The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [210]
I will hope that on my next visit to Stay More I will be invited to sit with them in that garden. I will also hope that Vernon will be willing to discuss the architecture of his house. I will expect him to let me have a look at some of those documents he will have found. I will look forward to sampling some of that fabled Ingledew Ham. The old Ingledew General Store will be disintegrating, and I will attempt to persuade Vernon and his father to allow me to assist them in removing the glass showcase containing the body of Eli Willard and giving it a proper burial in the Stay More cemetery, for even if Eli Willard was not a Stay Moron, he will have to have a permanent resting place, with a permanent headstone, the inscription of which I will be glad to furnish.
I’m sure that Vernon will understand.
Acknowledgments
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks is not purely a work of the imagination. Over the years I have attempted to read everything about the Ozarks that has been written, as some small consolation for not being able to go there and dwell there as long as I would like. My ancestral roots are deep in the Ozarks, and I know its people and its architecture and its traditions intimately, but I have tried to write this book with a self-imposed detachment which required a geographical detachment too. During the time of the writing of this book, I was able to visit the Ozarks on only one occasion, of one day’s duration, and the roll of film I shot that day did not develop. But here in my small room I am surrounded by books and magazines on the Ozarks, piles of photographs taken earlier, souvenirs of my childhood, letters from Ozark friends and relatives, and a mountainous landscape of notes that I obsessively write to myself. The view from my window is of a sycamore tree exactly like Noah Ingledew’s, backed by a meadow and a mountain.
Some of the more unbelievable situations and people in this novel are based upon “reality”; indeed, the more implausible or incredible an episode or person may seem to be, the more likely that true history is being imitated. For example, John Cecil was an actual person and the Battle of Whiteley’s Mill was an actual battle, fought as described here. The governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction actually was a blue-eyed Ozarks mountaineer. The woman homesteaders from the cities actually did homestead in Newton County. Of course there is an actual Newton County in the actual location of the Ozarks given, with a county seat named Jasper, and another town named Parthenon, and, as far as you and I are concerned, another town named Stay More. I would be happy to show it to you, but I feel I have.
Walter F. Lackey’s History of Newton County, Arkansas was the principle reference for this book, but I have also been influenced by the Ozark writings of Vance Randolph, Otto Ernest Rayburn, Waymon Hogue, Charles Morrow Wilson, John Gould Fletcher and many others, as well as such periodicals as The Ozarks Mountaineer.
Before writing the novel, I corresponded with many persons in the Ozarks. Mrs. Oliver Howard, reference librarian of the State Historical Society of Missouri at Columbia, was especially helpful, and her colleague, Lynn M. Roberts, editorial secretary of the Missouri Historical Review, furnished me with Xerox copies of several illustrations in their collection of Missouri Ozarks buildings, which are strikingly similar to Arkansas Ozarks buildings. Amanda Sarr of the University of Arkansas library furnished me with a complete bibliography of books and articles on Arkansas architecture, and Martha McK. Blum, graduate assistant in the University of Missouri library, did the same for Missouri architecture. I exchanged several letters with Professor Cyrus Sutherland of the Department of Architecture at the University of Arkansas, and I am grateful for his help. I also exchanged several letters with Tom Butler, a resident of Newton County, and with Day Whittacker and Diana Stoving, also