John-Boat Building Event

As far back as I can remember it seems as if I was part of a wooden johnboat. I recall sitting in one of my grandfather’s johnboats on the creek behind his house when I was very young, sensing that I belonged there. Grandpa Dablemont had built a number of johnboats, the first of them long before I was born. He had learned to do that when he was just a teenager, using an old johnboat some farmer had left tied up on the Big Piney River. He got lumber from local sawmills and he and his brother kept figuring out ways to improve them.

By the time I came along, my grandfather’s johnboats were known all over the Ozarks. He made them to use as a fisherman, hunter and trapper, but also to sell to others, for as little as ten or fifteen dollars each. I remember being at his cabin on the creek which flowed into the Big Piney when he would have three or four of them in various stages, sitting on sawhorses, and maybe a dozen sassafras paddles being made at the same time, all with old time tools; hand-saws, planes, hammers, draw-knives, and wood rasps. He never once used an electric tool. When he died, his cabin still had no electricity.

Grandpa began to rent his boats, and his sons began to guide fishermen, long before I was born. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I too was paddling johnboats down the river for fishermen with fiberglass rods and old Shakespeare or Pflueger casting reels with braided nylon fishing line. Dad was making johnboats by that time, and he was improving them even more, with his electric tools and the new concept of plywood bottoms which could be sealed, and therefore not have to be kept ‘soaked up’.

Before the plywood came along in the early 1970’s, Grandpa’s boats were made with pine cross-boards which had to be nailed on with about 1-8th inch cracks between them. When they were soaked in the river or creek, the boards swelled together so tightly that the boat didn’t leak. If you sat them up on a sawhorse in the back yard, you had to keep an inch or so of water in the bottom of them to keep them from drying out and leaking. If built properly and kept wet, those johnboats didn’t leak a drop. My dad and grandfather may have built and sold several hundred of them over the years to be used on those northern flowing rivers, the Big Piney, the Roubidoux and the Gasconade.

Different types of johnboats were built on the larger southerly flowing Current and White River systems. They were longer, and made with three boards running lengthwise on the bottom, rather than the crosswise boards we used on shorter boats. There were dozens of johnboat builders, but some were much better known because they built more boats. Charlie Barnes and his brothers began before 1920 down at Galena, Missouri, building johnboats for the James and White Rivers, and when entrepreneur Jim Owens came to Branson in the 1930’s and made float-fishing famous across the nation because of his publicity capabilities, he made Charlie his top boat builder and guide. The boats Charlie built had boards running lengthwise on the bottom, specially cut at Ozark sawmills out of yellow pine. They fit together with a kind of tongue and groove carpentry that must have taken some doing, and often sealed with tar and rags. Some leaked a little, but not much, and a little bailing solved that problem. In that time, with Jim Owens running three- or four-day trips down the White from Branson, and transporting the boat back by railroad flatcars, they needed lots of boats, most of them 18 to 20 feet long, but some even longer. Men who worked for him recalled commissary boats, boats used to transport camping and food supplies ahead of the floaters, being 24 feet long.

My grandfather’s northern Ozark johnboats needed no ribs, as most were only 14- to 16-feet in length, but Charlie Barnes built his with metal ribs spaced about two feet apart, running across the bottom of the boat and partway up the sides. Current, Jacks-Fork and Eleven Point johnboats were usually made with wooden ribs. Barnes liked to find old wagon-wheel rims that he could use for ribs.

I don’t know how many johnboats I paddled down various rivers over the years before metal johnboats and canoes came along, but I can tell you, it seemed as if a sassafras canoe and johnboat were an extension of my body back then. Eventually, working as a naturalist on the Buffalo River, I built a few wooden johnboats as part of interpretive programs.

In the late seventies I wrote a book for a New York City Book Publisher entitled, “The Authentic American Johnboat” It sold about 100,000 copies and years after it was out of print, I noticed that copies were starting to sell over e-bay and Amazon for 80 to 100 dollars. So I rewrote that book, included a great deal more material in the new version, and entitled it “Rivers to Run, Swift Water, Sycamores, and Smallmouth Bass”. In that book there’s an entire chapter on how to build a wooden johnboat, including original plans on building a White River Johnboat, put together by Charlie Barnes himself.

On Saturday, July 9, Myron Nixon and I are going to build a 20-foot replica of Charlie Barnes' White River boats, and a 15-foot version of my grandfather’s Big Piney johnboat. We will do this at the Bull Shoals State Park Pavilion just a few hundred yards east of Bull Shoals Dam, just off the highway in a spacious, shaded stand of big oak trees, not far from where hundreds of wooden johnboats once floated down the White. We can do this because of the interest, and the help of Arkansas State Parks Interpretive Division, and the Bull Shoals Park Interpretive Specialist Julie Lovett.

We are still planning all this, but we hope to have other johnboat builders there with finished johnboats, and items from the early 1900’s like sassafras boat paddles, old gigs, fishing lures, antique items like rods and reels, trotline spools, fish nets etc. If you have those things and want to display them, please plan to be with us. We will display hundreds of old photos and hope to have old-time river guides come and join us so visitors can meet them and hear their stories. We also will have a catered dinner for those who are hungry, and will schedule an hour in the afternoon to go down to the river and give visitors rides in an authentic wooden river johnboat, and teach would-be river floaters how to paddle a boat or canoe from one side.

There isn’t room here to get into all of what we hope to do on that day, but if you want to be a part of it, or if you wish to display or sell artifacts from river life in that day between 1900 and 1950, contact me so we can reserve a space for you. If the State Park System okays it we will set up spaces where vendors can sell wooden paddles or carvings, old hand-made fishing lures, etc. At any rate, the plans are being made, and I will give more information on this free event in future columns. At that time, I will be able to give the names of some of the people who will be there for you to meet, and a schedule of talks and events. There will be a lot of interesting people involved in the celebration of the old boats and the old days on the rivers of the Ozarks. The place will be the State Park just east of Bull Shoals dam near Lakeview, Arkansas. The date will be Saturday, July 9, all day long.

Contact me by writing Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613, or e-mailing lightninridge@windstream.net. Get more information from www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com