The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks by Velda E Brotherton    Books by Velda E Brotherton · Wilda's Outlaw · Stone Heart's Woman · Montana Dreams · Montana Destiny · Montana Promises                 >> View all
Category:	History	Publisher:	Old American Publishing	ISBN-10:	TheBostonMountains:LostintheOzarks	Type:
Pages:	201	Copyright:	April, 2010	ISBN-13:	9780981806846	Non-Fiction

A story of the lost communities of the Boston Mountains of Arkansas Ozarks Get your Signed copy today! Buy your copy! Old American Publishing Velda Brotherton  This is not a book of history, but the story of the people who lived our history. The book contains 137 photos, illustrations and maps and allows the reader to follow the author as she tours four counties of the Bostons in search of the lost communities. She interviews descendants of those who settled there from 1828 on to the present. Excerpt History books tell us when and how a thing happened and who made it happen. But their pages fail to reveal the spirit, the passion, the laughter and tears of those who lived that history. Only those who were there can tell us what it was truly like. In nearly every family there is a born storyteller, someone who remembers and recites the exciting tales, keeps history alive down through the generations. We call their stories folk tales and, though these tales sometimes differ from orator to orator, their value is extraordinary, for they truly reveal the culture and heritage of a people. Many will speak to us here as we explore their lives, an indelible part of our past. Scenic Highway 71 snakes south out of Fayetteville and through the valley to our first lost community. We’ll pass an airport, earlier known as Drake Field but now going by the name of Fayetteville Executive Airport. Within the confines of that very airstrip is a cemetery which was uncovered and restored by Spears Professional Environmental & Archeological Service in 1993. On a sunny morning, I watch those sites plotted and marked in the overgrown field and I’m awed at the bravery of those early pioneers who are buried there. A strong people who spent most of their lives on this land, farming, building homes and churches, raising their families. The cemetery is known as Old Pioneer Cemetery, but was originally called Stelle Cemetery, named after one of the prominent early settlers. Technically it lies inside the city limits of Greenland, in the past known as Rugby and then Staunton. Once marshy land brought mosquitoes in droves making this less than an ideal spot to settle. We are a bit north of the Boston Mountains, but are moving in that direction. There’s a tiny settlement ahead, on the banks of the West Fork of the White River, beyond a crossing known as Baptist Ford, not to be confused with the Baptist religion. An active church stands on the site, yet the community, those who settled in the valley and their farms, has faded into history. Greenland eventually grew nearby, beginning as Rugby in 1882, then Staunton in 1888 and finally in 1909 was renamed Greenland. Beginning in 1830, nondenominational church meetings were held in a log building on this site. In the Sheriff’s census of that year, there were 233 heads of household in all of Washington County. Many of the earliest settlers moved in where Greenland would one day grow years in the future. There is a cemetery next to Baptist Ford church where services are held today. The view approaching from the south on a coil of the old highway is picture postcard perfect.

LOST AMONG THE GHOSTS OF HISTORY: VELDA BROTHERTON'S THE BOSTON MOUNTAINS









LOST AMONG THE GHOSTS OF HISTORY: VELDA BROTHERTON'S THE BOSTON MOUNTAINS
by
Loren Gruber

Brotherton, Velda. The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks. Houston, TX: Old American Publishing Co., 2010.ISBN:978-0-818068-4-6.

You may have read stories about the ring-tailed roarers, the half-men half-alligators who whip their weight in wildcats in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Each of these interesting characters had their origins in the tall tales of the Old Southwest, the region that ultimately became the states of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri.
Unfortunately, the reading public has come to stereotype rural people, especially the salt of the Southern earth. While Jeff Foxworthy makes us look inward and discover that there is a little bit of "redneck" in each of us, sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Dukes of Hazzard have perpetuated the myths that belie the actual people in the "flyover zone," especially those of the South.
