The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  About 1840, Peter Bellah, from Alabama, erected a gristmill on what would be called Mill Creek in what would become Marble City Township. Some living descendants insist that it is “Beller.” Just as Archibald Toomer became Ah-Che-To-Mah, or vice versa, the Ozarker has a habit of pronouncing “er” sounds as “ah,” and especially vice versa: hence, “tomato” becomes “’mater,” “Emma” becomes “Emmer,” “Marcella” is always “Marceller,” and so on. The logic is that if the actual spelling were “Bellah,” then it would be pronounced “Beller”; since the pronunciation is “Beller,” the spelling is therefore “Bellah.”

  Before coming on into Newton County, Kim took a motel room in Harrison; on the outskirts of that city she stopped to see Dr. Allen Robinson, a great-grandson of Peter Bellah. Dr. Robinson, who was eighty-eight (not as old as Kate Scraper), had only recently retired from a distinguished career as a physician, a pioneer in therapeutic radiology with a practice on Park Avenue in New York from 1921 until 1952, interrupted by service as a commander at the naval hospital in Long Beach, California, during World War II; during World War I he had been a young army doctor fresh out of Vanderbilt Medical School. But he had been born in Newton County, east of Marble City, the youngest in one of those typical ten-child families. All his years in Manhattan he was homesick for the Ozarks and came home on vacation every two or three years. Finally, after thirty years, a New York neighbor of his who was an architect had listened long enough to his talk about Arkansas and urged him to go home, recommending a fellow New York architect, a native of Arkansas named Edward Durell Stone, to build a house for him.

  Stone (1902-78) designed “Robin’s Hill” near Harrison for Dr. Robinson and his New York wife, Loretta, in 1952, and pronounced it his favorite of the many houses he designed. His best-known buildings range from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Kennedy Center in Washington, and a couple of entire college campuses, including the now defunct Windham College of Putney, Vermont, which went out of business the same year Stone died, 1978, leaving a great white ghost city of a campus in the small village.

  For Robin’s Hill, Stone cannibalized materials from the old Colonel Gaither homestead a considerable distance off toward Marble City: the large dogtrot “double house” of hewn logs was converted into a very modern bathroom, while the huge hewn timbers of the barn were realigned and scarfed and splined into a vast cathedral-ceilinged living room for the main house. Kim cannot help remembering the Alexanders’ “Raheen” on its hilltop outside Sulphur City (whose architect, Fay Jones, was a disciple of Edward Durell Stone’s); the similarities of site and scale are noteworthy, but the differences are more important. “More comfortable here,” Kim wrote into her notebook, “more used, more habituated. This has been made into a home. Raheen is too new.”

  “We had to find a carpenter who wanted to use the old materials,” Dr. Robinson told Kim. The very old physician was quite trim and spare, spry, scarcely stooped, wore no glasses to hide the twinkle in his eye, had a full head of white hair to cool his brain, and large, very long ears to hear perfectly with. “Not a carpenter who could use the materials, but one who would.”

  “Have you been to Dogpatch?” Kim asked, explaining that she herself had not yet been there. “Have you taken the tour?”

  “Oh, sure,” the good doctor said. “With all these grandchildren…” His five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren had all had fun at the amusement park, but, like many others, he resented the name Dogpatch. He wished that its last “official” name, Marble Falls, had been retained, or even Willcockson, which was the name on the post office for many years. “Anything but Dogpatch,” he said. He would rather have seen Marble City made into a state park than into a commercialized theme park.

  From what little she knew about Marble City at that point, Kim had determined to concentrate on its physicians or its residents claiming to engage in the old-time practice of medicine, and she appreciated the coincidence of having her first interview be with a genuine physician. Dr. Robinson had heard of Marble City’s “Dr.” Silas Shruggs Stacey (1829—1915) but knew little about him. There is a great-grandchild of Stacey’s living north of Harrison in a house trailer; it is on Robinson’s great-grandfather Peter Bellah, who died before Stacey came to town, that this early part of the search must center. The name, Dr. Robinson assured her, was written down the way it sounded, “Beller,” but was Bellah in the original. Allen Robinson may have been named for Allen Bellah, who was the first sheriff of Newton County. Did Robinson remember his great-grandfather? “He died in ’62,” the doctor told Kim; “I wasn’t born until the nineties.”

