Missouriana Sunday:Week Two

Welcome back to all of you who were with me last week when we visited Blackwater, Missouri, and a hearty welcome to you who are visiting this site for the first time. This week, we're going to drive a few miles closer to the Missouri River, to a small village that boasted a thousand inhabitants in the middle of the nineteenth century. Now, a modest home of less than a hundred, it is still one of the more famous tourists stops in mid-Missouri. We're going to visit Arrow Rock, originally named Philadelphia but renamed almost immediately for its most famous treasure; a river bluff comprised almost entirely of flint rock that has been used for the making of tools and weapons for a millennium.

Sitting above the Missouri River at a spot where the Arrow Rock Ferry used to carry Santa Fe Trail passengers across the big muddy, today's town is all about bed and breakfast lodging, antique and collectible bartering, and tourist traffic. The entire village has been on the National Registry of Historic Sites since the early nineteen sixties.

Shortly after that, it was used as the setting for the filming of Mark Twain's popular book, Tom Sawyer. The home that sported the white picket fence the protagonist schemed to get whitewashed still stands in the middle of the town, though that fence is now state of the art plastic. I guess nobody is gullible enough to volunteer to whitewash it these days.

Drive further down the main street and, on the left a block away, you'll see the most famous attraction in Arrow Rock; the Lyceum Theater. The Lyceum is the only professional playhouse between St. Louis and Kansas City, giving a five month season of productions by prominent actors and crews every year. The house seats just over four hundred patrons and is booked solid play after play, year after year. Quite an accomplishment for a village of only forty five full time residents, with another thirty three who live there part of the year.

I hope you enjoy the photos we've taken of some of the houses in town. And if you're ever in mid-Missouri, you might want to drive down Highway 41 and spend a little time in Arrow Rock. One word of caution; When you drive down the main street, be careful if you turn off onto a side street. There are rock-lined ditches that make the transition a bumpy one. Maybe that's where some of that flint ended up. LOL

Next week, we're going to take my dogs for a walk in a tiny but scenic State Park. Meanwhile, happy reading, everybody.

Pat Dale