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IN THE MID-1970S, THE ARKANSAS OZARKS belatedly came to grips with the legacy of the previous decade's social revolutions. While a host of challenges to America's status quo had been offered in the 1960s, the Ozarks had weathered these changes with relative ease. Fayetteville, Eureka Springs, Harrison, and other towns in the region were not centers of protest or violence. For many, the Ozarks maintained a beguiling image of a sleepy throwback to a time before industrial growth had disrupted simple living, small towns, and pristine landscapes.
Yet, change was, in fact, fast coming to the Ozark hilltops. Beginning in the late 1960s, population boomed throughout the Arkansas uplands as thousands of in-migrants-mostly retirees and returnees but also members of the counterculture-moved to the state. These disparate groups from the nation's cities and suburbs flocked to the newly created lakes and retirement villages but also to small towns and rural areas and, along the way, stirred up a potent mixture of enthusiasm and consternation among local people. At times, consternation became antagonism, the most organized of which occurred in Carroll County's Eureka Springs, giving birth to a mythology concerning hostility between native-born hill folks and back-to-the-land hippies.
Though Eureka Springs is now seen as a mecca for Ozarkian counterculture, in the late 1960s and early 1970s the "long hairs" newly residing in and around the town agitated the town's business leaders. Some of the loudest protests came from John Cross, a bank owner, entrepreneur, and community elder. Cross characterized the arrival of the hippies as at first "a trickle," but "then it was a flood." He continued:
And it got pretty bad. It got pretty bad. It got pretty bad drug-wise, it got pretty bad food stamp-wise, and it just got pretty bad. You know, this was the place to come. And it got so bad that I could see what was going on, in terms of drugs and fraud, with the food stamp[s]. . . . So, as a community leader, I picked up the phone, got the name and address and phone number of the man who was in charge of the food stamp [program] for the entire southwestern part of the United States. . . . I said, "There's a lot of...