Alley Spring

Davis Ford and the campground river front

Ford, shallows and campground · campground on the right bank · about miles 31.3 to 31.4 · Plate A10

The river comes down to Alley through a shallow stretch with a field on one side and the Alley Spring Campground on the other, and the old road crossed it at Davis Ford1. In one family’s telling of a Civil War raid on a Union household upstream, one of the raiders’ wagons broke down “at that first crossing above Alley”2 (Chapter 6).

The campground spreads over the bottom on the right bank, upstream of the highway3. The Park Service built most of it in 1974, and it is the largest campground in the park4 (Chapter 11). It sits low. When the gauge at the bridge reads 8 feet, water begins to reach three of its loops, and at 13 feet5 the whole campground is under water (Chapter 14). On the hillside beside it, old shortleaf pines carry the scars of 39 fires between 1706 and 19156 (Chapter 16).

Alley Bluff Hole

Pool under a bluff · bluff on the left bank · about miles 31.4 to 31.9 · Plate A10

Where the river turns east, a little more than half a mile above the bridge, it runs against a bluff on the left1, and the pool under the bluff is the swimming hole of Alley. In 1980 it was called the Alley Bluff Hole2, and it was already the favorite place to swim, having given “thousands of local swimmers and campers hours of enjoyment.” People who swam it in later years call it Bluff Hole, and so does the park, which keeps a Bluff Hole Trail3 and a small river access on the campground side4. A swimmer of the 1970s remembered well-beaten paths to the top of the bluff for jumping and a big sand bar5 across the water where people watched, and another found the hole “about gone”6 when she went back (Chapters 15, 18 and 19).

Alley Ford and the Highway 106 bridge

Old ford, highway bridge, gauge and accesses · mile 32.0 · Plate A10

The old Alley Ford crossed just above the present bridge, where the river ran deep, and by one account a ferry worked at Alley from 1906 for several years1. Old photographs show a wagon ford and a low-water slab2 near Alley (Chapter 8). The present steel girder bridge, about 385 feet4 long, went up in 1939–403, and it is still the only highway crossing between Highway 17 and Eminence. A footbridge beside it, damaged by the floods of 2017 and 2018, was taken down in 20195 (Chapter 8).

The Geological Survey’s gauge here has measured the river since 1993. It stands above the mouth of the spring branch, so its readings leave out Alley Spring. Its highest mark is 23.29 feet, on April 30, 20176 (Chapter 14).

Besides the access at Bluff Hole, the park keeps the Alley River Access and the Burr Oak picnic area7 here. A big gravel bar by the bridge has long been Alley’s beach and landing; a paved ramp nearby filled with gravel8 (Chapters 11 and 15). Across the river from the park, Harvey Staples, who became Alley’s postmaster in 194210, opened a store and recreation spot. By 1980 Harvey’s was a busy place with a large canoe rental, though by one account Staples did not live to see it pay9 (Chapter 11).

Lawrence Hollow

Hollow · right bank · about mile 32.2 · Plate A10

Lawrence Hollow comes in from the south a little below the bridge, and Highway 106 climbs south up its valley2 on the way to Eminence. It drains a little more than three square miles, about a square mile and a quarter1 of it through Drewell Hollow, its main branch. Someone who grew up in Eminence calls its creek Denton Hollow Creek, and says it is usually dry3. A big spring, the Lawrence Hollow Spring, is said to feed the small branch out of the hollow. The Lawrences, the Drewells and the McCormacks, by one account, were families who once lived in the hollows4 that carry their names.

The deep half mile

Pool · about miles 32.0 to 32.6 · Plate A10

Between the bridge and the mouth of the spring branch the river was once half a mile of deep water, twelve to fourteen feet, and by one account people swam their horses in it. A man named Pulliam from Birch Tree is said to have drowned there in the 1930s1. In later years people swam all along this stretch, from Bluff Hole down to the place where the spring branch comes in2 (Chapter 19).

