ON THE MAP!
By the late 1930s US Highway 62 was a major transcontinental highway. With the travelers came roadmaps and guidebooks. The first auto travel guide, Arkansas: A Guide to the State, was published in 1941 – the result of the Works Project Administration Writers’ Project. US Highway 62 is described as “concrete-paved between Corning and Pocahontas, asphalt-paved between Harrison and Oklahoma line: elsewhere gravel. “
The description of our area reads:
“Through its eastern and western extremities pass through comparatively level country, US 62 zigzags for most of its length through the Ozark hills of northern Arkansas. The slopes, gradual as they rise from the Black River, become increasingly steep as the route moves westward, until they reach a dramatic height in the breath-taking gorge of the upper White River near Eureka Springs.
Visitors expecting to find bearded hill farmers blasting away with squirrel rifles at blood-enemies will be disappointed. The romanticized isolation of the Arkansas mountaineers has been broken down by railroads and automobiles, movies and radios. Log cabins are giving way to houses of field stone, and there a few stretches of more than ten miles without a filling station. The highway generally follows the river valleys, the most fertile and prosperous land in the Ozarks; back in the rocky hills, life is harder and more meager.
“Although the western part of US 62 traverses the highest country of the route, the elevation is strikingly perceptible only where the highway makes its way through the deep gorges of the White River or one of its tributaries. Between Harrison and Gateway, these dips are frequent enough to give the country a genuinely mountainous appearance; thereafter the land is a plateau. Farmers of the level land in this northwestern corner of the State have perhaps the highest living standard of any rural people in Arkansas. Houses and barns are well-kept and painted; carefully tended orchards and vineyards yield important cash crops.”
“EUREKA SPRINGS, 36.8 m (1,463 lat., 1,770 pop.), a spa, clings to valley slopes so steep that townspeople say there is no level spot here large enough for a circus to pitch its tents.
Although Eureka Springs is the western seat of Carroll County, its principal business is catering to the health-seekers who have visited it for half a century. Most of the older homes are large frame buildings, now turned into boarding houses. Springs emerge every few yards along the single street that winds between the valley walls; 63 springs have been counted inside the city limits. Caves, usually found in the neighborhood of limestone springs, also abound, some of them opening directly from the main street.
West of Eureka Springs US 62 passes through the most rugged country of its entire route, skirting canyons 500 or 600 feet deep and rearing over summits that reveal similar canyons winding away to the horizon. The road reaches White River’s most impressive gorge at Inspiration Point, 43.9 m. In winter, the bare brown hills, fading into the characteristic smoky blue of the Ozark horizon, give the vista a resemblance to Arizona mesas. Spring covers them with tones of green and blue found nowhere but in the Southern mountains. On the far side of the valley range after range of hills, rolling northward into Missouri, repeat the pattern.
The highway descends steeply and crosses White River, 46.4 m. Once the valley has been passed, the country becomes surprisingly flat. The name of Gateway, 55.9 mi. refers to its position at the portal of the Ozarks – at least a dozen towns call themselves the “gateway to the Ozarks.” This community, with perhaps the clearest claim to the title, is hardly a town, but a group of filling stations and tourist camps.”
With its place formally established in this popular guidebook, more travelers stopped to visit or chose the town as a resting place before continuing on the region’s tortuous roads. On the Highway 62 edge of Eureka Springs, local businesses turned their hospitality expertise to this new type of traveler. Commercial enterprises were developed early to appeal to the motorists -- first tourist camps, then tourist cottages, then tourist courts, then motels. These were complemented by filling stations, gift shops, restaurants and attractions – all with the prerequisite convenient auto parking.
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