Bridges mark transition of old to new Theodosia: 70 years ago, Old Theodosia disappeared beneath the lake

Sue and Estel Robirds are old enough (87 and 88, respectively) to remember a vivid image representing when the old village of Theodosia disappeared 70-plus years ago and the new Theodosia was born. The image in their memories is of deep water lapping against the sides of a 12-foot-high bridge below a soaring new and larger bridge still being built.  

The “new” town of Theodosia was officially incorporated 60 years ago, in 1963. That town now lines a stretch of Highway 160 a mile or so west of Bull Shoals Lake. Old Theodosia was a different community entirely. It traces its roots to the first recorded white settlers, Payton and Nancy Keesee, who were married in the area around the Little North Fork of the White River in 1818, before Missouri even became a state in 1821.

Next to arrive, in 1828, were James and Mary Friend, according to a story by the late Mary Newton Graves that was published in the Ozarks Mountaineer in 1981 and then reprinted in The History of Ozark County, Missouri, 1894-1994.

In another article written by Graves and the late Dean Wallace, the Graham, Risley, Friend, Hoodenpile, Brown, Johnson and Clarkson families are also named as early settlers here.

In those days, tall “cane breaks” grew alongside the river; the bottom land was rich, and the hills were timbered with native white, red, post, pin and black oak, hickory and walnut trees. 

“The pine and cedar didn't show up until after World War I,” Graves wrote. “Bluestem grass grew 'tall as a horse's belly.'”

The first post office

By 1886, the area's population was big enough to need a post office. Tully D. Kirby, the first postmaster, named it for his daughter Mattie Theodosia, who had died at a young age.

In 1903, Theodosia started looking more like a village when Jim Herd (1881-1935) constructed a cluster of buildings along the gentle slope on the west side of the Little North Fork. The village was a bit downstream from the point where Pondfork Creek flows into it and a bit north of where Theodosia Marina Resort and Corps of Engineers campground operate today on Bull Shoals Lake.

Herd built a store that also housed the post office (Herd was Theodosia postmaster at the time), a water-powered grist mill and, most remarkably, a 12-room house – “the talk of the area,” Graves wrote. Built as the Herd family's home, the big house was used later as a boarding house and then as a hotel. 

Graves cited a Herd family member's description of the dam that impounded the river to power the Theodosia mill: “She said Jim Herd built the dam of wood. Later, Frank Grisham rebuilt it of rock. She said it was a beautiful dam.”

Later Jim Herd's cousin Walter Herd would own the house, store and mill.

Soon a cotton gin opened north of the Theodosia grist mill. While settlers grew corn in the fertile bottomland, “cotton was raised on every cleared hill spot,” Graves wrote, adding that sometimes keelboats brought cotton up the stream to the gin. Then the ginned and baled cotton was sent to the Frisco Railroad 60 miles away in Chadwick, or it was sent downriver by boat to the railhead at Cotter, Arkansas.  

In addition to the gin and the buildings Jim Herd constructed, the town grew through the years to include a two-story school, canning factory, blacksmith shop and at least one other store.    

The bridges at Theodosia

For many years, travelers in wagons and on horseback had to ford the Little North Fork at Theodosia; the river was small enough there to be called a creek by some residents. Then a “plank bridge” was built, but it “had to be repaired after every hard rain,” Graves wrote.

The town of Theodosia clustered around the west end of the bridge. 

Estel and Sue Gray Robirds, who live on land near Longrun northwest of Theodosia that Sue's grandparents Fletcher and Hester Ann Gray homesteaded more than a century ago, remember the next bridge that spanned the Little North Fork. Part of Highway 80 (now Highway 160), “it was actually two bridges with dirt in between,” said Sue, now 87. 

Part of the bridge was a “built-up road on an earthen dam 12 feet high,” said Estel, now 88. 

