From Camp Crowder to Camp Swampy

"You're not going to put this on your blog, are you?"

I stuffed my camera back in my pocket. "Nah, probably not."



Several months ago, some friends and I were scouting the desolate remains of the U.S. Army's Fort Crowder near Neosho, Missouri, for possible use in organizing outdoor events. We had permission to be there from the current owner, Crowder College, but exploring the derelict military installation seemed like a clandestine operation. Not for public consumption, and definitely not for blogging.

As I discovered, the site's history is too interesting to keep to myself.

Camp Crowder


Camp Crowder started life as an Army Signal Corps training base built during World War II. At its peak, its operations expanded to roughly 45,000 people stationed across a sprawling city of soldiers, block after block of barracks and drilling grounds. Crowder's ranks saw everything from basic training to specialized communications instruction, and even Axis prisoners of war.


Postcard from Flickr user "Smaddy."


Colorful visitors: Senator Harry Truman (born in nearby Lamar, MO), Cary Grant, and Congressman and necktie enthusiast Dewey Short. Images courtesy of the Missouri State Archives.


Swastikas marking the funeral of a German captive. Images courtesy of the Missouri State Archives.

Links ahoy:
[Missouri State Archives: Camp Crowder Photograph Collection]
[Newton County History]
[Camp Crowder postcard history]

Camp Swampy


Cartoonist Mort Walker, creator of comic strip Beetle Bailey and its spin-off television shorts, was stationed at Crowder during the Big One. When the comic strip began in 1950, Walker had no want for material - gags follow the toils and characters of base life.


No coincidences: Camp Swampy is Camp Crowder.

Among today's old, weathered stop signs and concrete footings was the ever-aloof Private Bailey, getting his neck wrung by the Sarge for napping against a half-painted door. We've seen how the L'il Abner comic was a uniquely Ozarkian endeavor, spawning its own "Dogpatch U.S.A." theme park near Jasper, Arkansas. Here is another real-life standard straight out of the Sunday funny pages.


Inspiring decades of worked shrugged by Private Bailey. Images courtesy of the Missouri State Archives.


Neither gender or racial sensitivity was up to modern norms, but look, there was a war on.
Rubber band gun from Volume 22.

Crowder's role diminished after the war, briefly becoming a rocket testing ground before dividing the land among Crowder College, the National Guard, and local industry. Most of the infrastructure was sold or demolished, but the more permanent works in asphalt and concrete remain. A web personal favorite of mine, Underground Ozarks, has some pictures of areas we were not able to cover.


Among the relics: a rusty desk, oil drums, and concrete blocks marked with weights of odd accuracy.



Touring the old base, the one thing that stands out is the remarkable pace of nature. Constructions erected with even military efficiency are no match for the Ozarks' relentless green tide. Trees grow in the middle of old roads, and herds of white-tailed deer roam the fields where neat rows of buildings once stood. Any low spot in the soil became fair game for a frog pond.



General Halftrack is long gone from Camp Crowder, and the past has faded rapidly. Like Beetle Bailey, Mother Nature is not one to take orders.

Vanning Out with Craigslist

The full-sized van is America's spiritual canvas. We're a nation on the move, and a shed on wheels lets us roam without stranding a single piece of emotional or physical baggage. Some vans are luxury conversions shuttling the whole entourage to the tailgate party, while others are windowless beasts of burden. At work or play, vans have carried our most colorful characters, including Uncle Rico, the Bad News Bears, and the A-Team. Charles Bukowski even made a cameo running a wet t-shirt contest in the 1977 vanning freakout, SuperVan.

[Charles Bukowski SuperVan cameo]
Headlights warning, but if your boss doesn't think this is hip, get a new job.

A van is diversely utilitarian, yet sometimes a little odd and socially obtuse. Even the layout is a little off. The interior's console hump hides the engine tucked up near your ankles, and the cavernous rear cargo area carries payloads in fishy anonymity. Worse, high-profile vanners like John Wayne Gacy and Phillip Garrido have earned these vehicles a measure of nefarious mystery. The stigma is so common that web site Suspiciousvans.com does a thriving trade in sharing the most dubious examples captured on the road, with hilarious results.

As we've seen already, I'm a compulsive Craigslist window-shopper. When it comes to vans, the Ozarks have plenty to offer.

Bro Van


Let's be fair. Not all of these hefty haulers are tools of the criminal element. The idea for this post began with an inspiring Craigslist listing dealing with the favorite Ozarkbahn subject: road trips. Three friends purchased "Van Damme" to take on a 3,000-mile journey, and along the way the red Dodge endeared itself as "the 4th member of our trip." Any plebeian SUV or sedan could have fit the bill, but a conversion van has soul. Hard-drinking, bear-wrestling soul.


