Buckhorn Hollow

The 2006 station

Former stream station · about North Prong mile 2.7

For part of the summer of 2006 the U.S. Geological Survey kept a station on the prong between Tracy Hollow and Buckhorn Hollow, named “North Prong Jacks Fork below Arroll.” It recorded daily data from May 16 to July 20 and took three water samples. At that point, about 930 feet above sea level, the prong drains 55.9 square miles, nearly all of its basin. It has recorded nothing since. On the station’s last day, July 20, 2006, Survey biologists also took fish from the prong there, carmine and bleeding shiners, which went to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science in Jackson1. About seven-tenths of a mile below the station, at about mile 2.02, a small branch with no recorded name comes in from the north.

Buckhorn Hollow and Arroll

Hollow and village · left bank · North Prong mile 0.7 · Plate A1

Buckhorn Hollow comes down from the north-northwest and reaches the prong on its last loop, about seven-tenths of a mile above the junction, draining about 1.3 square miles1. The hollow leads north past the Arroll school to the village2.

The man who knew the Hiker Hole, who lived at the VFW camp below the Prongs in the early 1990s, counted at least two miles up each prong among the stretches where “all of those areas are filling up13 and you’re getting hole after hole after hole” (Chapter 15).

Arroll is a village on Route W3 in Date Township, on the upland about two miles north of the junction4. The township was formed from Carroll Township in 1896 and was probably named for Date5, a post office whose site is not known; Date’s first postmaster was appointed on June 20, 1892, and the office closed on February 1, 1896, when its mail went to Oakside6. Two stories explain Arroll’s own name. In one, the applicants proposed Carroll and “clipped off the C”7 when that name was taken (Chapter 5). In the other, Turner Cook sent in the name ARRALL, and his handwriting was read as ARROLL8. The first recorded appointment at the Arroll post office is dated July 9, 1898. The office closed on November 30, 1914, reopened on February 12, 1938, and closed for good on May 3, 1957, when its mail went to Summersville9. By one account the Jack’s Fork post office, kept by Reuben Harlow from 1849, became the Arroll office; that account dates the change to 189910, the year after the first Arroll appointment, and the Jack’s Fork office is also dated 1860 to 190211 (Chapter 4).

In the early days William Harvell ran a hotel and livery stable at Arroll. In 1980 there were still a few homes, a church, a cemetery and a couple of stores12. A correspondent from Arroll sent the news to the Mountain View Standard in March 1913, including that “several men attended the bridge meeting at the Buck Hollow Ford” (Chapter 8). A Mountain View resident who grew up there in the 1960s and 1970s remembers that “it used to be a hopping place,” with “always someone at the store to chat with while grabbing a soda and a snack, maybe a little gas.” The same resident’s thoughts on what the park changed for people at the head of the river are in Chapter 11.

Collectors’ labels have long placed this country by its distance from Arroll. On April 27, 1952, Julian Steyermark, who later wrote the standard flora of the state15, collected spring coralroot, a small leafless orchid of shady woods, along the North Prong about two miles southwest of the village14. His labels of the 1930s16 give Barn Hollow and the bluffs of the river below the Prongs as so many miles southeast of Arroll (Reach C).

Below Buckhorn Hollow the North Prong finishes its loop and runs the last seven-tenths of a mile17 to meet the South Prong, which comes in from the west after passing under the Highway Y bridge. The county low-water crossing18 near the junction is described in Chapter 8. The junction, where the river’s miles begin19, and the two crossings at Low Water are in Reach C (Plate A3).