  Kim and Dr. Robinson were joined by one of the doctor’s grandsons, Jim Robinson, and his wife, Betty. They live on and manage the Robinson Farm Museum and Heritage Center at Rally Hill, east of Valley Springs, Arkansas, the fulfillment of Dr. Robinson’s dream to have a living museum preserving the dwellings, tools, and artifacts of the early Ozark pioneers. Jim invited Kim to visit. Another day, she will.

  That day, Jim Robinson told Kim of the Bellahs who were involved in the Mountain Meadow Massacre: in 1857, a party of 140 Arkansawyers on their way to California were stopped in Utah and slaughtered in cold blood by Paiute Indians at the instigation of Mormons who resented their trespass; there is a monument in their memory on the lawn of the courthouse in Harrison. Jim Robinson also told Kim that Peter Bellah cut the block of marble that represents Marble Falls and the state of Arkansas in the Washington Monument at Washington, D.C., and suggested to her that she might want to talk to Doyle Harp, at his farm on Harp Creek, west of Marble City, who is a great-grandson (there are great-grandchildren of all the original settlers and central figures of Marble City still living somewhere in the neighborhood) of the Harp who helped Peter Bellah quarry the block of marble. There is a small monument to the accomplishment, and Kim decided that this would be the next thing she wanted to find, and to see.

  Before leaving Robin’s Hill, she put to Dr. Robinson the standard question about how to live so long. Would he also tell her that he had never worried? Surely a physician who tended the dying of both world wars must have worried a lot. No, he did not tell her he had never worried. His prescription was:

  “Choose your ancestors. Live in the Ozarks. And marry a good cook!”

  Now Kim heads her black sports car yclept Zephyra south on Highway 7, past the Dogpatch billboards, into Newton County. Just before the county line she sees on her right a stone ruin: once a gift shop or roadhouse or even a home (although much too close to the highway), it now lacks all of its many windows and its roof is caving in, but its flagstone masonry is still sturdy and intact. Kim is destined to ask several people about this derelict relic before she will learn, from the son of its builder, Albert Raney, that he had a dream of tourism long before Dogpatch but was finally forced to sell the gift shop (for such it was) to the Dogpatch establishment, which promptly forgot about it and let it deteriorate. Just beyond this handsome survival, Kim comes to Dogpatch itself, cold and deserted at this time of year, not yet ready for tourists, its hodgepodge of bastardized architecture sprawling through the little valley to the left. To the right is a tiny glade, scarcely noticeable, scarcely wide enough for Kim to pull off the highway; on it is a cairn of stones looking like a converted backyard barbecue, encasing two marble blocks incised with letters, the upper one saying simply “Arkansas” and the lower one declaring, “This marker commemorates the Arkansas Marble in Washington’s Monument taken by Beller and Harp Bros from this hill in 1836 this marker erected 1954 by Newton Co. History Society, W. F. Lackey Pres. Manda Hickman Sec.” The W. F. is Walter Lackey, a county historian who never lived in Marble City but knew everyone who did. Amanda Hickman did live here. Her name, of course, was pronounced “Man-der,” not “Mandy.” (Another parenthesis: Man-der Hickman was the last postmaster/mistress of the place before it became Dogpatch; Mander Willcockson was the place’s first postmaster/mistress, appointed October 30, 1883, by order of the postma
ster general of the United States of America, although Marble City had been a mail drop or postal stop for forty years previous to that. As so often happens, the name of a town is bestowed by the first postmaster, at least in the official eyes of the United States Post Office Department, and thus Mander Willcockson called Marble City by the name Willcockson, which it kept, officially, for the rest of its life, despite being Marble City in reality until, according to the backers or promoters of Dogpatch USA—though the figure, as we shall see, is of highly suspicious authenticity—60 percent of the local populace voted or signed X’s on a petition to change the name from Willcockson to Dogpatch. Willcockson has the distinction of being the only post office in the United States to which an addressed piece of mail never had the post-office name spelled correctly [except by the Post Office Department, and then not always]. Some of the variants are: Willcoxson, Wilcoxon, Wilcoxson, Wilcoxsen, Wilcocksen, Wilcoggins, Millcocksing, and Wisconsin.)

