5

A Tip to the Ozarks #5

You approach his house by a steep roadway, for the house is built
up on an elevated plateau of the Mountain. This plateau, he told us,
is 2400 feet above sea level, or 200 feet higher than the grounds of
the Hotel.

The Summit Hotel is pleasantly situated in a large grove of Red and
White Oaks, with some White Hickories. Not far from the porch of the
Hotel, there is a deep well, down which the iron-bound bucket goes many
times a day, bringing up the clear, cool, refreshing sandstone water,
more refreshing and exhilarating than the sparkling wines of "Sunny
France." Not far from the well, deep sunken in the ground, there is
a stone upon which is cut the figures ",2200", the height of the Hotel
Grounds. In the rear of the Hotel is a steep, wooded hillside, which
runs the entire length of the extensive grounds. In September this
hillside was here and there completely covered with the graceful elm-
leaved Goldenrod, which was just then coming into flower.

The town of Winslow is about a half a mile from the Hotel. It is
not a place where the mere sight-seer would care to linger very long.
One building of merit in the town however, is the Station of the Frisco
Railroad, for the Frisco Railroad passes thru Winslow. It approaches
the town thru a deep gorge in the Mountains and an tunnel 1700 feet
long. So steep is the grade thru the gorge and the tunnel, that an
extra engine is necessary in order to enable both passengers and freight
trains to reach the town.

Occasionally, as at a little distance, I watched the incoming and out-
going trains, and saw not only the Station Platform but the sides of the
railway tracks, crowded with people, very few, if any, had an intention
of becoming passengers on the trains, I thought of what Dudley Warner
says on this point : " No matter what hour of the day or of the
night a train may arrive at or depart from any country station in
America, the loafers are so invariably there in waiting that they
seem to constitute part of the railway system. "There is," he adds, "
something in the life and movement, incident to and inseparable from, thete
arrival and departure of a trian that appears to satisfy all the desire
for exertion such persons are seemingly capable of manifesting. "

Winslow, with its immediate suburbs, supports 5 denominations, an
Episcopal Church; a Methodlist Church, a Baptist Church, a Presbyterian
Church and a Christian Church. The Rector of the Episcopal Church is
Dr. Simpson Ardmore, who is also principal of the Helen Dunlap Memorial
School which is about a three minutes walk from the Hotel. This
school was founded by the late Helen Dunlap for the exclusive benefit
of the Ozark Mountain girls. There is said to be a deep-seated preju-
dice against this school on the part of the Mountain girls, and no one is
able to divine the exact grounds of the prejudice. Perhaps it may be
this : The school is, of course, both a literary and a vocational
school. As a vocational school the girls are sometimes called upon
to perform tasks which are not only distasteful to them, but for which
they are utterly unsuited and unfitted. For instance, I was told that
at one time when the roof of one of the school buildings needed painting
it was the girls who went upon the roof and did the painting.

All Mountain regions are subject at certain seasons of the year to
not continuous, but heavy rainfall, and the Ozarks are no exception to
this rule. During the month of August, it is said to have rained
heavily everyday, but during the 4 weeks we were in the Ozarks, it rained
twice only, and then but for a short time.