? or parents? with two young girls, one standing between the elders and another perched on the railing.  Everyone in his or her place.   Randomly balanced.

     And, unlike the image below,  the houseboat leaves everything to the viewer's imagination.  Is this the White River? All one family?  An extended family?  Since the men on the roof appear to be about the same age, were they both family and friends?  Sunday afternoon?  Holiday?  And that relatively fancy boat tied at the right?  And what's the story of the second smaller houseboat in the right background?

     What is clear, however, is this dwelling is several cuts above the houseboats of the ordinary inhabitants -  depicted in the image below - who made their living from the river.

L-R: Cicero Spence, Helen Spence, John Black and others at fur trading barn at St. Charles.  Circa 1919

     Unlike the image above of the houseboat gathering, this image is much closer to the camera and therefore more revealing in its detail.  Although intriguing in its detail of life on the White River in the early decades of the twentieth century, it is even more astonishing as a virtual glimpse of the prehistory of Cicero Spence and his daughter Helen at the left.

     In her Daughter of the White River, Denise Parkinson includes an expanded view of this image that includes the unidentified figure with a rifle at the right of the black dog: "Expanded view of Cicero and Helen Spence and John Black, as well as unidentified boys and a hunter, at a fur trading barn in St. Charles, possibly circa 1918."

     A staged collection of related objects, in addition to the array of furs, are displayed on the wall.  Mostly "hides" of raccoons, with perhaps those of mink - far left behind the rifle next to Cicero - and a single one of a deer, with its  head and antlers at Helen's left.  Everyone kneeling or sitting, everyone dressed appropriately - Cicero with his pistol and vest of shells, the boys in their hats, the powder horn hanging over the deer skin - and every object significant to its theme.  The Brown's Mule chewing tobacco can/box along with angled

Brown's Mule Tobacco Box

wooden beam at the right foreground serve as perfect objects to add balance to the image.

     Obviously, the photographer had more in mind than a simple recording of some folks and some furs.  Hunting and trapping and fishing were the mainstays for survival on the White River in those days - especially during winter months - activities that for survival required killing and slaughter.

     None of those present when this image was captured, certainly not the photographer Dayton Bowers, could have dreamed that by the time this young Helen Spence in her white leggings reached her late teens Cicero would be killed and she would use perhaps the pistol, held here casually in her father's hand,  to kill "her daddy's" killer at his trial in the DeWitt Court House.

Parkinson, Denise, A Treasure Comes Home, May 2015

Prange Family 1995 Visit to Their Birth Place

The Adolph Prange family was arguably the largest and most prominent family in Crockett's Bluff from the late 1920s to the end of World War II.  In 1929 they moved to their house  west of the Prange Store that stood overlooking the White River and the riverside road that ran northward from Rt. 153 along the river embankment to what was generally known as the "steamboat landing."  By the late 1930s and the war years, the older children gradually moved away from the Bluff, and in 1944 the store was closed and Adolph and Edna and the youngest children moved permanently to California.

Fortunately for us today, the Pranges believed in recording the activities and progressions of their family.  From early "box" cameras on, they recorded the milestones of their lives.  Like so many other images on this site, I'm indebted to Jim Prange, the son of James, one of the eldest of the clan, for many images of the family and the Bluff generally, as well as these videos.

Over the years, various members of the family paid visits to the Bluff, particularly for annual Fourth of July celebration.  In 1995 they made a major - and for many, a final - pilgrimage to the Bluff that was faithfully recorded by a video camera.  Jim was kind enough to transfer them to me via DVD.  Though sections of them understandably vary in clarity, the sound is generally clear and the moments have been captured.

I

Part I begins with a windshield view from one of a caravan of Prange vehicles approaching from the west on Rt. 153 (the old Hill Road).  David Prange moderates the first gathering on the bank of the White River at the old "Steamboat Landing."  Stories and laughter.  Afterward, there are similar stops at the site of the Prange Store and Schwab's Store and the Cemetery across from the old Post Office.

II

Part II  returns to the old Prange homesite.  General  recollections of their memories  of the Bethlehem Lutheran Church that stood nearby it.  Gravesite of Adolph Prange's younger brother Bernard who died in his childhood.  Lin "Hal" relates his memory of the day his parents left for California in his brother Joe's 41 Ford for California, and their stop for one final look back at their home and store.  It ends with the arrival of the group at the Poplar Creek Missionary Baptist Church (which in part is composed today of the Lutheran Church that was moved west five miles or so to this spot) where other older friends and members of the community from the 1930s and 40s.

III

Parts III and IV, also moderated by Hal who opens their discussion with a poem "At Two O'Clock," after which he invites stories from the Prange siblings, as well as others in the gathering: Halley and Sikes Keithley, Lucille and Shelby Woodiel, Boone Bullock, and others.  Two members of the Poplar Creek congregation - L.S. Stiggers and Roy Allan, both old friends of the Prange family - host the gathering, along with their Minister Rev. Williams.  Boone relates the story of his dog Charlie and the cart he made that carried Hal as a young boy.

IV

Part IV continues the general discussion and concludes with Roy Allen's rendition of a folk hymn entitled "How Sweet It One Day Will Be."

January 1918: White River Frozen at Clarendon

[This image was originally posted by Gary Shaw (with Betty Edwards Norwood) on Facebook and later shared there by John Coker, Vickie Schwab, and others.]

The White River at Clarendon, AR: January 1918

"This is a 1918 photo of a solid White River at Clarendon in January of that year, frozen when temperatures ran 13 below zero.  The River was solid enough to cross with wagons and horses and cars crossing at Clarendon that winter when the biggest snowstorm to hit Arkansas in the 19th century left no region untouched in Arkansas.  Little Rock was buried in 19.4 inches of snow.  Other parts in the northern part like Searcy had up to 30 inches." Facebook note.

This is the first image I've seen that verifies the legend heard from time to time by all of us as children growing up there in the 1940s and 50s.  I can recall Russell Marrs stories of it from his childhood. DPW