My daughter works at a shop in town frequented by tourists. The other day, a couple probably in their 70s came in and the gentleman said, “The last time I was in Eureka Springs I must have been about twelve years old.” He told about coming to visit during summer vacations and about the restaurant at Lake Lucerne. As his wife impatiently tried to usher him out the door, he said, “I’m just trying to tell this young lady about her town’s history.”

I have some old Lake Lucerne postcards and they show that it was quite a resort. One postcard shows the sizeable restaurant, which was a hot spot for both locals and tourists, looming over the lake. There is a high dive, a tall water slide and other recreational activities. Another postcard shows the hilly golf course.

Lake Lucerne was once partly owned by Lance Alworth. He is considered an all time great of both the Razorbacks and of professional football. I’m told that in the era that Lance Alworth played for Frank Broyles in Fayetteville, the Razorbacks would come to Eureka Springs and stay at the Crescent Hotel the night before home games. Perhaps that is when he became familiar with Lake Lucerne. Later, during the 1965 off season when he wasn’t playing professional football in San Diego, Lance Alworth and two Little Rock businessmen purchased the Lake Lucerne Resort. They only owned it for two years, but Lance Alworth managed to establish a boys camp there during that time.

I’ve read articles about the group that purchased the resort from Lance Alworth and company and their plans. According to what I read, they planned to lengthen and pave the airstrip at Lake Lucerne so that it could accommodate daily passenger flights. The 9-hole golf course was to be expanded and a ski slope and chair lift for snow skiing was to be built.

If you have memories of Lake Lucerne, write to me at steve@steveweems.com or P.O. Box 43 in Eureka Springs, 72632.

Jack McCall was born in 1911 in his grandfather’s house east of Eureka Springs. His grandfather was George McCall, a widower and Justice of the Peace for the Kings River Township.

Justices of the Peace in those days had expanded powers. For instance, Jack remembered his grandfather holding court in the parlor. Two fellows might be brought in for fighting and disturbing the peace, and George McCall would ascertain the facts of the altercation and levy a fine as he deemed necessary.

The historic house has been gone for several years now, but what brought it to mind was a book I happened across at the Eureka Springs Carnegie Library titled Ozark Vernacular Houses: A Study of Rural Homeplaces in the Arkansas Ozarks 1830-1930 by Jean Sizemore. It turns out that the McCall house was a particular type of Ozark house called a “Central Hall Cottage.”

I know very little about architecture, but I fell in love with the McCall house at a young age. It’s interesting how some houses have character and personality, while others do not make an impression. The front of the white frame house had a portico in the center with square wooden columns. The screen door behind lead into the Central Hall or “breezeway.” The front was in perfect balance, each side a mirror of the other. Equal distance from the portico, on either side, were tall narrow windows, and equal distance from the windows were handsome limestone chimneys.

I’m told that the house began as a one room cabin when the family returned to Arkansas following the Civil War and then evolved as the size of the family fluctuated from generation to generation. At one time, the kitchen was outside in a separate building, so that the cooking could be done away from the house, especially in the oppressive heat of summer. I remember the antique window panes were thick and flawed and that the scent of nearly a dozen decades of wood fires greeted visitors. Though the house is gone forever it does continue to live in a small way as the home of Max McCaver in my novel Murder in the Ozarks.

My wife’s grandfather, Bill Groblebe, worked for the electric company in the early days of electricity in Eureka Springs. In those days, a power outage meant Grandpa Bill would set out on foot carrying all the tools, equipment and wire that he might need to look for the problem. He would follow the power line from Eureka Springs toward Rogers checking it out. At the same time, a lineman from Rogers would start out walking toward Eureka with the same goal. Whoever reached the outage first spliced the line and climbed the pole to put everything right. Grandpa Bill spent cold winter nights in the woods miles from town with a lantern looking for the cause of outages and restoring power.

