Cultural Memory in the Arkansas Ozarks

Archeology is often about what is no longer there--at least what is no longer visible on the surface of things. Today, the site offers visitors only glimpses of what it once was. The only discernible surface feature left of the mill is the large limestone foundations for the platform that, in the nineteenth century, housed the three cast iron boilers and the steam-powered engine that ran the mills.

Around this platform is several other features related to the mill. To the west was a deep but narrow trench approximately three meters deep with a wall built of massive pieces of cut limestone extending from the trench's west face. This trench was where the mill's legendary flywheel was mounted. This flywheel, long demolished for scrap metal, gave me my first encounter with how my work as a historical archeologist at Van Winkle's Mill was entangled with the larger cultural memory of the Arkansas Ozarks.

Historical accounts refuse to agree on the most basic facts about the mill's equipment. There was no doubt that the flywheel was large and impressive. Beyond that fact, it was reported as being anywhere between 18 and 24 feet in diameter and weighing between 10,000 to 20,000 pounds. Moreover, none of the measurements given in the historical documentation correspond with the projected size of the wheel as ascertained through industrial archeology. My colleague, Robin Bowers, has pointed out that what is behind these contradictions is the place of the mill and its steam-powered machinery in the local imagination.

Thus the flywheel cannot be discerned through solely historical or archeological methodologies. To really understand the flywheel, how it becomes "legendary" in local history and how its real size gets obscured, one must take into account the cultural frameworks at work in the construction of our historical narratives. These frameworks have been referred to as our cultural memory.

The above quotation also offers a glimpse at a powerful theme in both local and national cultural memory that I will be examining in much detail later--the trope of the hillbilly. Bowers overtly evoked this trope when she pointed out that the nineteenth-century rural Ozark residents may have been considered "backward hillbillies." Although the term itself would not become widely used until the twentieth century, Bowers' point is well taken. There is an interesting disjuncture between these people who may have been conceived of as "backward" or "isolated" and the "symbol of modernity" that is Van Winkle's Mill. Bowers, however, was also playing into the trope when she stated that many of these inhabitants "had likely never seen a locomotive."

Each time I have given tours, lectures or interviews about the work being conducted in Van Hollow, I have encountered this disjuncture. I have found the listeners filtering what I was saying through various tropes of cultural memory.

After listening to me explain the history and archaeology of Van Winkle's Mill complete with the New York born, Illinois raised owner and his family, the large industrial saw mill complex that dominated the regional markets, and the enslaved African-American labor which made it possible many people would go out of their way to tell me of their surprise at (or sometimes disbelief of) my narrative. Sometimes they were surprised by the presence of such a powerful industrial capitalist in the Ozarks, sometimes it was surprise that the institution of slavery was prevalent in the upland South or industrial settings, sometimes it was a surprise that any racial or ethnic diversity ever existed in the Ozarks at all.

The further I delved into this disjuncture, and the more interactions I had with public interpretations of Ozark history, I began to suspect that the origins of some of the tropes at work in our cultural memories were entangled with the forces at work at Van Winkle's Mill in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century. The onset of modernity, industrialization, the creation of tropes such as the hillbilly, changing conceptualizations of race and even the formation of modern whiteness itself all left a mark on either the physical landscape or the cultural memory of Van Winkle's Mill.

Our work on cultural memory concentrates on the rise of certain tropes--such as the ever present hillbilly--that serve to erase industry and racial and class diversity in the Ozarks. Our work follows these tropes from their origins (in the late nineteenth century when Van Winkle's Mill was still in operation) to their full blossoming in the twentieth century. Understand what is differentially remembered and forgotten--both locally and nationally--can help us parse out changes in social relationships that caused these recastings of history.