Winslow Museum a trip to the past

The row of buildings in the background house City Hall and the Winslow Museum plus a couple of apartments. To the left is the pavilion about where the depot once stood.

Yesterday I spent some time at the small museum in Winslow, Arkansas. I'd dropped in there a few times and thought maybe the editor of the paper I write features for would be interested in a story. He was, so I set up an interview for after closing time.

Winslow has a city population of 399, but the rural population brings that up sharply. The Post Office serves between 800 and 1000 families, depending on who's moved in or out lately. The small school was closed down a few years ago, but people continue to gather downtown every Saturday for a farmer's market all summer and for First Saturday year round when recycling is done and Friends of the Library has a bake sale.

The train doesn't stop there anymore, except occasionally when the Arkansas Missouri line runs a special tourist trip that includes a brief stop where the old depot used to be. City fathers had a nice pavilion built there and a local master gardener keeps half-barrels of flowers blooming almost year round. City Hall is located in a long stone structure butted up against a rock bluff. It faces the railroad. Next to city hall is where the library once was, but it's been moved up on the mountain to the rock building that once housed the high school.

And in the space left empty by that move are gathered memorabilia out of the past of this town that once was a mountain summer resort for the people down south in the Arkansas River Valley. A place where the temperature was always 10-20 degrees hotter than this Boston Mountain town. It's population would swell to 10,00 for those few months of summer. There were hotels, a variety of businesses, three doctors, the town had a local telephone service, and something was always going on. There's quite a lot of history here. And much of it can be learned in this tiny museum located off the main track.

I spent almost two hours there talking to Barbara Ashbaugh, who works for the city and runs the museum. She's a fountain of stories out of the past and can tell one about almost every individual treasure housed there. It's a real find for history lovers, and since the road to Devil's Den State Park goes right past, there are plenty of visitors happy to run across something like this out here in the boonies.

As a writer I grab on to these stories, for from them can be written short stories, novels, articles and of course, the feature I'm writing for the Observer. I've worked for them off and on since 1990 when I actually worked in the office as city editor and feature writer. Now it's an occasional assignment for the weekly feature column and I do it just to keep my hand in.

Lord knows, I have enough to keep me busy without that assignment once a month, but I can't seem to let go of the place. It's where I really learned how to be a good writer, it's where I was the day the call came to publish my first novel. This story seems to have become about the paper rather than the museum. But I've written the museum story, and I guess I just wanted to share a little piece of my life from out of the past.