The year was 1916. A former riverboat captain named Flave Carpenter and an ambitious Arkansas businessman named Harvey Couch shared a vision. They wanted to build dams on the upper Ouachita River for hydroelectric power.
Sunday, this newspaper's Perspective section published a story I wrote about the Ouachita. The construction of Remmel and Carpenter dams changed that river forever.
Carpenter was born in Georgia in 1851. His family moved to Arkansas in 1857. Carpenter's father operated a steamboat that plied the Ouachita, Red and Mississippi rivers south from Arkadelphia to New Orleans. Carpenter often accompanied his father on those trips and learned to pilot the boat.
The railroad arrived at Arkadelphia in the 1870s. With river transportation in decline, Carpenter took a job as a deputy U.S. marshal.
"He rode many miles on horseback through the Ouachita Mountains around Arkadelphia, Malvern and Hot Springs, searching for illegal stills and arresting moonshiners," writes noted Arkansas historian Wendy Richter. "While doing this work, he encountered locations along the Ouachita that he believed would make excellent sites for power-producing dams. Carpenter didn't have the financial resources to turn those visions into reality, but he convinced entrepreneur Harvey Couch of the sites' suitability for hydroelectric dams.
"Couch's company, Arkansas Power & Light Co., eventually built dams on the upper Ouachita at two of Carpenter's chosen locations. Remmel Dam, completed in 1924, created Lake Catherine. Carpenter Dam was finished in 1931 and formed Lake Hamilton. The two lakes are among Arkansas' most popular tourist attractions."
Couch was born in 1877 in the Columbia County community of Calhoun. When he was 17, his family moved to Magnolia. He was influenced by a teacher named Pat Neff, who would go on to serve as governor of Texas from 1921-25 and president of Baylor University from 1932-47.
Couch's first job was to fire the boiler of a cotton gin's steam engine at a salary of 50 cents per day. A big break came when he was hired as a mail clerk for the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway. When Couch saw a construction crew raising a pole for a long-distance telephone system along the tracks, he decided to begin his own telephone company.
Couch sold his North Louisiana Telephone Co. in 1911 after having strung 1,500 miles of line with 50 exchanges in parts of four states. With the more than $1 million received from selling out to Southwestern Bell, Couch bought the first electric transmission line in the state in 1914. That line ran between Malvern and Arkadelphia. It was the beginning of AP&L, the forerunner of what's now the massive Entergy Corp.
In addition to AP&L, Couch created Mississippi Power & Light and Louisiana Power & Light. Sixteen years after purchasing the Malvern-to-Arkadelphia line, AP&L had 3,000 miles of line serving towns in 63 of the state's 75 counties.
Having been convinced in 1916 by Carpenter to build dams, Couch went to Washington after World War I to secure a license. In his hotel lobby, he ran into Harmon Liveright Remmel, who had succeeded Powell Clayton as leader of Arkansas' Republican Party in 1913.
Remmel, who had been born to German immigrants in New York, moved to Arkansas with his brother in 1876 to form the Remmel Brothers Lumber Co. at Newport. The vast virgin hardwood forests of the Delta were just beginning to be cleared. In 1886, Remmel moved to Little Rock to become the Arkansas general manager of the Mutual Life Insurance Co. of New York.
Remmel used his political connections to get Couch a meeting with Secretary of War John Weeks. The secretary agreed to a quick licensing hearing, and Couch was granted a license to build what would become Remmel Dam. Construction began in May 1923 and was completed in December 1924 at a cost of $2.14 million.
Couch named the dam for Remmel. He named the 1,940-acre lake it created after his daughter Catherine. In August 1935, Couch donated 2,048 acres along the shore to the state. Members of the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps began building a park on that land in 1937. Much of the CCC's work still stands at Lake Catherine State Park.
Carpenter Dam was named for Flave Carpenter, who selected the site 10 miles upstream from Remmel Dam. The dam impounds 7,200-acre Lake Hamilton, named for Arkansas business leader Colter Hamilton Moses. Work on the dam began in February 1929.
According to the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas: "More than 156,000 cubic yards of concrete were used for a dam that measures 115 feet high and 1,165 feet long. A work camp, at one time housing 1,000 people, was established adjacent to the construction site. Construction was completed in December 1931 at a cost of $6.5 million. ... Carpenter Dam features two generators, which together produce an output of 56 megawatts. The dam was built to provide electricity to the AP&L system during hours of peak energy consumption. As such, it's credited with helping AP&L survive the Great Depression, the full impact of which Arkansas was experiencing as the dam was being completed."
Moses, who was known to his friends as Ham, served as a key aide to three Arkansas governors: George Donaghey, George Hays and Charles Hillman Brough. He later became general counsel, president and chairman of the board of AP&L. The Hampton native graduated from what's now Ouachita Baptist University in 1908. He became AP&L president after Couch's death in 1941 and remained in the job until 1952.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.