In the early nineteenth century, Arkansas was "a reincarnation of the American frontier" and thought of in the same fashion as places like Kentucky had been in the popular imagination of the late 1700s. It was seen as a wild borderland in the process of being tamed and brought within the sphere of civilization through pioneer settlement. Even at that point in history, however, the "forces of movement" and modernization which had overtaken the myriad of previous frontiers had been put into motion in Arkansas and the Arkansas Ozarks (Blevins 2002:9; Rohrbough 1990:219). The decades following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which included the land that was to become the Arkansas Ozarks, saw the arrival of what some have called "ambitious pioneers"--merchants, politicians, lawyers, farmers, aspiring planters and their families--until "the Arkansas Ozarks were home to over a quarter of a million American settlers" by the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps more than the land could support (Blevins 2002:9).

The story of Van Winkle's Mill takes place in this period of exponential growth, a time that regional historian Brooks Blevins calls "an era of starts and stops, false hopes, important transformations and stubborn continuities" (Blevins 2002:69). Of course, this period was a time of rapid change in a region which is usually portrayed as "timeless" and "unchanging." This is just the oppositional dichotomy that our work seeks to explore through the device of Van Winkle's Mill.

Take a closer look at the history of this Ozark sawmill community by clicking the links below.

• The Beginning of Van Winkle's Mill
• The Postbellum "Golden Age"
• The Death of Peter Van Winkle
• Van Winkle's Mill into the Twentieth Century