In 1977, CS Bank Chairman John Fuller Cross was on his way to Wyoming on a hunting trip and noticed a calendar on the wall of a Kansas motel with photos of the town he was passing through.
Inspired by the calendar, and knowing that 1979 was the Eureka Springs Centennial, Cross wrote and published a 1978 bank calendar that contained historical photos and stories. It was a hit, and the calendar has been published every year since. Cross has lived a lot of the history of Eureka Springs and, over the years, has brought stories to light that might otherwise have been lost.
“I’ve always been interested in history,” Cross said. “It has always been in me to learn as much as I could. I’m not only 88 years old, but I had the best teacher in town in my grandfather, Claude Fuller, who was in [U.S.] Congress for 10 years and who is featured as the centerfold of the 2023 calendar we just published. He also taught me and my brother Claude how to ride a horse like a Pawnee Indian, and how to swim in the White River before the highway bridge that is there now was built.”
The calendar is free and popular with locals and tourists. Sometimes the calendars include stories that most people never knew or have forgotten. For example, there used to be a railroad tunnel between Eureka Springs and Berryville, and there was illegal gambling at Lake Lucerne and the Basin Park Hotel.
“A lot of what is in the calendars is pretty much a secret,” Cross said. “Everyone is gone but me. After 1978, it just took off. We have never missed a year. It got to the point that people demanded them. We mail out over 100 calendars every year to politicians, relatives and friends. It’s good for public relations.”
This year’s calendar is dedicated to Cassville, where CS Bank has opened its sixth branch bank, and a new bank building is under construction.
In this year’s calendar, Cross writes about the history of Cassville that would have been lost if not for the late State Senator Emory Melton’s book, The First 150 Years in Cassville, Missouri. If he had not written that book, there would not be any early history of that town, Cross said.
“During that century-and-a-half, no one has compiled a history of the city,” Melton wrote. “As a result, many of the human events and their associated activities have been lost with the passage of time. It is difficult to understand and, for the most part, still a mystery, how so many people devoted to worthy causes could have lived so long in such a lovely setting and be so unconcerned about its past.”
While other histories cover the early days of the town, it is harder to find information about the era when Eureka Springs was practically a ghost town with many buildings boarded up. There was a renaissance in the 1970s as artists and others were drawn to Eureka Springs where they purchased and renovated buildings.
“We restored this whole town including the courthouse,” Cross said. “We brought back the trolley cars, cleaned up the major springs, and invited the Dortch family to visit. Lewis Epley and I told Bob Dortch, Jr., what the town was doing and told him we needed a railroad. That was the only thing we were missing. The Dortch family opened the Eureka Springs & North Arkansas Railway in 1981, which is still a popular tourist attraction.”
Cross, who also operates a museum in the downtown CS Bank, has many historical photographs, books, and newspaper clippings.
“We have the largest collection of photographs of this town, literally thousands of them back in our archives,” Cross said. “If I want to go back and look something up, there are files on everybody and everything. This place is alive with history. I don’t have to look very far to find topics for the calendar.”
In the historical information for the March page of the 2023 calendar, Cross writes about a fire that nearly destroyed the Crescent Hotel:
“On March 15, 1967, fire and water damaged about 60 rooms of the 100-room Crescent Hotel when the hotel caught fire and burned from the top down. No one was injured in the four-hour blaze that threatened to destroy the castle-like structure, a city landmark since 1886.
“Dwight Nichols knew the insurance policy on the hotel was in its safe, so when the ashes cooled and Mr. Nichols, who was a 25 percent owner and resident manager of the hotel, read the hotel’s fire insurance policy in the amount of $50,000, he discovered the policy was solely in his name and payable to him.
“In order to protect the building as much as possible, Mr. Nichols contacted Wayne Johnson, Eureka Springs building contractor, and asked how much work he and his crew could do with the $50,000 insurance proceeds to protect the building from further damage. Mr. Johnson said he could build a new, more or less flatiron, to enclose the burned-out center section, repair the damaged roof of the south tower, and repair/replace the elevator.
“Since the policy was in Nichols’s name and he felt that the heirs would want the insurance money rather than spend the money to protect and help preserve the building because they ‘felt the building down in Arkansas was just a pile of rocks,’ Mr. Nichols wanted to contract with Mr. Johnson to perform the work as soon as possible so he could safeguard the hotel before telling the heirs anything about the insurance policy, as to what he had done as the managing partner.
“Before entering into a contract with Mr. Johnson, Mr. Nichols consulted with Lewis Epley, Jr., a Eureka Springs attorney. The two of them discussed the best course of action, and Mr. Epley concurred with what Mr. Nichols wanted to do, after which Nichols entered into a $50,000 contract with Mr. Johnson, and work was immediately commenced to get the building back in the dry.
“When the heirs in Chicago found out that Mr. Nichols had spent $50,000 of insurance money on the ‘pile of rocks’ down in Arkansas, they filed a Contempt of Court Action in Illinois asking that Mr. Nichols be held in contempt. The Illinois court issued an order directing that Mr. Nichols and Mr. Epley appear in court to show cause why Mr. Nichols should not be held in contempt of court, and why the $50,000 was spent on the hotel building.
“Mr. Nichols and Mr. Epley flew to Chicago, appeared in court, and testified as to why they made the decision to spend the insurance money on the building in order to try to preserve and protect the building from further damage. After hearing their testimony, the judge agreed that Mr. Nichols had taken the proper action to protect the building from further damage and dismissed the contempt action.”
The back of the 2023 46th Annual Historic Calendar ends with this quote from Cross: “Lord, I assume that someday I will lose what there is of my weirdly excellent memory, and when that happens, I will be sad. But meanwhile, thanks for letting me remember pretty much every sweet moment I ever had.”
Calendars are available at any CS Bank location.