Stories About Fishin' The White And James Before Tr Dam...

[moguy1973]

I found some! I never thought of looking up old topo maps...

[bfishn]

You can download many of the historical topos at;

http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/topomaps/f?p=262:1:22602829645695

[ness]

Those are pretty cool.

[Woodland Artisan]

Lots of family stories but I'm too young to have my own pre-dam. The family moved into the white river valley in the late 1700's from TN. My favorite story from my pappy was on one of their standard 4 day trips when, late at night and at Penelope Sink, their jingle bell river alarm went off. River was rising and fast. Dad, as a boy, climbed up as far as he could on a paw paw and tied the jon off. Paw Paw's dropping on my uncles head as he went. The group then hauled everything they could up another tree and spent the next day and half waiting for the water to get down enough for them to see the river banks. They had thought about having my uncle make his way, through the trees, over to the bluff and climb out to get more rope in order to haul everybody and everything up and out of there. But they didn't. Just waited. When the river did go down enough, they climbed down with all of their gear. The boat, however, didn't come down. It was wedged into the branches of a tree, still tied up, and they couldn't get it down. So, they took their canvas bags, dumped a few of them and used them as floats going down the river to a place where they could get up the bank and walk to a cousins house. It took them a few months to get back and get that boat out of the trees, but they did eventually.

[wayne b]

I don,t know about table rock but my grandma grew up on the white before beaver dam was built she still has the deed to 40 acres that are underwater by lost bridge it belonged to her uncle they refused to sell. When they moved out of the back door water was touching the front porch of the two roomed house. she also remembers when the old lost bridge collapsed. She said that the river flooded and it piled trees and brush up aginst the pilings and it went down under the pressure of the water. I love to sit and listen to her talk about her child hood on the white and growing up in the depretion. If I was talented I would write her stories down ad make a book. I think we need to pay more attention to the older generation and learn from there experinces because they will not be here forever. By the way she was born in 1931.

[Wayne SW/MO]

By the way she was born in 1931.

That's not that long ago! :lol:

[Greasy B]

Good stories.

[Al Agnew]

I found some! I never thought of looking up old topo maps...

Really cool maps. The top one is from 1927, the lower one from 1908. Think about that a minute...back in 1908, there were no airplanes available to use for aerial photography, and even though there were planes in 1927, they weren't being used for mapping all that much. You'll note that down in the left corner, on both maps it lists who drew the maps. On the 1908 map, those guys had to roam across the whole countryside and measure elevations, guess a lot at elevations between their measurements, and draw all those contour lines by hand from their own observations on the ground! The amazing thing is that they were seldom all that far wrong, because when the technology with aerial stereophotography came along and one could get very accurate information for the topography, nearly all those hills and hollows came close to matching the old maps...maybe some of the smaller hollows were a little different in shape, and maybe the ridge tops were slightly off, but the accuracy of the old maps is still incredible.

[hank franklin]

Excellent stuff fellas. Thanks for posting.

[Al Agnew]

One more story I have always found pretty cool about the older topo maps...

My aunt, who is in the process of dying now from a brain tumor at age 87, lost her first husband back about the time I was born, and married again later. Her second husband, Charles Neece, who was considerably older than her, grew up in rural Bollinger County in the 1910s and early 1920s. When he was still a kid, sometime around 1920, he was sitting on the front porch of the farmhouse, alone because his parents had taken the day to go in to town for supplies, when two men drove up in a Model T Ford with a U.S. Geological Survey emblem on the door. They asked him if his parents were home and he said no.

"Well, maybe you can help us. We're making a map of this area, and we're trying to find out what the names of all the creeks and other landmarks are. Could you tell us what the name of that creek is there behind your house?"

The "creek" was a very small, mostly dry stream that was no more than three or four miles long, and as far as Uncle Charlie knew, nobody had ever named it. The two families living along it simply called it "the branch". But Charlie Neece said, "Well, that's Neece Branch."

And sure enough, there on the topo map that I have, is Neece Branch.