The Approach from the West

The following is an excerpt from a memoir (or as he prefers to call it, a "remembrance") written by David B. Prange who was born in Crocketts Bluff in 1926 and lived there until his family moved to California in 1944. For copies of his Crocketts Bluff As I Remember It contact David B. Prange, 16471 E. 196th St., Noblesville, IN 46060.

"Crocketts Bluff is the northern gateway to the White River Prairie. This prairie that is a vast plain of fertile soil was then, and still is, comprised of thousands of acres of cultivated farmland, mostly dedicated to growing rice.

There were then, and still are, only two roads into the Bluff. One from the south and the other from the west. As it was, in my earliest memories, the road from the south was graveled and was maintained by the county. The road from the west, referred to by the natives as the Hill Road, was dirt and was not maintained.

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 uniformally 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.

Before the Hill Road improvement, Crocketts Bluff was considered to be at the end of the road, and it truly was, considering the fact that the Hill Road was extremely primitive." [Further excerpts re the Prange water tank, the Crocketts Bluff School, the Prange, Schwab, and Inman stores, and the excitement of White River steamboats will follow.]

"The Bluff": Still on the Map

An official historical marker verifies today what was for more than a hundred years the center of the active community of Crockett's Bluff, Arkansas where I was born on an early September afternoon in 1935. Near this site stood during the years of my childhood a tall water tank of the conventional sort that can still be seen on the skylines of small towns throughout America. Here it was designed with fire protection in mind for the Prange Farm warehouses that rested along the bluffs at the bend of the White River for which the site gets its name. For more than half a century, at least, it served as a focal point that could be seen actoss the prairie from as far as eight or more miles away. Today it almost totally abandoned. There remain, of course, "hunting cabins" here and there along the river, as well as a few permanently inhabited scattered houses, and there's occasional traffic from the outlying areas --from the "hill road" leading west toward Stuttgart and the almost straight asphalt stretch leading south toward St. Charles and DeWitt. But what was once an active river and farm community is today about as dead as it can be and still be said to have life at all. The marker provides the occasional visitor evidence there was once a lively village huddled around the long bend with the bluffs overlooking the river. Not more than a quarter of a mile west along Rt. 153 in the well-kempt cemetery near the Baptist Church lies more detailed evidence of that past life.