Calling Dispatch


I have watched an awful lot of the disco-era California highway cop drama CHiPs, and the message about vans is a bit different. If Baker and Ponch taught us anything, it's that shifty old vans can never be trusted. If you saw this tint-sided "mystery van" weaving down the Santa Monica Freeway today, it's definitely full of stolen microchips and Firebird parts.


You Sure Ask a lot of Questions


One has to admire the simplicity of the advertising. No need to embellish. It has an automatic and V8, and it runs. Got $600? Then you have yourself a van. No back seats come with the deal, as they were not needed in it's previous line of work. The brevity makes us wonder, though. Did it belong to an electrician? Drug mule? Serial groper? Uncle Walter?


Coyote Ugly


If burnouts and fast getaways are on the itinerary, this four-speed manual transmission Econoline is the one to get. The panel sides keep the heist under wraps until you crash through the bank door, and the twin gas tanks feeding a 4.9L V8 make the Mexican border appear that much faster.


Free Candy


Okay, maybe my imagination takes liberties, but this 1961 Ford Molesterline may have a few skeletons in the closet. Clowns, ponies, balloons, and from the looks of it, chloroform rags. If Stephen King were serving up rocket pops, this might fit the bill. The rest of us would do well to keep the children at arm's length when this one rolls through the neighborhood.


[Sound of brakes locked up / sliding door opens / tires squeal away]

See you later. I hope.

Driven: Missouri DD

The Old Wire Road Project was quite a detour. An ambling hop down a quiet nowhere road revealed an unexpectedly rich Ozark narrative, charting a flourish from dusty wagon trail to unlikely pivot of American commerce. We could follow this track indefinitely, but the Ozarkbahn is an exercise in mobility. People to see, things to do. Time to hit the road.



Before you loosen the chin strap on your learning helmet, recall that Arkansas' hesitant membership in the losing side of the War of Northern Aggression earned it no favors. The economic setbacks tendered in the nineteenth century are even visible in the Old Wire Road itself, where it trades gravel for blacktop at the state line. This field trip down Missouri DD begins with a thwump as the original 'bahn leaves the South for now-paved Union territory.


Guess where Arkansas ends and Missouri begins. No cheating.

A marker for a Civil War skirmish at Potts Hill is the only ceremony offered at the border, but something about the tidy pavement's edge takes on additional fascination. Here is a Mile Marker Zero, a place where old ventures end and a fresh batch of asphalt invites new exploits. A clean break.



Like the most angular sections of Ozarkbahn favorite Arkansas 123, Missouri DD looks and drives less like a modern highway and more like the unpaved path on which it was based. The asphalt tenuously clings to the often narrow creek bank at the base of Lennox Mountain, leaving little margin for error. While the DD-grade curves are entertaining and scenic, there are no guardrails to lift and separate the overeager from unintended motorboating.


Rustic storage at roadside.

The road follows a unique and simple Missouri naming convention. Like cords on a banjo, the more letters you pluck, the more twang you'll get. Major highways are numbered, intermediates receive a single letter, and the backroads take two letters. The Alphabetical highways were a mid-century state project to bring the all-American joy of paved driving within a few miles of nearly every person, place, and thing in the Show Me State. Most of these lettered roads are short jaunts into lightly traveled terrain, creating often engaging fractals of asphalt throughout the Ozarks. Names were frequently recycled from county to county with no spatial relationship, so you'll encounter DD's all over Missouri.

[Highway DD in Barry County, MO, on Google Maps]

Our MO-DD started as a farm-to-market road, which means the local trade remains quaint and unassuming small-scale agriculture. Still, the inbr...err, innate Ozark character glows intensely. MO-DD features the finest feat of postal engineering in America, a mailbox magnifique combining the most expert hillbilly building techniques: collecting junk and stacking junk.


Rejecting art's traditional aesthetic, this mailbox masterpiece channels Marcel Duchamps with materials likely re-purposed from a local ravine.

While the above route in is not a lengthy drive, it is rich in context, linking the Old Wire Road with the excellent Missouri Highway 112 and Roaring River State Park, seen previously. This section of MO-DD terminates in Seligman, a town with history as a trading post dating back to the times of earliest American settlement in the Ozarks. As the Rootsweb Focus on Seligman web page shows, Seligman grew swiftly with the introduction of a railroad line after the Civil War. Today the formerly bustling downtown is bypassed by the latest alignment of the Old Wire Road, Highway 37, and now sits largely disused. Still, a few roadside gems remain. One is the former Linden Motel, A turn-of-the-century construction that was moved down the street from its original location in the 1920s (yeah, wow), then given the native stone exterior that still stands today.