  There was never any town or even a settlement here before Peter Bellah built his gristmill; in fact, Peter Bellah himself did not come to live here, except when the business of the mill, which ran day and night, kept him overnight. He had settled eight miles northeast of his mill in the flourishing community of Bellefonte (“pretty spring,” but quite possibly a play upon his name), where he quickly made a reputation as a millwright, designing and building and operating water-powered gristmills, which were as indispensable and almost as prevalent in those days as quick-stop convenience stores are today. His mill at Marble City (the exact year of construction, sometime between 1834 and 1837, is not known) was simply one more in his chain, but perhaps the largest, grandest, and busiest, thanks to the power of the spring as it bubbled up out of Spring Bluff. (Contrary to logic and popular belief, Peter Bellah’s mill was built not at the waterfalls called Marble Falls but, rather, some six hundred feet upstream.)

  Presumably, people didn’t call him Peter but simply Pete: he called himself Captain, although there is no record of any service in any branch of the military. He was Cap’n Pete. Beller the Miller. Also, Beller Miller the Driller, drilling into the marble (actually a less compact, more grainy form of limestone) deposits for choice blocks. There were no houses at or near his mill. There would be no houses anywhere in Mill Creek Valley for years to come; Marble City would not become a dream until Cap’n Pete was dead, and even then no marble would ever be used in the construction of any house or other building there. Just what happened to the so-called marble quarried at Marble City is a mystery: some of it undoubtedly was worked into tombstones; some of it may have found its way to distant cities for banks, courthouses, churches; some of it may even have become sculpture.

  One piece of it went to Washington, courtesy of Cap’n Pete, and perhaps the very name of Marble City derives from this one block, four feet long and two feet high. Bellah and the Harp brothers must have selected the whitest, most marblelike chunk they could find, for most of the Marble City stone, according to a description by Lee Randolph, who worked there in the 1890s as a marble cutter, “varies in color from light to dark gray, beautifully clouded gray and red, of dark and light shades splendidly mottled, showing all colors of the rainbow and excelling anything so far discovered for inside finish of buildings, and furniture work. The heaviest colors run from dark mottled red to the deepest wine color, turning into almost a blue black.”

  Cap’n Pete, his cousins, and the Harp brothers, seized with the dream of developing the marble quarry into an industry, went to the considerable trouble of building a special wagon that was pulled by three yoke of oxen, and hauling the ton-block of marble over the tortuous Boston Mountains a distance of ninety miles to the Arkansas River. The seven men and ten oxen required a month for the journey, and then the block was rafted out to the steamboat Pennywit, waiting in midstream; months more were required to float the block to New Orleans and thence to its destination at Washington, where it would remain locked up in a warehouse along with identical tribute blocks from other states, counties, organizations, and individuals, as well as ton-stones from China, Japan, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Brazil, and Switzerland, for years and years. The actual laying-in-place of the stones was commenced on the nation’s Centennial—long after Cap’n Pete, most of his cousins, and most of the Harps were dead.

  Kim decides to follow Jim Robinson’s tip and interview Doyle Harp, who lives not far from the memorial to his ancestors and Peter Bellah. Nobody, Kim has discovered, appears to live in Dogpatch, or beside it, or close to it, or around it, except possibly the caretaker or someone like that. This time of year, like a stage between shows, it is empty of people: the props are there, all the sets are up, the scenery is in place, but if there are any people around, they are in the wings. Zephyra protests the dirt-and-gravel road that she must suffer a mile or so to get Kim over the hill and beyond the sham theatricality of Dogpatch. Doyle Harp, age sixty-one, is a farmer, and lives on a farm. The farm is in the Newton County mountains, without an acre of flat bottom land; his pastures and meadows roll all over the place, around the spring branch of Harp Creek; the land has been in the Harp family since the first white settlement. Doyle’s son now owns the land where the ersatz marble for Washington’s monument was quarried.