Even movies such as True Grit have created the likes of Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn, himself a "half-man half-alligator," while building upon the reputation of "Hanging Judge" Parker.
Although such movie perceptions of the heroic fictional and historical characters may be for the good, it is through Velda Brotherton's The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks that we meet the real people behind what are otherwise media masks. She resurrects the old times and we tour the old towns, some dead, some dying, some prospering; and she introduces us to the tenacious settlers who invested the region with its present-day character.
Supplementing her image-rich prose in The Boston Mountains, Brotherton's photographs capture those people, their homes, and towns that otherwise would be lost to all but family albums and fading pictures in historical archives.
As she loses herself in the Boston Mountains, Brotherton takes the time to interview the descendants of the every-day Davy Crocketts and Daniel Boones who settled the Old Southwest. They planted themselves in the rich soil and grew crops never before imagined. They drank purer water and breathed purer air than they had ever known.
Brotherton's love for people, their places, and their histories is apparent on every page of The Boston Mountains. Drawing us into her world of times past and times present, she says, "The past whispers of secrets long kept, hushed murmurs that embrace me as I walk among the tumbled headstones in a long abandoned cemetery, place my hand on the trunk of a splendid maple that has shaded the ancient Ozark soil for a century or more, and turn my face to catch the kiss of afternoon sunlight that fires great oaks into a golden glow" (i).
Brotherton begins The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks with the history of the region, drawn not only from her first-hand observations of the region but also from historical documents. For example, we learn why Sequoya, the creator of the Cherokee written language, was called "pig in hiding."
We also learn why there is a factual basis for Thomas Bangs Thorpe's exaggerations in "The Big Bear of Arkansas." The "Big Bar," himself, bragged that he would never shoot a turkey that weighed less than forty pounds. According to him, Arkansas' soil runs to the center of the Earth. Moreover, it is so rich that when the "Big Bar's" sow slept one night on a kernel or two, "the corn shot up" before morning and "the percussion killed her dead."
Well, Arkansas soil is not that rich. But Brotherton cites "The Status of Medicine and Medical Men in Washington County, Arkansas 1854-1860," whose muted description of the land parallels that of Thorpe's exaggeration. "Lovely County: here was a county, in many respects unequaled in the producting (sic) of everything, calculated to bring about the best results to man and beast―a soil producting (sic) beyond the average ... . The labors of the husbandman always amply rewarded; orchards and fields always yielding an abundant harvest ... ." (iv).
After providing a brief history of the Boston Mountain region, Brotherton invites us to tour with her. As she says, "This is not a history book, but a book of the people who lived our history" (v). She does so in what could be deemed a travelogue, written with a deft touch, a delicate hand that makes it easy to be "lost in the Ozarks."
We learn that children went to school from two or three months a year; some eight months. In any event, they employed their 3Rs well. At the request of the United States Post Office, for example, John Hiram Mannon ingeniously calculated the distance between Blackburn and Winslow. He tied a white cloth to a buggy wheel's spokes and counted its revolutions. His calculation was off a mere few tenths of a mile.
That was a time when school started with prayer and when school buildings served as community halls and churches. We learn, too, that today's high school youths would have been considered adults in the nineteenth century. Girls married as early as 14; boys, at 17.
Brotherton writes of the "nobodies" who are the important "somebodies." They enriched the region, as well as each others' lives, often with main force and awkwardness in less-than idyllic circumstances.
Tolbert Malone's daughter, Wanda Malone Buckner, weighed only a pound-and-a-half at birth, but her grandmother Rachel Malone kept her "alive in a warming oven ... after doctors told her that baby would never live" (7). Not only did she live, Wanda later survived polio. She married and reared two sons.
Life had other dangers, including the flooded White River that sucked a mother, her infant-in-arms, and her two sons off their horse. In another instance, a sow carried off an infant and killed it, "despite efforts by older children and the family dog" (9).
