Roscoe Gideon Harness (born May 1, 1887 in New Jasper township, Greene County, Ohio, and died February 6, 1982 in Heber Springs, Arkansas). He married Nelle Eliza Conner June 5, 1905 in Newport, Kentucky. She died December 2, 1963 in Heber Springs, Arkansas.

Roscoe Harness

Roscoe lived with his parents, Mr.and Mrs. Marion Harness, at Jamestown, Ohio. The Harness' lived in a rather large house outside Jamestown.

His dad was a farmer of sorts. Not long after Roscoe had married Nelle Conner, who he had known since school days, Marion inherited what at the time was a considerable amount of money, probably from his father, Gideon. Roscoe and his new wife lived in a smaller house (her Conner family home) not far from the elder Harness' house.

Roscoe and Nelle Home in Ohio

Roscoe helped his father do what little farming he did after obtaining the inheritance. But Roscoe also traded in furs. This would have been about 1908-1910.

Marion decided to move his family to Arkansas, where he heard that land was cheap and he thought he could invest in land there and make a considerable amount of money. Marion Harness and his wife, along with another son, Emmet L. Harness, who was mentally impaired, left for Arkansas.

Roscoe and Nelle Harness and their family (which then consisted of Morris, Esther, Ward and Pat) remained in Jamestown, Ohio. Two years later, in 1913 or 1914, they joined the elder Harness' in Heber Springs, Arkansas. When Roscoe arrived in Arkansas, he bought a bakery in partnership with another man. Located in Heber Springs, it was called "The Palace of Sweets".

Roscoe and Nelle Harness

About that time, Marion Harness was getting involved in the portable saw mill business. At some point Roscoe also got interested. So he traded his interest in the bakery business for about 300 acres of farm land near Higden, about 25 miles from Heber Springs.

Nelle Harness did not like living in the backwoods. The family lived at Higden about 6 or 7 months before returning to Heber. At that point Roscoe got seriously involved in the portable saw mill business with his dad and another man.

Nelle Harness

When the depression arrived in the late 20's, Roscoe discovered that he couldn't make any money in the saw mill business any more. He had no money. His dad, Marion, still had some, but didn't want to share it, apparently. So Roscoe, like many people during the depression in the rural areas of the nation, went to work in a federal CCC camp. It was run for people who could not find work and feed their families because of the depression. In return for working in the camps on various public projects (like repairing roads, etc.) they would be paid $30 or $40 a month.

Roscoe and Nelle had 5 children by that time (the youngest, Martha Rose, was born in Arkansas) and $30 or $40 a month wasn't enough to feed the family. So the kids took jobs chopping cotton, picking berries, sawing wood or whatever else to supplement the meager amount of money Roscoe was making while working at the CCC camp.

In the early 30's, as the depression was coming to an end, Roscoe decided to use his experience in the saw mill business to start estimating timber for companies who were still in the saw mill business. When he retired, that was the type of work Roscoe was doing.

Roscoe collected Indian arrow heads. Sometimes, his brother, Emmet, who lived with Roscoe and Nelle for many years, would accompany him, but he often went alone. Roscoe would walk up and down furrows of farm land that had been freshly plowed, picking up hundreds of Indian arrow heads. Some of them were not very good, but many of them were excellent, and at his death he had a priceless collection. His prize arrowhead board was located for several years in the Corps of Engineers office at Greers Ferry Dam just outside Heber Springs. On loan from the Harness family, many if not most of the arrows on the board were collected by Roscoe or his brother, Emmet, in the farm fields that adjoined the Little Red River. Most of those fields are now covered by Greers Ferry lake.

Roscoe's Prized Arrowhead Board

Roscoe and Emmet Harness also liked to pick wild berries on their trips by foot to search for arrowheads, or while out fishing or hunting. Roscoe, until his death, was an avid fisherman. The two would bring buckets and buckets of blackberries and blueberries home where they would be cooked, often by Roscoe, into delicious pies.