The mouth of the spring branch

Spring branch and creek mouth · left bank · about mile 32.6 · Plate A10

The water of Alley Spring reaches the river by a branch about half a mile long1 that enters on the left. On the federal maps the branch is the last part of Alley Branch, a creek draining about sixteen square miles2 to the north and west. Its valley is Alley Hollow3, and among the side hollows that drain into it are Cartwright, Conner, Kingfisher, Pipestem and Peter Cave hollows4. Pipestem Hollow, by one account, is named for its shape5, and Peter Cave Hollow is said to take its name from one of the caves where Peter Renfro6 hid from the law (Chapter 13). Pipestem Hollow is now a state natural area within the Angeline Conservation Area7 (Reach I).

By one account the branch has entered the river in three or four different places over the years, and the swimming hole at its mouth was a dare, with swimmers going back and forth between the river and the cold spring water8.

The Spring Branch Trail, about three-tenths of a mile long and laid on bedrock9, follows the branch up to the pond. The branch holds the richest plant life10 of the park’s large springs (Chapter 16). In 1926 and 1927 the state made a swimming beach with a beach house11 on it (Chapter 19), and four bridges it had recently built over the branch were carried away by a flood, in 1927 or in 192812 by different accounts (Chapter 14). A footbridge across it was destroyed in the flood of 2018, and the road bridge over it was rebuilt in wood in 201913.

Alley Spring

Spring and flooded cave · up the spring branch from the left bank · Plate A10

“Just after the bridge,” the park’s river folder of 1977 told floaters, “get out and walk a short way up the spring branch.” The spring rises at the base of a high, concave cliff1 into a round pool, which the mill dam holds as a pond. Its flow is given as 81 million gallons a day2 and, from the gauge records, about 87 million3 (Chapter 12). In the early days, by one account, it was a thrill to swim across the spring4.

The pool is the top of a flooded cave, Alley Spring Cave, whose floor slopes back under the hill5. Inside the cave a slope of gravel runs down the west wall to a depth of about 100 feet6. Divers have mapped more than 3,000 feet of passage, reaching at least 155 feet below the surface8, and the water rises under pressure7 from a lower passage (Chapters 12 and 13). In September 1978 divers went 450 feet back and 135 feet down without finding any trace of early people, and from about 100 feet down they saw crayfish that had lost all their color in the dark. The same divers watched the spring turn from a light, milky blue to beige as rain from storms to the north9 came through. The park’s caves have been closed to the public since 201010 (Chapter 13; Part Six).

The spring has had several names. It was Barksdale Spring11, after its first miller, and Mammoth Spring, the name given for the first mill’s site about 186912 and, by one account, the McCaskills’ name13 for it. It became Alley Spring about 190014, after the post office (see The hamlet, below). By one account the spring stopped for twelve hours in 1811, the year of the New Madrid earthquake, and fell five feet. In 1917, by the same account, it stopped for a few hours when a large sinkhole opened about fifteen miles to the northwest, and came back muddy15.

People camped by the spring for thousands of years before anyone dammed it, and a buried camp of Dalton times lies at the mill (Chapter 3). A township plat of 1821 marked an Indian village near the spring, probably Delaware or Shawnee, and archaeologists have looked for it16 there (Chapter 4). Someone who grew up in Eminence also remembered a village at the spring17.

The millpond and the dam

Millpond and dam · below the spring · Plate A10

The pond covers a little over an acre and is roughly triangular, with several small islands, the largest of them part of the dam1. The dam, of earth, river rock and concrete, runs about 170 feet east from the mill, and two spillways with wooden gates2 let the water over into the branch. The dirt for it, by one account, was hauled from the side opposite the mill3.

The first dam stood about a hundred feet below the spring4, and a flood in the spring of 18905 washed much of it away (Chapter 14). When George McCaskill rebuilt the place in 1893–94 he carried a new dam nearly two hundred feet6 across the branch, and Robert Brock of Eminence repaired or rebuilt it7 about that time. Late in 18998 it gave way again. About 1900 Fritz Lahmeyer built a wooden barge to repair it, and by one account the barge sank in the spring and was raised by divers a few years before 19809. Floods damaged the dam again in 1903 and 190410. The Kansas City company that bought Alley in 1912 paid for a concrete spillway in 1914, and it was gone by 192311. A flood broke a large section of the dam and carried off the headgate, in the spring of 1927 by one account12 (Chapter 14). The Civilian Conservation Corps rebuilt the dam and its spillways in 1933 and 193413, but left a 20-foot section near the east end unrepaired, and by the late 1970s the head of water at the mill was about five feet, enough to turn a stone for demonstrations14.

