113
Jamie C. Brandon
James M. Davidson
TheLandscapeof
VanWinkle’sMill:
Identity,Myth,andModernity
intheOzarkUplandSouth
ABSTRACT
Archaeological investigations at Van Winkle’s Mill
(3BE413), a mid-to-late-19th century sawmill in the
Arkansas Ozarks, were conducted between October
1997 and October 2003. These investigations yielded
information that may help us understand the changing
social relations and race constructions associated
with the end of the antebellum era as expressed via
landscape usage. Additionally, the excavations have
much to say regarding our stereotypes of both slavery
(and by extension the whole African Diaspora) and the
inhabitants of the American upland South.
Introduction
In what is now a quiet, overgrown Ozark
hollow in a corner of the low mountains and
plateaus of northwestern Arkansas was once a
bustling community centered around a sawmill
known as Van Winkle’s Mill. This mill served
as a major source of lumber for the region
in the mid- to late-19th century and was the
dominant provider of the materials for rebuild-
ing after the carnage that marked the American
CivilWar. Additionally, the narrow hollow now
known as “Van Hollow” was home to a good
number of men and womenblack and white,
skilled and unskilled, enslaved and free—who
made up the labor force of Van Winkle’s Mill.
Like many other regions, this postwar period
seemed to mark for northwest Arkansas a passage
into a more fully articulated modernity (Harvey
1990:27). The war seems to have served doubly
as a catalyst for this change. First, it served as
the traumatic moment creating the need for social
and infrastructural change (Soja 1989:26–27).
The Union armies effectively demolished the
Southern way of lifeincluding racial slavery
HistoricalArchaeology,2005,39(3):113–131.
Permissiontoreprintrequired.
and its economic infrastructure. Simultaneously,
the war’s havoc opened up space much like the
practice of “creative destruction” did in other
contexts (Harvey 1990:19; Boyer 1994:179), and
an “explosion of capitol investment in the last
two decades of the century” was mobilized to ill
that space (Allen 1994:156). Thus the massive
social reorganization that occurred on the heels
of the war was accompanied by rebuilding the
physical landscape.
Landscape-oriented archaeology is, by all
accounts, becoming a ubiquitous line of inquiry
in historical archaeology (Leone 1984, 1995;
Kelso and Most 1990; M. Johnson 1996; Wor-
rell et al. 1996;Yamin and Metheny 1996; Stine
et al. 1997; Kealhofer 1999; Epperson 1999b;
Delle et al. 2000). By now, it is no longer
a novel concept to see social landscapes as
intimately connected to social structures (Cos-
grove 1984; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991:97–129;
Lefebvre 1991). In this vein, archaeology and
historical research conducted sporadically at
VanWinkle’s Mill (3BE413) between 1997 and
2003 presents some interesting perspectives on
and poses some important questions about the
cultural processes that form cultural memory,
stereotypes about the plantation South, the
African Diaspora, and the very landscape of
the hollow itself.
This article will attempt to outline some
of the entanglements of the landscape and
the social realities of Van Winkle’s Mill. Of
course it cannot address all of the complex
ways in which modernity, concepts of race,
the emerging trope of the Ozark “hillbilly,”
and industrial landscape of Van Winkle’s Mill
all interacted and changed throughout the 19th
and early-20th century. It does, however, hope
to focus on more than one of these trends and
how it relates to the physical landscape of Van
Winkle’s Mill.
Peter Van Winkle and Van Winkle’s Mill:
A Brief Background
Van Winkle’s Mill began as a place on the
historical cultural landscape in the 1850s when
Peter Marselis Van Winkle borrowed money