Despite infants' deaths, floods, and disease, people lived a frugal life of joy and generosity. Audie Parker told Brotherton that two men his father hired to make railroad ties recycled their chewing tobacco. After "they'd extracted all the juices from their chaw," they dried it on a sun-lit stump and later smoked it in their corncob pipes (22).
Adeline Root told Brotherton country hospitality was the norm. "People didn't wait for invitations. They dropped in any time, always knowing they would be welcome. When the women prepared a meal they didn't know who or how many would be there to share it" (170).
Sharing was common even in an Ozark hardscrabble existence. According to a letter written by Jean Malone, Wanda Malone Buckner's younger sister, Mineral Springs second grade teacher Mary Stockburger "decided the children who had never celebrated Christmas or decorated a tree would have both. She collected contributions from parents and with the small amount of money rode horse-back to Fayetteville where she selected small gifts for every child in the community." As for the Christmas tree, she "persuaded a few young men to cut a large cedar" that they decorated with berries and popcorn (7).
There were other acts of generosity, too. The Low Gap (Fairview) School District No. 89 provided a cooperative hot lunch program, according to Juanita Patterson's letter. "One boy gained a pound a day for a week. Our discipline problems became almost nil. The children were busy helping with the cooking, serving and cleanup duties and they were happy." According to Brotherton, the wealthier area farmers provided the "vegetables, meat and bread for the meals" (63).
But not everyone dined so well. According to Glaythra (Chub) France, boys brought their dogs and rifles to the Chapel School District No. 160 as a matter of survival. At the end of the school day, the boys retrieved their rifles stacked in the corner of the schoolroom. Leaving the school grounds, the boys hunted game on their way home. Often, that "would be the only meat the family had to eat" (73).
And yes, there were the real-life ring-tail roarers who could whip their weight in wildcats at Old Skully in 1855. The way station was "a hang-out for the men from the surrounding mountains," who fought for the sheer pleasure of it, but without intentional "killing or maiming." Probably fighting to earn their names, Old Skully most certainly did "because of the many skulls that were beaten and bruised" (116). But the men were no match for Bob and Cole Younger and Jesse and Frank James. When the Old Skully posse chased them down, the gang shot the posse's horses out from under them and made a clean getaway.
We learn of others in history, such as Nathaniel "Texas Jack" Reed who escaped the noose of Fort Smith's Hanging Judge Isaac Parker. We shiver at the mention of the legendary "stranger on a black horse." And we chuckle at the odd names like Bugscuffle Road. Brotherton tells us of schools named Who'd A Thought It and Papa Gimme Nickel, and she tells us why a town came to be called Hog Eye.
Certainly, I wish that I would have been there when the post office ran away. But throughout The Boston Mountains, I am there. You can be, too, when Velda Brotherton visits Chapel School District No. 160. She writes: "But on this day, as I stand in the doorway of the eerily silent school house, I hear the clip-clop of horses' hooves. It's probably a couple of Henson boys riding in on horseback. And there come the Preston and Miller kids threading their way toward us through knee-high clumps of meadow grass. But with a second look, all is still, the only sound the chatter of the creek harmonizing with birdsong and a vivid imagination. I must have eavesdropped on the past, not an uncommon thing at all" (73).
As one who has spent many years living in the geologic Ozarks, it is a pleasure to tour with Velda Brotherton. I see new places through her sharp eyes, hear the voices of the Boston Mountain residents, and revisit places where my travels have taken me.
Loren Gruber is a freelance writer and professor of English and professor of Mass Communication at Missouri Valley College in Marshall, Mo.







LOST AMONG THE GHOSTS OF HISTORY: VELDA BROTHERTON'S THE BOSTON MOUNTAINS
by
Loren Gruber

Brotherton, Velda. The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks. Houston, TX: Old American Publishing Co., 2010.ISBN:978-0-818068-4-6.

You may have read stories about the ring-tailed roarers, the half-men half-alligators who whip their weight in wildcats in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Each of these interesting characters had their origins in the tall tales of the Old Southwest, the region that ultimately became the states of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri.