Compare to the original photo from Focus on Seligman. Same building.

Missouri Highway DD: short, curvy, and full of personality. You could do worse.

Traffic: doesn't really register
Driving challenge: mind the crick and roadside art
Purty mouth: yours is looking real good-like
Ozarkbahn rating: were you expecting a "DD" to be anything less?

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Pea Ridge National Military Park

Memorial Day commemorates America's young, but undaunted history of armed involvement on the international scene. We most commonly recall trench scenes in Europe and island clashes in the Pacific, but some of the most brutish fighting seen by Americans happened right here in the Ozarks along the Old Wire Road.



The Battle of Pea Ridge was a crucial step the American Civil War, and a milestone event in local history. During the war, control of the Ozarks between Springfield and the Arkansas border became essential to securing the pivotal state of Missouri and key to commanding the destiny of the Western United States. The North and the South each had designs on ultimately ruling Missouri, the only state above the Mason-Dixon Line the that allowed slavery. Their armies forced the issue during the icy Winter of 1862.

[Battle of Pea Ridge at Wikipedia]


The Pea Ridge visitor's center was recently expanded with new videos and displays. The tour road makes a stop at the hill overlooking the main battlefield.

Tens of thousands of soldiers met at what is now Pea Ridge National Military Park in far Northwest Arkansas, a few miles South of the Missouri border. The area's mixture of brushy woods, spiked ridges, and open pasture are maintained in the same state as found in the middle of the 19th century, and visitors can explore the park by car, foot, bike, or even horseback. As mentioned before, one of earliest and best-preserved segments of the Butterfield Overland Route - the original Ozarkbahn - lies within park boundaries.


Hiking trails criss-cross the park. Little Mountain, which hid Confederate troop movements, can be seen in the distance from the Elkhorn Ridge overlook.

[Pea Ridge National Military Park at U.S. National Park Service]

While the setting is serene, the action in March 1862 was hard-fought and grim. United States General Samuel Curtis had chased Confederate forces back into Arkansas until supply lines ran thin. Expecting an imminent counterattack up the Old Wire Road, an outnumbered Union Army dug into the high ground along Sugar Creek, just South of Pea Ridge. Southern General Earl Van Dorn sensed an opportunity to cut Curtis off entirely, and used the cover of darkness and nearby hills to secret his forces around to the Union's rear flank.


The Union fortifications along the Old Wire Road at Little Sugar Creek never saw battle, but the soldiers entrenched there had to perform a hasty about-face to meet the Confederate forces.

The result was a series of fierce, confused melees in close quarters and frigid conditions. The Rebels emerged from the woods to capture Elkhorn Tavern, an advantageous point along the Old Wire Road, but failed to capitalize on their position. They were ultimately repulsed the following day in one of the Civil War's largest confrontations West of the Mississippi.



[Battle of Pea Ridge at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas]

The Union Army had pushed the Confederates out of Missouri for good, but the Battle of Pea Ridge was costly. There were over 3,000 casualties combined, and the developing economy of Northwest Arkansas was savaged. The Confederacy burned any infrastructure of civilization deemed beneficial to the enemy, including War Eagle Mill, most of Fayetteville, and the Van Winkle sawmill operation that formed the basis for Hobbs State Conservation Area. A significant depopulation followed, and the lay of contemporary Northwest Arkansas would have to rise from that ruin.


Elkhorn Tavern and the now-defunct hamlet of Leetown were used to treat the masses of injuries.

Pea Ridge National Military Park is fateful ground. What if the risky Confederate assault at Pea Ridge had been successful? What if the Union's campaign against the South had followed a different path through the Ozarks? Would have the businesses and fortunes of today's biggest economic drivers locally - WalMart, Tyson, J.B. Hunt, the University of Arkansas, and so on - taken root without the heavy hand of war?


Years after the battle, veterans from both sides gathered at Elkhorn Tavern. Pea Ridge would not gain National Park status until the Eisenhower era.

No matter what, war extracts a grizzly toll, especially when it destroys from within. The well-tended beauty of Pea Ridge is a striking memorial to soldiers who took part in a chapter of conflict where every victory was an exercise in American self-defeat, but bravery was on high form.