A TRIP TO THE PAST

In 1951, when I was 11 years old, my Father and Mother, my sister-in-law, Eleanor, and her two daughters, one a new baby, my brother John and myself, loaded into a 1947 Chevrolet and drove from Wisconsin to Mountain Home, Arkansas. My oldest brother, Herman, was working on the Bull Shoals dam project and we were going there as a vacation and to bring Eleanor and the kids to where Herman was working.

In keeping with the spontaneous nature of this current trip, last evening as we were enjoying happy hour, I suggested that as long as we were this far south, I would like to go back to Mountain Home and see how much it had changed. So, we headed cross country on Missouri and Arkansas back roads to satisfy a whim. Driving cross country East to West in the Ozark Mountains is not easy. The roads are narrow, winding, and very much up and down hill. Not much had changed in that regard from 1951. One pleasant surprise along our route was Mammoth Springs, Arkansas. Mammoth Spring flows at an average rate of 9.78 million gallons per hour with a constant water temperature of 58° Fahrenheit. The actual spring cannot be seen at Mammoth Spring because it emerges more than 80 feet below the water level of the spring pool.

We arrived at Mountain Home and for a place to park found an empty parking lot at a shopping center that was totally completed but unoccupied. It was quiet, well lighted, and there were a couple of trucks parked at the other end so we knew we wouldn't be asked to leave.

That evening and the next morning we checked out the downtown square around the County Court House to see if it was as I had remembered. The Court House was the same, the trees around it were bigger, and the buildings were pretty much the same except the businesses in them had changed.

In 1951 we stayed in a small hotel/rooming house that was close to the square. I could not find the old building as I remembered it. In talking to some of the locals, it is possible that the old hotel has been torn down and replaced with newer buildings.