Unfortunately, the reading public has come to stereotype rural people, especially the salt of the Southern earth. While Jeff Foxworthy makes us look inward and discover that there is a little bit of "redneck" in each of us, sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Dukes of Hazzard have perpetuated the myths that belie the actual people in the "flyover zone," especially those of the South.
Even movies such as True Grit have created the likes of Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn, himself a "half-man half-alligator," while building upon the reputation of "Hanging Judge" Parker.
Although such movie perceptions of the heroic fictional and historical characters may be for the good, it is through Velda Brotherton's The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks that we meet the real people behind what are otherwise media masks. She resurrects the old times and we tour the old towns, some dead, some dying, some prospering; and she introduces us to the tenacious settlers who invested the region with its present-day character.
Supplementing her image-rich prose in The Boston Mountains, Brotherton's photographs capture those people, their homes, and towns that otherwise would be lost to all but family albums and fading pictures in historical archives.
As she loses herself in the Boston Mountains, Brotherton takes the time to interview the descendants of the every-day Davy Crocketts and Daniel Boones who settled the Old Southwest. They planted themselves in the rich soil and grew crops never before imagined. They drank purer water and breathed purer air than they had ever known.
Brotherton's love for people, their places, and their histories is apparent on every page of The Boston Mountains. Drawing us into her world of times past and times present, she says, "The past whispers of secrets long kept, hushed murmurs that embrace me as I walk among the tumbled headstones in a long abandoned cemetery, place my hand on the trunk of a splendid maple that has shaded the ancient Ozark soil for a century or more, and turn my face to catch the kiss of afternoon sunlight that fires great oaks into a golden glow" (i).
Brotherton begins The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks with the history of the region, drawn not only from her first-hand observations of the region but also from historical documents. For example, we learn why Sequoya, the creator of the Cherokee written language, was called "pig in hiding."
We also learn why there is a factual basis for Thomas Bangs Thorpe's exaggerations in "The Big Bear of Arkansas." The "Big Bar," himself, bragged that he would never shoot a turkey that weighed less than forty pounds. According to him, Arkansas' soil runs to the center of the Earth. Moreover, it is so rich that when the "Big Bar's" sow slept one night on a kernel or two, "the corn shot up" before morning and "the percussion killed her dead."
Well, Arkansas soil is not that rich. But Brotherton cites "The Status of Medicine and Medical Men in Washington County, Arkansas 1854-1860," whose muted description of the land parallels that of Thorpe's exaggeration. "Lovely County: here was a county, in many respects unequaled in the producting (sic) of everything, calculated to bring about the best results to man and beast―a soil producting (sic) beyond the average ... . The labors of the husbandman always amply rewarded; orchards and fields always yielding an abundant harvest ... ." (iv).
After providing a brief history of the Boston Mountain region, Brotherton invites us to tour with her. As she says, "This is not a history book, but a book of the people who lived our history" (v). She does so in what could be deemed a travelogue, written with a deft touch, a delicate hand that makes it easy to be "lost in the Ozarks."
We learn that children went to school from two or three months a year; some eight months. In any event, they employed their 3Rs well. At the request of the United States Post Office, for example, John Hiram Mannon ingeniously calculated the distance between Blackburn and Winslow. He tied a white cloth to a buggy wheel's spokes and counted its revolutions. His calculation was off a mere few tenths of a mile.
That was a time when school started with prayer and when school buildings served as community halls and churches. We learn, too, that today's high school youths would have been considered adults in the nineteenth century. Girls married as early as 14; boys, at 17.
Brotherton writes of the "nobodies" who are the important "somebodies." They enriched the region, as well as each others' lives, often with main force and awkwardness in less-than idyllic circumstances.
