osage river – Page 4 – Damming the Osage

Warsaw on the Osage – 1905 Postcard

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Dec 192013

Real Photo Postcard, mailed 1905

Sent by Lula G. Davis from Lincoln, Missouri to Miss Edith Belle Ordway of Haverhill, Mass., on December 6, 1905 showing “a scene in our county – at Warsaw on the Osage.” This real photo postcard shows the swinging bridge built by Joe Dice across the main Osage. After discussing her upcoming trip to New Mexico in the “Interesting West,” Miss Davis assures Miss Ordway: “. . . . I too am interested in souvenir postals. I do not think it silly to like beautiful things.”

Today the remaining Joe Dice ‘swinger’ on the main Osage, the same bridge in Miss Davis’ real photo postcard, is a pedestrian walkway at Warsaw with historic marker.

Osage River near Osceola

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Dec 162013

Real Photo Postcard, circa 1920

Message on the back makes it sound like this photo was taken for a particular friend. Written in pencil it says: “Osage River near Osceola. Here are some river (pictures) near Mrs. MacKenny made for you as we never got to take any while you were here. I guess we will go to Alba the last of the week.”

HISTORIC HURRICANE DECK BRIDGE OVER LAKE OF THE OZARKS DYNAMITED

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Dec 152013

The last of three bridges designed by Svedrup and Parcel dynamited and replaced by new span.

December 8, 2014 – Missouri’s highways and transportation commissioner pushed the plunger, detonating dynamite on a 740 foot section of the Hurricane Deck bridge that once carried Highway 5 over the Osage River arm of Lake of the Ozarks. According to the bridgehunter.com website, the 1936 bridge was ‘structurally deficient’ and clearly the highway department agreed. The steel will be pulled out of the lake and the rest of the bridge will be taken down in additional demolitions in coming weeks.

Video from Springfield TV station, KOLR-10, shows the demolition blasts and collapse of the first spans to be dropped into the lake.

Early in the development of the Lake, Sverdrup and Parcel, a St. Louis firm, was engaged to design and construct bridges to connect communities in Morgan and Camden counties that were now cut off from each other. When Damming the Osage was published (2012), the 1936 Hurricane Deck bridge – which was named the most beautiful bridge in its class that year by the American Institute of Steel Construction – was the last remaining span over the lake by that firm. Additional information is available at Bridgehunter.com http://bridgehunter.com/mo/camden/hurricane-deck/

Leif Sverdrup, a Norwegian immigrant, with his college engineering teacher, John Parcel, founded the company in 1928. During World War II, General Sverdrup became chief engineer for General Douglas MacArthur.

Among many distinctive spans, the firm also designed the graceful twin bridges that cross the Missouri River at Jefferson City.

Sverdrup and Parcel also designed the pair of steel-through-arch bridges crossing the Missouri River at Jefferson City (Cole County, Missouri) in 1955. These spans still carry traffic on the multi-lane freeway of US 54/63.

(click on image to enlarge)

A Chronology of Development on the Osage River and Tributaries

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Nov 052013

For our presentations this month for the Greenway Network at River Soundings and for the Big Muddy Speaker Series in St. Charles, we created this chronology of development on the Osage River.

DAMMING THE OSAGE:
A Chronology of Development on the Osage River and Tributaries

• 1813 – The Osages and Chouteaus reluctantly agreed to locate the trading post on the Missouri River instead of on the Osage, near their home, acknowledging that the Osage was too shallow for year round transportation.
• 1821 – Harmony Mission attempted a water mill on the Marais des Cygnes (then called the Osage River) but it washed out.
• 19th century – numerous pioneer mills on tributaries throughout the 1800s
• Circa 1840s – Caplinger Mills – successful grist mill on the Sac River. In 1917 this became the first hydroelectric project on the Osage system
• 1895 – Lock & Dam No. 1 construction started because of agitation for river improvement for steamboats. Designed by Hiram Chittenden, built by Army Corps of Engineers.
• 1906 Bates County Ditch, an ill-conceived channelization of the Marais des Cygnes
• Late 1920s – run-of-the-river hydroelectric dam at Osceola built by Ozark Utility Company
• 1931 Bagnell Dam closed. Financed by Union Electric of St. Louis, but started by Walter Cravens and Ralph Street of Kansas City.
• 1932 – Corps of Engineers delivers 308 Report on “Osage River, Mo. And Kans.”

