Date of Graduation

8-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in History (MA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

History

Advisor/Mentor

Phillips, Jared

Committee Member

Whayne, Jeannie

Second Committee Member

Williams, Patrick

Keywords

agriculture; dispossession; National Park Service; oral history; Ozarks; parks and recreation

Abstract

This thesis examines the creation of Buffalo National River (BNR) from the perspective of dispossessed landowners. A unit of the National Park Service in the Arkansas Ozarks, BNR has garnered little scholarly attention in this light, despite present-day resentment of the federal government by locals. The park was signed into law in 1972, capping a years-long debate about the fate of the river. Some had supported a tenacious U.S. Army Corps of Engineers effort to dam the river, others backed a well-organized, preservationist-led campaign to create a park, while on-the-river landowners typically preferred the status quo of private ownership. Many of these landowners – who often had ancestral ties to the area and an agricultural relationship with the land – were ultimately dispossessed of their property in a drawn-out phase of land acquisition. The present narrative reflects the dominance of preservationists, particularly via Neil Compton’s The Battle for the Buffalo River, published in 1992. Compton was the preservationist Ozark Society’s leading activist, and thus the book privileges their campaign for a park; landowner voices during the debate and their experiences negotiating with the federal government are largely ignored in Compton’s work and elsewhere. Drawing heavily from National Park Service documents, newly-conducted oral history interviews with landowners and park employees alike, newspapers, and correspondence, this thesis explains landowner grievances both in the debate years and in the land acquisition phase. Beyond providing an administrative history of BNR that privileges the landowner perspective, this thesis builds upon novel frameworks that emphasize the interrelated nature of agriculture, landscape, and identity, contextualizing many landowners’ desire to remain on their land. It also demonstrates that while the National Park Service has made strides in ameliorating relations with locals, particularly through a land-exchange program that returned land to private ownership in the park’s Private Use Zone, present-day economic interests perceived by locals as “outsiders” echo the dispossessing power that changed the lives of many on the Buffalo River not long ago.

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