Alley Mill

Roller mill · west edge of the millpond · Plate A10

The red mill on the pond is the last of a line of mills at the spring. In 1868 the heirs of the pioneer James McCormack sold the land around the spring to Ike Barksdale and John Daugherty, brothers-in-law from Dent County. They dammed the branch and set an overshot wheel with an eight-foot fall and eight horsepower under a rough shed2 to grind corn meal, with a small sawmill run by a steam engine beside it. Barksdale kept a blacksmith shop and a store. In 1874 it was one of only two mills3 in all of Shannon County (Chapter 5), and in 1879 it ground a thousand bushels of wheat and two thousand of corn1. Both families had lost men in the war, by one account, and Daugherty, captured in Shannon County in 1864, became the county’s clerk and recorder in 18674.

In 1881 Charles Klepzig, a German immigrant, bought the mill with 240 acres5. By one account he also bought a farm of 320 acres across the river, and his children, the only Germans in the neighborhood, never liked the place. After the flood of 1890 he shut the mill (Chapter 14), and the family moved to lower Rocky Creek6, in the Current River country. On February 13, 1893, he sold out to George W. McCaskill of Eminence for $1,5007. One of his sons, Walter, bought a farm on Rocky Creek in 1912 and rebuilt the small mill on it, which ran until 1930, and the Klepzig Mill there is now kept by the park8.

McCaskill and his brother James had already built a roller mill at Summersville, and the machinery for both mills came from the Richmond City Mill Works9 of Indiana. Another brother, John, who built more than twenty mills in the Ozarks, was in charge of the work. The old mill came down in the winter of 1893–94, and the new one was finished in July 189411. By January 1895 McCaskill was advertising fifty barrels12 a day of “Straight Fancy Roller Process Flour,” with corn meal and chopped feed. Mr. Sprague was the first head miller, and Jim Holloway took over in December 189410.

The building is a frame structure two and a half stories high, about 32 by 42 feet and some 40 feet tall, on a foundation of local limestone blocks, sided in pine and roofed with wood shingles. Water from the pond ran through a concrete headrace into a turbine pit under the east porch13, where a Leffel turbine, given as 35 inches and as 4615, still sits14. A wheel on the porch set the gate and so the speed. Belts carried its power up to steel rollers17 on the first floor and to sifters above, where flour was shaken through silk16.

It was a merchant mill, built to buy grain and sell flour, larger than most18 mills on the two rivers and among the most modern in the Ozarks19. It was also built to make wheat flour in country that mostly grew corn20. Farmers came several times a year and sometimes waited days21 for their turn, and many paid in grain22. A miller’s usual share was one-eighth, and by one account Lahmeyer took only a fourteenth23. The mill was “large for its day, but too small to compete in the 20th century,” once store flour from Minneapolis came in cheaper and better roads put Eminence and Summersville within easy reach.

McCaskill did not keep it long. By one account his sister Elizabeth and her infant son were killed by a tornado near Summersville in May 1894, and he lost interest24 in Alley. The Boyds bought it in 1895, though some records give 189725, and it passed quickly through other hands: John F. A. Lahmeyer in 1899, A. M. Phillips in 1901 and John M. Knotts in 190226. Knotts sold in 1912 to the Crystal Spring Town-site Company of Kansas City for about $15,00027. The mill’s last year of grinding for trade is given as about 192228 and as 192729, after a flood.

The Red Mill was white first. Photographs show it white about 190030, and in 1913 John Liebinger31, a stockholder of the Kansas City company, painted the store and the mill white with green trim, helped by the sons of the operator, Taylor Gates. On the inner wall of the mill office he wrote:

Baz the Sucker John Liebinger 1913 Lon the Kid

The same person from Eminence remembered that the mill used to be green and white32. The red came under the state. A photograph of Civilian Conservation Corps men planting trees about 1933–3433 shows the mill dark red, and a work order of February 28, 193434, called for red paint. No historical reason35 for the color has been found. By 1980 the Park Service was considering painting it white again, though by one account nobody then remembered it white and the Red Mill had become a landmark, and the mill was left red36.