Corps of Engineers Dams completed 1961-1982

• 1961 – POMME DE TERRE, on the Pomme de Terre River – multipurpose pool of 7,820 acres
• 1963 – POMONA, KANSAS, on Dragoon and One Hundred Ten Mile creeks – 4,060 acres
• 1969 – STOCKTON DAM, MISSOURI, on Sac River – 24,900 acres. Stockton is larger than the first two projects and is the only one, besides Truman, to have hydropower generation
• 1975 – MELVERN LAKE, KANSAS, on the Marais des Cygnes – 6,930 acres
• 1979 – TRUMAN DAM, WARSAW MISSOURI on the Osage River – 55,600 acre power pool
• 1982 – HILLSDALE, KANSAS, on Big Bull Creek – 4,580 acres

• ? – Removal of Lock & Dam No. 1. Originally unjustified and an environmental disaster today

More information is available in DAMMING THE OSAGE: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir. Retail $35, it is available from our website for $25 postage paid.

www.dammingtheosage.com
www.beautifulozarks.com
http://www.youtube.com/user/lensandpenpress
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BRIDGE AT HOECKER / HENLEY (UNDER CONSTRUCTION) 1903

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May 162013

Although long out of service, the Henley railroad bridge is still an imposing iron bridge across the Osage in Miller County, not far from St. Elizabeth. It is hard to get to as the right of way is grown up and interested bridge hunters have to walk in. Tangled, grown up brush makes the walk difficult – easier in winter than summer.

It was built in 1903 for the Chicago, Rock Island, & Pacific Railroad to span the Osage River. The main span is a pin-connected, 14-panel Pennsylvania through truss. With the bankruptcy of the railroad in 1980, ownership of the line was transferred through many hands until the Union Pacific Railroad sold it to Ameren Corp, a St. Louis-based utility. The majority of the line (including the Henley Bridge) has not been used since 1979.

Bridgehunter.com is a valuable resource for those fascinated by old bridges.

Bridgehunter.com’s inventory of bridges and bridges lost on the Osage River:

PLANS FOR LOCK AND DAM NO.1 ON OSAGE RIVER

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May 092013

Local plans for improvements to the Osage River to make it a commercially navigable stream projected a series of locks and dams. Work by the Corps of Engineers on the first one began in September 1895 at Shipley Shoals, then seven miles from the mouth of the Osage. A key feature of the project was the “Chittenden Drum Wicket” (or the Chanoine wicket), the half-round section shown in this diagram. Designed by Army Corps Captain Hiram Martin Chittenden to regulate the flow of the river, the retractable 375-foot long iron mechanism was installed on top of a 9-foot concrete dam. It was prone to being jammed by mud and clogged by drift and was eventually scrapped.

Soon after its completion in 1906 a 30-foot section of the dam collapsed. That was rebuilt and for more than a century the lone lock and dam has served more as an impediment to river travel than as an improvement.

Capt. Chittenden redeemed himself with the Chittenden locks in Seattle, a complex of locks at the west end of Salmon Bay, part of Seattle‘s Lake Washington Ship Canal. Chittenden became the Seattle District Engineer for the Corps soon after completion of Lock and Dam No. 1. Seattle’s locks include working fish ladders for salmon. They were formally opened in 1917 and are still in operation. Chittenden retired as a general.

