Old Bluffton: A Ghost Town Rises from the Lake

Old Bluffton (from Texas Observer)

Greeting from Lake Buchanan, Texas! We are spending Christmas with Cindy’s parents, Jim and Maxine Heath of Buchanan Dam, Texas. Their house sits on the (sometime) shore of Lake Buchanan, formed when the Little Colorado River was dammed in the 1930s. I say “sometime shore” because the lake level has been down considerably for several years due to drought. Right now, the lake is 25-30 feet down, and the shore is a quarter mile or more below their yard. Previously, they could launch their sailboat directly from their property.

House foundation

The lowering lake level brought up the remains of the ghost town of Bluffton, submerged when the lake was formed. You have to travel nearly two miles on the old lakebed to reach the ruins. I made a brief attempt last February; I was dog-and-house-sitting for my in-laws while writing my current book. But the descent from the modern road to the lake-bed seemed too steep and difficult for my 2-wheel-drive Ford Ranger (my daughter April teases me about my wimpy truck-- she drives a big F-150). With Jim Heath’s four-wheel drive Chevy Suburban, however, it was not hard to get out to Old Bluffton. We were returning from visiting the Fall Creek Winery a few miles to the north (excellent Texas wines!).

Bluffton cemetery being moved before the flood

Bluffton was founded by the David family, who moved from Arkansas in 1883. The town burned down at one point and was rebuilt some distance to the south. Residents harvested pecans and grew corn and cotton. When construction began on the dam, the Lower Colorado River Authority bought up people's properties. Some residents moved to the new town of Bluffton nearby and others left the area. Engineers in 1937 calculated that it would take four years for the lake to fill in behind the new dam, but heavy rains shortened that time to a few months. All but one grave from the cemetery were moved prior to the flood.

House foundation

The ruins today are not very spectacular. I only had a short period to see the site and take a few photos. Visitors to the site seem to be aware they are not supposed to remove artifacts, and people have piled up broken glass, potsherds, and rusty iron objects on top of the cement and stone remains at the site.

Artifacts piled on a cement slab

Artifacts piled on a building stone

 

Not much is left of old Bluffton. The ruins are considerably sparser and in much poorer condition than the many old mining towns and other ghost towns that litter my state of Arizona. But the fact that we know something of the history of the town and the names of its residents gives this site a rare immediacy. The glass jars and rusty nails seem familiar - they look like they could be five years old, not 75 or more. 

My father-in-law and I look at an old well

Another way to visit old Bluffton is with the Vanishing Texas River Cruise. They sometimes stop at Old Bluffton (I've taken their river tour of Canyon of the Eagles; it was great). Or you can find instructions on reaching the site on a number of websites. For more information, check out the website describing a field trip to the site by the Llano Uplift Archaeological Society. They have nice photos and a sketch map. (I attended one of their monthly meetings last February - a nice group of archaeologists and knowledgeable amateurs.) There are articles about Old Bluffton in the Texas Observer, focusing on the history of the town, and on the website, Texas Escapes.

Viking Urban Planning

Fig 1 - A Trelleborg fortress today

The very phrase "Viking urban planning" may strike some as an oxymoron. The Vikings are famous for raiding, conquering, and pillaging, hardly activities that resonate with the the careful design and planning of cities. Yet a group of geometrical fortresses exhibiting exacting planning were built in Denmark by the Viking king Harald Bluetooth around A.D. 980, and these give us insights into cities and planning in the Viking age. Most of my discussion here is based on Roesdahl (1987), an excellent discussion of these fascinating sites.

Fig 2 - Plans of three Trelleborg sites

At least four of these fortresses are known. They are often referred to as the "Trelleborg fortresses," after the first one to be discovered and excavated. Figure 2 shows plans of three of these settlements. These sites are clearly planned; they correspond to both of the measures of urban planning for ancient cities: standardization among cities, and coordination of buildings within cities (Smith 2007). The main features they share are: outer circular walls  with ditches; with four gates at the compass points; two axial roads that link the gates; a ring-road inside the rampart; and large standardized long-houses arranged in quadrangles (Roesdahl, p.211). Within each site, the houses are identical in size and form.

Fig 3 - Reconstruction by Holger Schmidt of Firkat

Fig 4 - Reconstruction of a house

Based on artifact dating and dendrochronology, all of the Trelleborg fortress sites were built in or close to A.D. 980, and they were only used for a very short time. Although the housing at first glance looks like soldier's barracks, excavation shows that men, women, and children lived in the sites, and that some were craftsmen. Roesdahl interprets these as "very special and very organized royal manors" (p. 217). Several reconstructions of the houses have been made (Fig. 4).

Fig 5 - Realm of Harald Bluetooth

King Harald Bluetooth ruled Denmark from around A.D. 958 - 985. His realm covered a sizable part of southern and western Scandinavia (figure 5). He was the first Viking king to convert to Christianity, and he set up elaborate rune stones at Jelling (fig. 6), in association with several large burial monuments. In case you were wondering, Harald Bluetooth provided the name for the Bluetooth wireless communication technology, developed by the Swedish company Ericsson. The Bluetooth logo consists of the runic characters for King Harald Bluetooth's name.

Fig 6 - Harald's runestone at Jelling

Fig 7 - Bluetooth runes

These circular fortresses are unique in Scandinavian urban history. They do not have clear predecessors or successors. In the interpretation of Else Roesdahl, they were built in a time of decline and crisis, "primarily to control a country ready to revolt." (p. 226). Within a few years, Harald's son, Sven Forkbeard, revolted, and Harald was killed in one of the resulting battles.

The Trelleborg fortresses are important as monuments of Harald Bluetooth's reign, and as a good example of the unusual practice of circular urban design (Smith 2007; Johnston 1983). But perhaps most importantly, their discovery and excavation overturned existing ideas of the urban accomplishments of the Vikings. In the words of Roesdahl,

[The discovery of] Trelleborg causes a sensation. Nobody had thought the barbaric Vikings able to plan, organise or construct such a sophisticated structure, and the learned world conseequently had to rethink their concept of Vikings. (p.208)

References


Brink, Stefan and Neil Price (editors)
2008    The Viking World. Routledge, New York.

Johnston, Norman J.
1983    Cities in the Round. University of Washington Press, Seattle.

Roesdahl, Else
1987    The Danish Geometrical Viking Fortresses and their Context. Anglo-Norman Studies 9:208-226.

Smith, Michael E.
2007    Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning. Journal of Planning History 6(1):3-47.


*** ONE of my favorite historical novels is The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson, which starts with the end of Harald Bluetooth's reign and follows its Viking protagonists for several decades. According to a book review by NPR.org:   "Even though The Long Ships was first published in 1941, it remains the literary equivalent of an action-and intrigue-filled adventure movie that won't insult your intelligence...Bengtsson is an infectiously enthusiastic and surprisingly funny writer--even readers with zero interest in the Europe of a millennium ago will want to keep turning the pages." How can one not like a book whose characters have  names like Sven Forkbeard and Ragnar Hairy-Breeks?