Mar 132016
 

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Real photo postcard. No publisher.

“Dr. Moore L. C. Mo.” is written in red ink. L.C. is Linn Creek Unsent. Penciled on back, “Linn Creek, Mo.” There appear to be some political advertisements pasted in the window. Shows a horse-drawn carriage, sans horses, and a farm wagon hitched to two mules.

Someone really wanted others to know that this scene was in Linn Creek. It says so on the back and twice on the front.  Linn Creek, the seat of Camden County, in spite of being subject to periodic inundation was a thriving little burg before Bagnell Dam. Linn Creek and Tuscumbia were the last towns to have regular steamboat service on the Osage.

Does someone know who Dr. Moore was?

 

 

Apr 222013
 

Old Bagnell-street scene

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.


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Dec 192012
 

8 x 10 press photo from Chicago.  4/21/41

The cutline reads: “BAGNELL, MO. – This bantam rooster, caught in the flood that has inundated several Ozark towns, found himself floating on a log down the Main Street of Bagnell, Mo., a new experience worth crowing about.”

Note that this flood happened ten years after Bagnell Dam closed off the Osage River creating Lake of the Ozarks. Note as well that the town of Bagnell is below the dam in what should have been a protected area. If the promised storage reserves are adequate, dams can help prevent downstream flooding. However, if the reservoirs are full and major rainfall or snowmelt occurs upstream (as happened on the  Missouri and Mississippi rivers in 2011), dams can create higher and longer flood crests


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