Possibly he erred in his calculations for Lock and Dam No.1 because he was absorbed in the writing of multi-volume books on the fur trade in the West and on steamboating on the Missouri River. Remarkably, unlike other histories written in that era, these are still in print, and even available in e-book format. His guidebook to Yellowstone is also still in print.

Today there is growing interest in getting rid of Lock & Dam No.1. The sad, crumbling state of the structure was painfully exposed during the drought of 2012. We have added a section to the Web site pulling together information on the current controversy surrounding Lock and Dam No. 1

http://www.dammingtheosage.com/lock-and-dam-no-1-on-the-osage-river/

PADDLEFISH OF THE MISSISSIPPI

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Apr 252013

Drawing from Scientific American (19^th century)

Living paddlefish are somewhat hard to draw and preserved paddlefish are even harder. Their physical representation has been poorly illustrated. They’re not only hard to draw, they are near impossible to mount. Their habits are even harder to observe. A large fish in muddy water is a difficult subject for accurate scientific description. Their spawning was first observed and described in the section of the Osage now under Truman Reservoir.

“It wasn’t until 1961 that anyone actually observed paddlefish spawning when Charles Purkett, a fisheries biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, saw them release eggs and milk over flood gravel bars on the upper Osage. “

(page 204, Damming the Osage)

(Above) A tract from an anti-evolutionary organization, Does God Exist? September /October, 2002. In this issue, they discuss the impossibility of the paddlefish being a product of Darwinian adaptation. Cover art does not bear out their conclusion that “God shows us His wisdom and engineering ability in such beautiful creatures as this one.”

THE VILLAGE OF BAGNELL, MISSOURI

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Apr 222013

Photograph, 1920s

The village of Bagnell, Missouri, was a little railhead along the river used mostly for unloading railroad ties that had been rafted down the Osage. There were plans for the railroad to cross the river at Bagnell, but they didn’t materialize. When construction of the Osage River dam began in the mid 1920s, a spur line was built to transport materials to the construction site, in addition to the barges and steamboats that hauled materials

The few years of heavy construction were a boom time for Bagnell. When incorporated in 1926, the town had a bank, a post office, telephone system, stores, a café, gas stations and even a movie theater. But when the dam closed, work and workers disappeared. The highway was routed over the dam, killing the ferry operation across the Osage. Three fires in 1931 nearly spelled doom for the town. Then a huge flood in 1934 destroyed many of the rebuilt businesses. (see “Bagnell in Flood” post on this blog – http://www.dammingtheosage.com/osage-river-in-flood-at-the-town-of-bagnell/).

Today a campground is the main attraction in old Bagnell.

Steamboats Remembered

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Feb 202013

Steamboats ran up the Osage as far as Osceola when the river was high. Tuscumbia, county seat of Miller County, was a regular stop – a fact commemorated today in this plaque on the new county courthouse.

OSAGE RIVER BLUFFS NEAR OSCEOLA

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Feb 132013

Real photo postcard, Osceola Missouri, 1913

The bluffs along the Osage may not have been as spectacular as the larger bluffs along New York’s Hudson, but they excited a similar esthetic appreciation in the writer of an 1888-something booklet extolling the unappreciated beauties of southwest Missouri:

How grand are thy works, O Master Divine! The Osage and the Sac Rivers vie with each other in their natural beauty. Here their river banks o’er hung with drooping elm or giant sycamore, there long reaches of pebbled, gravelly beach, on and further on great walls of rock and bluff stand boldly forth with the hoar of a thousand ages on their face, and check the waters of the ever flowing streams which bathe their rocky feet as if in conciliation and with peaceful curvette pass onward on the journey to the sea. . . . A coming generation of scenic artists will find, that after the beautiful scenery of Colorado, Utah and the Sierras have been made familiar to the public, they can turn to the hitherto neglected scenery of the Osage and Sac rivers and find gems of surpassing beauty.

We noted that it sort of took, but the painters didn’t come. There was no Osage River Valley School of painting.

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