Emmet Harness with Arrowheads

Roscoe is buried beside his wife, Nelle, in the Heber Springs cemetery at the foot of the mountain just off the old downtown area. Emmet Harness is also buried there, as are Roscoe's mother and father, Marion and Mina Harness.

Roscoe and Nelle Harness had five children.

Morris Longfellow Harness (born April 24, 1906 in Jamestown, Ohio) was the oldest. He married Betty Emma Allen. They had four children. Morris was a federal government employee most of his life, joining the Social Security Administration the year it was formed and remaining with the government agency until his retirement.

Esther E. Harness (born March 31, 1907 in Jamestown, Ohio, and died March 14, 1983 in Searcy, Arkansas.) She married George Norris Musick, who worked as an automobile mechanic in a car dealership in Searcy. They had two children.

Albert Ward Harness (born January 29, 1910 in Jamestown, Ohio, and died February 17, 1990 in Desert Hot Springs, California.) He married Fern Speed. They had two children.

Ward and Fern moved to the Richland, Washington area in 1944 where he was employed as a millwright by Dupont and General Electric. He retired from Douglas United Nuclear (the Richland Nuclear Power Plant). Prior to the couple's move to Washington State, they lived in Okmulgee, Oklahoma where Ward worked as a meatcutter in a retail food store.

Max Eugene Harness (born July 24, 1911 in Jamestown, Ohio, and died July 19, 1988 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.) Pat, as the family called him, married Ann Pascal. The couple had five children. They lived in south Philadelphia. Pat worked for the old Philadelphia Naval Yard and retired from there.

Martha Rose Harness (born December 10, 1917 in Heber Springs, Arkansas.) For a time she was a stewardess for Eastern Airlines, but for most of her life she has been a housewife. Her first husband was Tom Robbins who was killed during World War 2 (on June 23, 1944) in Europe. Her second husband, Dr. Horace Barnett, was a surgeon. He died April 8, 1997 in Jonesboro, Arkansas where the couple kept their home. They had three children.

Where they lived: Heber Springs, Arkansas

Heber Springs is located in northcentral Arkansas on the edge of the Ozark mountains. It was incorporated in 1881 as Sugar Loaf after Sugar Loaf mountain in whose valley it lies. It is the county seat of Cleburne County.

Morris and Betty Harness near Sugar Loaf Mt.

In the 1890's and early 90's, Heber became a sort of fashionable spa for visitors who came to spend the Summer and "try the waters"...the several mineral water wells located in Spring Park. (One of them is sulphur water and is extremely foul smelling and tasting, but Roscoe Harness used to walk down to Spring Park several times a week to fill big jars full of the water to take back home and put in the refrigerator. He drank the stuff regularly. Of course, he did live to be 94.)

In 1910, the town was renamed Heber Springs after Dr. Heber Jones, the son of the previous owner of the town site. Back in those days, Heber was sort of an upscale watering place. While farmers in the rest of Cleburne County (including the Allens out in the Drasco area just 12-15 miles away) were barely eeking out a living growing cotton on scrubby hills country land, the town of Heber Springs was prospering.In the 1910's and 20's there were about 15 hotels in Heber.

But the mineral waters lost their fizz as the Depression hit in the early 30's and Heber fell on bad times when the Summer visitors stopped coming. The town never really recovered, until the early 60's when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed up the nearby Little Red River, creating Greer's Ferry Lake, and a surrounding recreational area developed. Today (2001) there are numerous communities that have sprung up around the lake, and although the area is hard to get to (there is no nearby interstate highway) it appears to be prospering again, primarily from tourist trade attracted by the lake.As for Heber itself, its former downtown area looks about like it did in the late 40's, but there are few major businesses located there anymore. They have moved out on the edge of town, closer to the dam and the tourist trade.

As for the mineral waters, the locals still drink the water, but the out of state visitors who came in large numbers in the early 1900's, did not return after the Depression years, and the Spring Park, especially that part of it where the mineral water springs are located, is in a state of disrepair. Even so, many of the locals still trudge down to the park regularly with empty jars and bottles to fill them with the mineral waters.