Tolbert Malone's daughter, Wanda Malone Buckner, weighed only a pound-and-a-half at birth, but her grandmother Rachel Malone kept her "alive in a warming oven ... after doctors told her that baby would never live" (7). Not only did she live, Wanda later survived polio. She married and reared two sons.
Life had other dangers, including the flooded White River that sucked a mother, her infant-in-arms, and her two sons off their horse. In another instance, a sow carried off an infant and killed it, "despite efforts by older children and the family dog" (9).
Despite infants' deaths, floods, and disease, people lived a frugal life of joy and generosity. Audie Parker told Brotherton that two men his father hired to make railroad ties recycled their chewing tobacco. After "they'd extracted all the juices from their chaw," they dried it on a sun-lit stump and later smoked it in their corncob pipes (22).
Adeline Root told Brotherton country hospitality was the norm. "People didn't wait for invitations. They dropped in any time, always knowing they would be welcome. When the women prepared a meal they didn't know who or how many would be there to share it" (170).
Sharing was common even in an Ozark hardscrabble existence. According to a letter written by Jean Malone, Wanda Malone Buckner's younger sister, Mineral Springs second grade teacher Mary Stockburger "decided the children who had never celebrated Christmas or decorated a tree would have both. She collected contributions from parents and with the small amount of money rode horse-back to Fayetteville where she selected small gifts for every child in the community." As for the Christmas tree, she "persuaded a few young men to cut a large cedar" that they decorated with berries and popcorn (7).
There were other acts of generosity, too. The Low Gap (Fairview) School District No. 89 provided a cooperative hot lunch program, according to Juanita Patterson's letter. "One boy gained a pound a day for a week. Our discipline problems became almost nil. The children were busy helping with the cooking, serving and cleanup duties and they were happy." According to Brotherton, the wealthier area farmers provided the "vegetables, meat and bread for the meals" (63).
But not everyone dined so well. According to Glaythra (Chub) France, boys brought their dogs and rifles to the Chapel School District No. 160 as a matter of survival. At the end of the school day, the boys retrieved their rifles stacked in the corner of the schoolroom. Leaving the school grounds, the boys hunted game on their way home. Often, that "would be the only meat the family had to eat" (73).
And yes, there were the real-life ring-tail roarers who could whip their weight in wildcats at Old Skully in 1855. The way station was "a hang-out for the men from the surrounding mountains," who fought for the sheer pleasure of it, but without intentional "killing or maiming." Probably fighting to earn their names, Old Skully most certainly did "because of the many skulls that were beaten and bruised" (116). But the men were no match for Bob and Cole Younger and Jesse and Frank James. When the Old Skully posse chased them down, the gang shot the posse's horses out from under them and made a clean getaway.
We learn of others in history, such as Nathaniel "Texas Jack" Reed who escaped the noose of Fort Smith's Hanging Judge Isaac Parker. We shiver at the mention of the legendary "stranger on a black horse." And we chuckle at the odd names like Bugscuffle Road. Brotherton tells us of schools named Who'd A Thought It and Papa Gimme Nickel, and she tells us why a town came to be called Hog Eye.
Certainly, I wish that I would have been there when the post office ran away. But throughout The Boston Mountains, I am there. You can be, too, when Velda Brotherton visits Chapel School District No. 160. She writes: "But on this day, as I stand in the doorway of the eerily silent school house, I hear the clip-clop of horses' hooves. It's probably a couple of Henson boys riding in on horseback. And there come the Preston and Miller kids threading their way toward us through knee-high clumps of meadow grass. But with a second look, all is still, the only sound the chatter of the creek harmonizing with birdsong and a vivid imagination. I must have eavesdropped on the past, not an uncommon thing at all" (73).
As one who has spent many years living in the geologic Ozarks, it is a pleasure to tour with Velda Brotherton. I see new places through her sharp eyes, hear the voices of the Boston Mountain residents, and revisit places where my travels have taken me.
Loren Gruber is a freelance writer and professor of English and professor of Mass Communication at Missouri Valley College in Marshall, Mo.