Sue and Estel, who grew up in the area, have memories of the bridge just before it disappeared beneath the rising waters of Bull Shoals Lake as a huge, new “million-dollar bridge” rose above it. The new bridge was being built to carry traffic over the lake that was slowly backing up behind Bull Shoals Dam, which had been completed in 1951 some 20 miles downstream in Arkansas. 

Sue and Estel remember crossing the bridge when the rising lake water lapped and splashed against the sides of the bridge – Sue on her schoolbus ride to Gainesville High School and Estel as he and his brother, Dick Stehle, left home to find work in California in May 1952.

“We left at four o'clock in the morning,” Estel recalled. Heading west, they “crossed what was left of the bridge,” he said. “Water was lapping over the base. We had to drive through water to get across the bridge, and we barely made it.”

Sue's last memories of the bridge were of the days during her junior year in high school in 1951-52. “I remember the lake coming up and, for a while there, the lake was lapping over both sides of the bridge. The driver, Mr. Dodson, would pull up and stop, and we would get out and walk; then he would pull on across.” 

The big, new “million-dollar” bridge wasn't completed when the old bridge, covered by lake water, became no longer useable. That meant there was no way to cross the rising lake at Theodosia. So, instead of a 15-mile drive to Gainesville, travelers, including schoolbuses, had to wind their way back east and then north around the crossable streams that fed the lake.

During her senior year, 1952-53, “We rode the bus more than an hour to get to school,” Sue said.

Although not completely finished, the new bridge opened to traffic in spring 1953. Sue remembers times when the bridge was being painted. “They would stop painting for so many minutes each hour to let traffic cross,” she said.

A landmark – and a village – are moved

By then all the buildings in Old Theodosia except one were gone in advance of the impounding of the lake: “torn down or washed away” by floods, Graves wrote. 

The exception was the hotel, which had begun as the 12-room house Jim Herd had built for his family in 1903. According to an article written by Graves and the late Dean Wallace for the White River Valley Historical Quarterly in 1976, Armand Janian owned the hotel then, having bought it in 1945 for $3,000. He preserved it “at much expense,” Graves wrote and had it moved a quarter-mile south to a site in what is now within the Theodosia Marina Resort.

A colorful character, Janian (1912-1980) had survived the 1915 Armenian genocide and was smuggled into America by friends when he was a child. He grew up in Chicago and then moved to Ozark County as an adult to take advantage of the tourism he believed would result from the new lake. He named the relocated hotel “Janian's Holiday Inn,” using a name that would later be taken by a national hotel chain.

(From 1966 until 1973, the old, remodeled structure was owned by real estate developer Gene Wood, head of the Theodosia Hills Corporation. It then passed through other owners and uses until it was destroyed by fire in February 1981.) 

L.B. and Pauline Cook, with their children Bill and Barbara, arrived from Joplin in 1952 to begin their new role as Corps of Engineers concessionaires on Bull Shoals Lake, charged with building a boat dock, restaurant and motel at Theodosia. Seventy-one years later, the Cook family is in its fifth generation of operating what is now the greatly expanded Theodosia Marina Resort adjoining the Corps of Engineers campground. Theodosia is the only concession on the huge lake still operated by the original family.

Bill Cook told the story of the challenges and joys of the family’s seven decades of lakeside work in “L.B. Cook ‘wanted a little fish camp,’” published in the March 9, 2022, edition of the Times. 

Name changes – and unchanges

Although the closing of the old bridge was a memorable event, Old Theodosia might be said to have officially disappeared on the day in 1951 when its post office “closed out to Lutie.” That must have been a sad day indeed for Eunice Herd McCullough, Walter's daughter, who had served as Theodosia postmaster since 1937 while also running the store where the post office was housed. She also operated a boarding house in the big Herd home. 

Graves wrote that, while the highway was being built through the area, the hardworking McCullough “kept as many as 19 men who were working on the road. She fixed their breakfast, dinner pails, supper, and gave them lodging, all for $2.50 per day.”  