The Civilian Conservation Corps restored the mill in 1933 and 1934, and in the 1930s the state ran an Ozarks museum inside, grinding with a stone burr37 driven by the turbine. The state restored it again in 195838 and replaced the west porch in 196439. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, repaired in 2014 and put on the back of a quarter in 201740 (Chapter 11). In the flood of April 2017 about a foot of water41 stood on its main floor (Chapter 14).

The mill has its ghost stories. The story goes that a man in overalls, carrying a lunch pail, has been seen on the footbridge, and that a phantom campfire has been seen across from the mill42. In October of 2017 and of 2019 the park held evenings of storytelling at Alley, with Ozark legends and folktales and a skit by the Eminence High School drama club called “The Curse of Healing Spring,” and in 2017 a local musician played old tunes in the mill43.

The hamlet

Former mill hamlet · around the mill and the spring branch · Plate A10

A photograph taken about 1896 from the bluff above the spring shows the new mill at the water’s edge, a white general store1 in the middle of the view, and houses and outbuildings scattered across open fields beyond. Around the mill grew a mill hamlet: by the 1890s a post office, a general store, a blacksmith shop, a sawmill run off the mill’s turbine and a school. About a dozen people worked in these enterprises, and the school had about twice as many pupils2. Most of the families3 who used the hamlet lived on farms around it (Chapter 5).

The post office came first by name. Charles Klepzig applied for it in 1884 and offered two names, Shannon and Alley, and the department took Alley. The name is presumed to honor John Alley, a farmer who lived about three miles east, and every story about why it was chosen appears to be apocryphal4 (Chapters 5 and 18). By one account John Alley, oldest son of David Alley, a Tennessean who came in the 1830s, applied for an office on his own farm about two miles southeast of the spring and later moved it to the store5 by the spring. The office’s postmasters followed the mill’s owners until 19126, and it became Alley Spring in 1950 (Chapter 5).

Each owner changed the store. The Boyds opened a general store south of the mill in 18957. In 1899 James Smith, who ran the store, moved in a stock bought at Ink8 and advertised “prints, green coffee, granulated sugar9 … trace chains and hames.” From 1902 to 1912 John Knotts, a Pennsylvanian who arrived in his late fifties, owned the mill and store, and he paid farmers for their eggs, ham and sorghum in coupon books good at the store, a system borrowed from the lumber company stores. After the big mill at West Eminence opened in 1909 his shelves added sardines10, chili, prepared mustard and cereals (Chapter 7).

The Kansas City company of 1912 meant to make Alley a town and a “pleasure resort.” It added a picnic ground with swings and a shelter house, called the casino on early maps, on the east side of the spring branch, with footbridges11 over the water, and the family of its head, Conrad Hug, summered in a camp on the branch12. In 1913 it pulled down the old store and built a two-story one with a boomtown front, with water piped in from the spring branch. The upper floor, meant for a hotel, became a gymnasium for Alley’s young people. A dynamo belted to the mill’s main turbine shaft lit the mill, the store, the school, the dance floor at the picnic ground and two houses, and the lights went on and off when someone threw the dynamo’s clutch13. A brochure of 1922 still offered Alley as “a summer resort of extraordinary merit,” with rainbow trout in the spring branch, but the resort never grew and the company sold to the state14 (Chapter 10).

The school was among the first in Shannon County. By one account its ground belonged to the family of Ida Saxton McKinley, wife of the future president, and in 1889 William McKinley and his wife signed a quitclaim deed for it to the Alley School District. In the 1920s Alley briefly had a two-year high school, and in 193015 busing to Eminence began. Church services16 were often held in the schoolhouse (Chapter 5). The one-room Storys Creek School, built in 1896 at Storys Creek east of Alley, now stands between the picnic shelter and the mill, moved there in 1971. By one account Edna Staples17 bought it for the purpose, and Shannon County people gave it to the park18.

