Riding along in the rolling hills of the Ozark Mountains is a lot like traveling in Oconee and Pickens counties. Soothing, curvy highways slide across the dense, verdant landscape. The differences: More poverty, fewer stores and a lot less people.
So when the Tahoe’s navigation system reported the town where my great-grandparents lived almost 100 years ago was just six miles off the highway, it was a no-brainer to steer east to Ravenden Springs, Ark.
The road got worse. Interspersed between bumps and lush forests were large pastures with few cows. Suddenly came the city limits, population 119.
Just past what seemed like a worn post office, a man fiddled in his yard. He was the only person visible during a 20-minute exploration. At a crossroads (no stoplight) to the left was a dip across a bridge that led to two different churches joined in the middle, a volunteer fire department and a few small old cottages that needed tending. On the other side of the crossroads was a rickety, empty store next to an empty building, an American Legion and a building with a caved-in roof.
The city hall/water department was next door in a tan metal structure with a red roof. Parked in front was a silver town truck with capital letters on the tailgate: “IN GOD WE TRUST.” So much for separation of church and state.
My 89-year-old mother remembers visiting her grandparents in this town that just seems sad. She recalls the four storefronts had a connected wooden walkway – like in the Old West – because the dirt roads got muddy when it rained.
Around the corner was her favorite building – a one-room stone structure that then housed the town’s jail. Today, the sole window has no bars. In the background is an odd house that’s half log cabin and something else completely that’s painted maroon.
Across the street is an empty modern playground below a closed stone school built in 1941. One end of the school now houses a library that’s apparently been open four days a week since 2022. My mother says when she was a child, townspeople would watch movies at the school but she wasn’t allowed to go because she was too little.
Her grandparents lived in Ravenden Springs. They moved there from eastern Missouri sometime after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Why they moved is a mystery that likely will never be solved. There’s nobody left to answer questions – and my mother was too young to know much more.
That side of the family is kind of a mystery because her father – my grandfather – died three years before I was born in a Faulknerian tractor accident outside Macon, Ga. He stopped the tractor while plowing to move a big rock and, let’s just say, he died.
His father, who ran a Missouri hamburger restaurant at one point, and mother may have moved to northeast Arkansas because they picked up some pasture land during the Depression. The area also apparently was popular with Seventh-Day Adventists, which also may have been a lure.
My grandfather, an educator at the start of the Depression, eventually started work on a master’s degree in agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas. He got the degree in 1935 and my mother thinks her grandfather may have been raising some cattle with him. Makes sense. Around that time, he and my great-grandmother would have been approaching 60.
While Ravenden Springs seems much like a sparsely populated ghost town these days, it apparently got started around 1880 after a minister’s dream about a nearby mineral spring. The water apparently healed his ailments, leading a businessman to build a 40-room resort. That led to seasonal spa visitors and “boom years,” but by the 1930s – about the time my great-grandparents moved there – the town started to decline as a summer resort.
This week’s chance encounter with the past certainly led to more questions than answers. Next time I’m nearby, I’ll remember to go when the library is open.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a question? Send to: feedback@charlestoncitypaper.com.
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