Recently, late one night, I heard the muffled crash of a large tree falling followed by the lights blinking out. I pulled on my boots and tromped around outside in the rain with a flashlight. I found the power line resting on top of our old concrete spring house instead of being pulled taut between two electric poles. Dripping water, I returned to the house and called Carroll Electric. While I was outside, my wife had lit candles and oil lanterns. Since I didn’t expect to hear back from Carroll Electric until morning, I headed for bed.

Half an hour later, a utility truck came crawling down our little road. I jumped out of bed, pulled my boots back on and stumbled out the door. A Carroll Electric man was using a spotlight to look for downed power lines. I told the fellow the little I knew about the situation and we set out on foot. I hovered nearby at first, but then backtracked, knowing that standing ankle deep in spring water wasn’t the safest situation. The man returned to say that a sizeable white oak had brought the lines down and that he’d call his crew. The electricity was restored at approximately three in the morning. Lots of things have changed in the electric utility business over the years, but linemen are still out in the middle of the night turning on the lights.

The first time I heard of the Premier Fire Apparatus Company of Eureka Springs, Arkansas is when Duane O’Connor mentioned that Tommy Walker had seen one of the company’s fire trucks in a museum in Sheridan, Arkansas. The reason that we were even on the topic was because I’d seen an obituary for Minnie Barbee that listed Duane O’Connor as a pallbearer. He told me that Minnie’s husband had owned the fire truck assembly plant that was located on White Street at the top of Owen.

Having learned the name “Barbee,” I did what I do: I searched for the name on the internet and looked it up in my paltry collection of reference books. It turns out that Minnie Barbee’s late husband was Roscoe Barbee and he was a big deal, both in Eureka Springs and in the region. He not only owned the Premier Fire Apparatus Company, but he was also in a partnership with Sam Leath for a number of years. (They owned Camp Leath, now the location of Inn of the Ozarks.) On a wider scale, Roscoe Barbee came from a family that was widely known in Missouri politics. Online, I found a copy of Roscoe Barbee’s 1942 Draft Card. From this, I learned that his middle name was Cleveland and that the odds of his being drafted for World War II were slim: he was 57 and had only one leg.

I then talked further with Duane O’Connor about Mr. Barbee and his fire truck company. He remembered hearing that the trucks were delivered to Eureka Springs without a body or cab before being outfitted into a fire truck. He recalled a story about one such truck being driven to town in the middle of winter and that the driver was covered with icicles when he arrived.

Tommy Walker kindly emailed me a photograph of the sign at the Grant County Museum that described the fire truck that he’d seen on display. It was a 1939 Chevrolet (with a six-cylinder engine) modified by the aforementioned Premier Fire Apparatus Company. The truck was purchased by the city of Sheridan in 1940 and was the first motorized fire truck in Grant County, Arkansas.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about trees. I do that sometimes. What triggered it this time was a trip to the track behind the Eureka Springs Elementary School. A man stopped me to ask if I had ever seen a chinquapin tree. To be honest, I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen one or not, but I’ve heard about them all my life. The man showed me one growing in the edge of the woods that skirt the track’s parking lot. He gave me details about the once ubiquitous Ozark Chinquapins and how they were wiped out by blight, similar to what happened to chestnut trees. This led me to thinking about trees and the local forest.

Trees have always been important to the western side of Carroll County. I believe that the beauty of our forested hills still help bring in tourists and the cutting of firewood and sawmilling still employ several on a part-time basis. Once upon a time though, this area was part of the largest white oak forest in the world. For decades, millions of trees were cut for stave bolts (for barrel making) and for railroad ties.

The 1870 Federal Census was the last census taken before the founding of Eureka Springs and the tourism industry that we now take for granted. Timber was king. If you skim down the occupations listed for the approximately 1,200 locals on this side of the Kings River, you’ll see many lumber jobs and ancillary occupations such as blacksmiths, teamsters, and farriers.

All of this thinking of trees led to the memory of a conversation I had with a lady in town years ago. She asked how I could be a tree hugger when my family had cleared more trees than any other family in the history of Eureka Springs. I don’t think that she was correct on either point, but I do like trees. There is a good reason why I don’t live out on the treeless plains or tundra. But, as much as I am fascinated by trees, I still burn them in the woodstove every winter.