When its post office closed, the little town of Theodosia ceased to exist (officially, at least). It was now part of Lutie, the little town a mile or so away, up on the flat ridgetop west of the lake. The Lutie post office, which had opened in 1893, was housed in Jack Jones' store (see Kitty Ledbetter's story, page 1A). 

But . . .   

Some Theodosia residents who had moved to Lutie preferred to keep the original name of their town. Also, there was a move to “restore an area name to the post office to correspond with the name used by the Corps of Engineers to identify the dock and park on Bull Shoals Lake,” according to History of Ozark County, 1843-1993. As a result, nine years after the name Theodosia disappeared as the town's name, it reappeared. The history books says, “On August 1, 1960, Lutie post office was closed out at the end of the business day, and it was reopened the next morning under the name Theodosia.” 

Of course, residents who preferred the name Lutie weren't happy about this change. But for almost 63 years, the name Theodosia has remained, now linked, not to the quaint old village that once nestled along the west bank of the Little North Fork, but instead to the busy little town along the highway that includes commercial and religious entities as well as a bank, health and fitness facilities, restaurants and other appealing businesses.

It also includes a handful of important reminders of the town Theodosia replaced, including Lutie Cemetery (on land donated by early settlers Mary and James Friend in 1867) and the Lutie R-VI School District. 

And, just down the hill from the town of Theodosia, which had a population of 188 in the 2020 census, is the sprawling Theodosia Corps of Engineers campground and Theodosia Marina Resort, an area that can add up to another thousand temporary residents during busy summertime months when lake-loving tourists and seasonal residents flock to this favorite fun location. 

Portraits of the past

There, in TMR's popular Cookie's restaurant, black-and-white photographs of old Ozark County scenes are displayed, including a few that depict stores or sites in Old Theodosia. But there's no photograph overlooking the whole town.

However, there is a depiction of the town as one artist imagined it, based on old photographs of individual buildings. It was painted in 1992 by Wichita, Kansas, artist Carolyn Hendryx of Ebersole Arts, Crafts & Lapidary on a commission from Theodosia native Doyle Kelley, who sponsored the work as a fundraiser for Friend Cemetery. Artistic prints were made and sold for prices ranging from $10 to $27.50 each, depending on size.

Doyle's wife, the former Clairnell Henderson, also an Ozark County native, said last year she couldn't remember how many prints were made, but sales of the pictures raised somewhere around $20,000 to help pay for maintenance and repairs at the cemetery. All prints are now gone.

Doyle and Claire, now in their 80s, live near their son in Lewisburg, Kansas. Doyle had served as Friend Cemetery treasurer and administrator for many years, a duty he carried out in respect for his great-grandparents, Samuel and Sarah Ann Duggins Pellham, who are buried there. Samuel Pellham died in 1933 at age 69 and was buried in a smaller cemetery that would have been submerged under the rising lake water. Instead, the Corps of Engineers moved it and several area cemeteries to higher ground ahead of the lake's completion. 

Pellham's was one of 272 graves in a group of small Theodosia-area cemeteries that were moved to the new Friend Cemetery on what is now County Road 863 northeast of Isabella. His wife, Sarah Ann, died in 1953 at age 83 and was buried beside him in the new cemetery. 

Kay Stockton, Doyle's cousin and also a great-grandchild of Samuel and Sarah Ann Pellham, now serves as cemetery treasurer and administrator. 

The stylized picture of Old Theodosia created 30 years ago by the Wichita artist using separate photographs was very popular, even though all who remembered the old village agreed it wasn't an entirely accurate depiction. The buildings in the picture aren't in the exact locations where the originals stood; the perspective isn't quite right. But those who remembered the old town insisted the quaint charm the picture portrayed was true. 

In writing about Old Theodosia, Mary Newton Graves noted that the 1981 hotel fire destroyed “the last landmark of Old Theodosia.” But actually there is one more. It reappears when Bull Shoals Lake drops alarmingly low, as it does during the harshest drought years. That's when the old bridge reappears for a while, a physical reminder of the old town that, as Graves wrote, “lies forever beneath Bull Shoals Lake.”