  Harp Creek flows out of a place called The Basin, whose name is almost self-explanatory: a vessel of a valley, a wash-bowl of hills. There is a lovely little white school/churchhouse there, and not much else. One expects to hear the sound of harp music in the distance.

  Doyle Harp went to school in The Basin; he was born and grew up near it; he has lived in this valley all his life. Like most of the farmers, he has had to work off the farm to supplement his income; once he worked for a feed company in Harrison, and before that he had his own feed business. Along with many other local people, he helped build Dogpatch, but despises it.

  “I was on the carpentry crew,” he tells Kim. “I didn’t do anything but just drive nails in old boards.” He says this almost as a protest of innocence. His crew put up all the buildings, using old lumber, old logs taken from old neighborhood buildings torn down, old homesteads robbed of their structures. The native carpenters at Dogpatch did a good job with the old boards: in fact, their work was too good, their carpentry too neat for the “rickety” look of hillbilly sloth that the Dogpatch management was after. Harp’s crew was called back to smash the ridgepoles and make the roofs look slovenly.

  “All those sway-back roofs…” Kim says.

  “They decided they needed to be sway-backed, so they sent us back at ’em.”

  “Why?”

  “To make ’em look more like Dogpatch.” Harp pronounces the word the way Kim will hear it pronounced with emphasis by all of the native people she meets: with derision, with deep personal distaste. Not far west of Newton County is an actual locale called Dogbranch, and a timeworn Dogbranch Cemetery, and then of course there are dogwood trees everywhere, and also dogbane, dogtooth violet, dogberries, dog days, dogpaddling, dog sled, dogtrot, dog’s life, and dogma, and though “dog” is pronounced “dawg” everywhere in Arkansas, the only pronunciation that comes close to the slurring utterance of “Dogpatch” is “doggone,” a euphemism for “damn.”

  “You don’t like Dogpatch?” Kim asks. She is learning how to say the word acceptably herself. “Why not?”

  “I just don’t like the way we got done,” Harp says, “when they changed the name of it to Dogpatch. See, sixty percent of the postal patrons was supposed to be willin to petition, to sign it, that they wanted it changed. Nobody signed nothin! The dude that bought all that land there thought he had more money than the state of Arkansas. He just built the new post office all by himself up on the hill and decided to call it Dogpatch.” Doyle Harp twiddles some imaginary dollar bills between his thumb and forefinger. “Money,” he says. “I been in that new P.O. one time.” He does not plan to go there again if he can help it.

  Kim says, “What’s this about sixty percent of the postal…?”

  “That means that
percentage of the postal patrons was supposed to be willin for it to be changed to Dogpatch and move the P.O. up to the hill in Dogpatch Park. And nobody signed the petition. Nobody. They just done it, and the postmaster told me one day if the local people don’t start buyin stamps up here, it’s goin to lower the rating of this P.O., and I couldn’t cry for laughin: let it happen. That’s the way I feel about it. I’ve never bought any stamps up there.”

  The Dogpatch Post Office serves not only the residents who once got their mail addressed to Marble Falls or Willcockson but also many newcomers in the housing developments and condominiums and chalets not directly connected with the Dogpatch establishment, as well as motels and a convention center independent from Dogpatch. Doyle Harp also worked in maintenance for these.

  “I know you worked there at Dogpatch,” Kim says, “but did you ever go to enjoy it, like anyone else?”

  “Look, Dogpatch gives a lot of young people and several people my age employment. It employs a hundred, hundred fifty high-school graduates and college students for summer jobs. I drove a stagecoach over there for two years before it was black-topped. Outside of that, I’ve been back inside the park only one time, just to look at it. It’s the hottest place I’ve ever been in my life. It’s all blacktop now, and, boy, when it’s up in the nineties, and the sun beatin down on that blacktop…But there’s sure plenty people moves through there. When it’s open, you can sit in your car over here at the highway sometimes for thirty minutes just waitin to get on the highway. Dogpatch’s a nuisance, I’ll tell you for sure.”