Alley was the county’s gathering place. The Fourth of July picnic drew as many as 2,000 people for popcorn, oranges, peanuts and ice cream, swimming, baseball and dancing, and by one account moonshine flowed freely in the hills around and the picnics had their fights, one of which ended with a man named Vaughn stabbed to death by his brother-in-law, John Stubblefield. By the same account, the Long Brothers’ Circus19 came to Alley in 1900. Someone who went to many of the picnics remembered that people rode their horses in, visited every night and camped three or four days at a time to get their grinding done. At the last picnic this visitor went to, the Gates brothers ran their old steam merry-go-round, thirty minutes for a nickel, and the picnic was “right straight across from the shelter hole, over in that little island … right across the bridge,” with a round bandstand glassed in on every side and a cold-drink stand20 with no roof. The Odd Fellows21’ excursion of 1912 is told in Chapter 9.

Alley Spring State Park

Former state park, 1924–1970 · around the spring and mill · Plate A10

The state bought the spring, the mill and 427 acres in 1924 for $31,5001 (Chapter 10), by one count its fourth state park2, though Big Spring, made a state park on October 17, 1924, is also counted as the first. Mac Ellerman, who had overseen the property3 for the Kansas City company, became the first superintendent, and Noke Jones, a very popular man, ran the park for twenty-four years from 1944, through the years when tourism4 at Alley grew fastest.

In 1926 and 1927 the state cleared away the hamlet’s store, blacksmith shop and spring house and put up a rustic store5 of native pine (Chapter 10), and the flood of June 1928 took that store6 as well (Chapters 8 and 14). Keepers’ houses were built or rebuilt in 19307.

In 1933 a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, by one account of First World War veterans8, was set up at Alley. In their first year the men built eleven buildings and two roads9 through the park, laid a new floor in the mill16 and planted trees10, and in 1933 and 1934 they added a maintenance shop11, a pump house, seasonal cabins, the rock picnic shelter near the spring and the West Trail. The trail once called the Horse Trail, now the Overlook Trail, about a mile and a half long, climbs to an overlook12 on top of the bluff above the spring. The present general store went up about 1939 as the park’s office and became a store in 200313. Families still hold their reunions14 there (Chapter 9). The old park’s core, 259 acres, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district in 202315.

The Park Service took Alley in 197017 and remade much of it again (Chapter 11). By one account of 1980, most people thought the federal remodeling had destroyed the park, a project marked by poor planning, wasteful spending and too much asphalt18. Around 2000 Shannon County people remembered the mill fondly from the state park years and wanted it grinding again, with the whiskey exhibit and the school19.

Alley Hollow and the natural area

Hollow and natural area · left bank, from the river up past the spring · Plate A10

Alley Hollow is the valley of Alley Branch. Its flat, open floor holds the spring, the millpond, the mill and most of the old park’s buildings, with the river’s gravel bank along its southern edge, and above the spring the hollow runs on to the northwest2, its creek coming down to feed the spring branch from the north1. Highway 106 runs north from the bridge along the west side of the hollow before it turns west to climb the ridge3, and the road from Eminence to Summersville once went on up the hollow4. By one account several families farmed in the hollow until the flood of 1928 turned their farms into gravel bars, and Joe Chilton’s truck, parked a quarter mile up the hollow, washed down into the spring branch. Another flood came down the hollow on February 9, 1966, and by the same account a storm in April 1974 drowned three people in a camper5 at the hollow’s mouth.

In 2007 the state designated 795 acres at the spring as the Alley Spring Natural Area, owned by the Park Service and managed with the state. At least seven animals that live only in caves, the grotto salamander among them, have been found in the cave passages beneath it, and Branson Cave is counted among the most biologically diverse6 caves in Missouri. Like the park’s other caves it has been closed to the public since 20107 (Chapter 13; Part Six). The grotto salamander begins life in cave streams and spring runs as a brown or dark gray larva with gills, working eyes and a broad tail fin. After two or three years, sometimes six, it loses its gills and turns pale tan or pink, and its small eyes are partly or wholly covered by the lids. Grown, it is three to five inches long and lives at least nine years, and it is commonest in caves with many bats8, whose droppings feed the small animals it eats.