A City of Ruins

By James Kissinger

I met Coin Harvey shortly after I moved to Rogers, Arkansas in 1985. Okay, I didn’t actually “meet” him, he’d died about 50 years prior, but I learned of him. A buddy and I used to drive out east of town on Hwy 94, following the road until it literally disappeared into the Monte Ne arm of Beaver Lake. We’d sit at the lake’s edge, drinking beer and talking about a little bit of everything, but mostly about girls. When we’d covered everything we knew about women, which at the time was even less than I know now, the conversation would drift. And that’s where I met Coin.

William “Coin” Harvey was a colorful character by any man’s measure. Born on a farm in Virginia in 1851, his life was a series of adventures.  He was admitted to the West Virginia State Bar at the age of nineteen and shortly thereafter began his practice of law in Cleveland, Ohio and Chicago, Illinois. He married at the age of twenty-four and began a family, eventually having four children. At thirty-three he moved his young family to the wilderness of Southwestern Colorado, operating a successful silver mine outside of Ouray. After four years of carting tons of silver over the “million dollar highway” that traverses Red Mountain Pass, the silver market collapsed and he and his family moved on to Pueblo, Colorado where he turned his focus to real estate development.  The love of silver, however, stayed in his veins, and he spent much of the next decade promoting a move away from the gold standard to a silver-based monetary system. In the years that followed he authored several books, gained a great deal of notoriety, and earned himself the nickname, “Coin.”

While campaigning for William Jennings Bryan (a free silver advocate) in the 1896 presidential race, Harvey traveled to the northwest corner of Arkansas. The town of Rogers, to be exact. Nestled on the western edge of the Ozark Mountains, Harvey was immediately drawn to the scenic beauty of the area. Upon his return to Pueblo, he began to make plans to build a luxury resort in the foothills of the Ozarks.  Four years later, in 1900, he purchased acreage a few miles outside of town and began construction, naming the community “Monte Ne”, which means “mountain water.”

Over the next few years Harvey’s dream became a reality, at least in part, as the resort grew to include three hotels, a golf course, a tennis court, and a bathhouse featuring the state’s first indoor swimming pool.  Guests arriving by rail were transported across a lagoon to the main hotel via an ornate gondola that had been imported from Italy. After days filled with anything from croquet to fox hunts, guests enjoyed fine dining in terraced restaurants followed by concerts and dances in the grand ballroom. Harvey’s vision of long summer evenings spent in the pursuit, and the business, of leisure had come to pass.

And then the tide turned, and success slowly slipped away … the loss of a son, an estrangement from his wife, flagging interest in his resort.  As the resort declined and all Harvey had worked for began to wither away, he made one last push for immortality … for a legacy. Convinced the end of civilization was drawing near, he announced to the world his plans to construct a 130 ft pyramid housing a time capsule to serve as a record to future generations — a glimpse into his world. He began the project with the construction of an elaborate amphitheater to serve as an entrance, a foyer, into the pyramid. That’s as far as he got. The pyramid was never constructed. Harvey died in 1936 with $138 in the bank, $3,000 in debt and no will. The Army Corp of Engineers dammed the White River in 1966, forming Beaver Lake and engulfing much of his life’s work in the process. It was on those shores that I saw the legacy of Coin Harvey … crumbled buildings and dashed dreams. A city of ruins. 

I’ve come to give thought about my influence on the world. I desire a legacy that will last. Not bricks and mortar, but rather a legacy built into the hearts of others. My ideas carried on in the lives of friends and family. More often than not, our most enduring legacy is in our children. For better or for worse, they will carry on our values. I look at myself and I see a collage of ideas, attitudes, traits and characteristics that have been handed down to me by my parents. I’ve scripted them into something unique, but the traces are there. Our legacy can, and will, be carried forward elsewhere, but it’s in our children that our ideas will live on to be passed to another generation. If for no reason other than this, they are worthy of our best. And what is our best? It’s our time. Our attention. It’s a heart to know our children. It’s building something very real inside a young mind; something that elements and time can’t degrade.  

There’s an uncle on my wife’s side of the family that has long been my favorite in-law. Uncle Bill. Probably because he’s always seemed interested in what I am doing and takes the time to ask questions about my life. Perhaps more importantly, after he asks the questions he listens and genuinely seems to care what I have to say. He’s one of the strongest relational people I’ve ever met. Bill taught me a lesson about parenting years before I was ever a parent. I say he taught me a lesson … actually it was me observing something I saw in him that I knew I wanted.

My wife and I were visiting Bill’s family in Denver in the mid ’90′s. His daughter, Katie, was away at college in Omaha, Nebraska. Over dinner one evening Bill mentioned that he’d been awakened the previous night by a 1:30 AM call from Katie. Calls in the middle of the night are seldom good.  This one, however, was different. As I listened to the story he told, I somehow knew, even having not yet been a parent myself, that Bill had spent years building bridges with his daughter. I knew he had gotten it right.

In 1995 Hootie and the Blowfish was the hottest band on the radio. Their debut release, Cracked Rear View, was the largest selling album of that year. You couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing their music. The night of the call they’d played a concert at Creighton University, where Katie went to school. She and some of her friends went to the show and were at a local club afterwards when Hootie (Darius Rucker for you non-musically inclined folks) unexpectedly showed up.  A nineteen year old girl gets to meet the hottest star in music at the time. And what did she do? She immediately found a quiet spot and called her dad, waking him up in the middle of the night to share her excitement. I’ll be honest with you, I just now got teary-eyed as I wrote that last line … it still makes that big an impression on me. Perhaps even more so now that I have children. In the middle of the night something good happened and she wanted to do nothing more than call her dad. That’s a man who’s laid the foundation of a legacy. One day Bill won’t be around, but he’ll live forever in the hearts of his children and his children’s children. The pictures they flash before he’s eulogized will be of happy, laughing children and a man who cared … a legacy that can never crumble.

Legacies are built a day at a time. One simple decision or action building on another, and another, and another.  Words and actions. The way we live. These are the things that determine our legacy. A simple realization that our lives are nothing more than the sum of our days. That’s who we are. I’m seeking God’s grace and wisdom in building a legacy that will serve my family and my God well. A legacy of relationships; because I want more than crumbled ruins.