Report from the Ozarks

(Page 3 of 3)

November/December 1974
By Mary Jo Frolick 
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If you do buy acreage here and your homestead road crosses someone else's land on the way to the public highway, be sure to buy that strip or at least to negotiate a written agreement giving you use of the right of way. The laws of Arkansas guarantee you access, but the owner of the intervening property can cause trouble.

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One man, for instance, bought 400 beautiful, fertile acres overlooking a river. He built a dream home—the works—on the place and erected several huge tin barns for his cattle. Then, at his own expense, he put in two miles of all-weather road. Wonderful . . . but the catch is that he ran most of that route across another fellow's land.

OK, our ambitious landowner installs a cattle guard across his road at the property line . . . and suddenly he finds a gate—locked—in the middle of that barrier. Oh, he has a key all right, but he has to unlock and lock the gate every single time he goes in or out. Besides that and other problems, he discovers—in the worst of weather—a truck parked, without driver or keys, smack in the center of his lovely road . . . so to get home he has to turn off the surface, drive around the blockade and maybe get stuck.

Harassment? You bet . . . but no lawyer in this county will take the man's case, and if he won his suit he would have won nothing. Now he's trying to sell his dream place, as his attorneys have advised. I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole at any price. I prefer my shack in the valley to his mountaintop mansion and his problems. I'm not judging who's right or wrong, I'm merely stating the facts . . . and warning you to buy a right of way to the public road.

Generally, though, there's a healthy, amiable atmosphere about the Ozarks. The area has its good folks and its bad folks, but mostly they're just decent people trying to live a decent life.

Our own greatest ambition is to be able to live to the fullest and suck the marrow to the bone on the amount of money the government allots for two people's existence (without paying income tax). Within that limit, we want to be well fed, comfortably clothed, under shelter, busy and contented. I see no reason why this can't be accomplished here and now.

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