These Small Towns in the Ozarks Come Alive in Summer

By June the Current River is busy with canoes, and the float season at the heart of an Ozark summer is on. Water sets the terms across this region, its cold springs and clear rivers and wide reservoirs. The Ozarks stretch across northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, high enough that the streams move fast and clear. Towns that idle through winter find their stride once the water warms, some on a marquee name and some on little more than a bridge and a few dozen residents. These eight span both states, and each earns its summer crowd a different way.

Eureka Springs

More than 60 natural springs surface in the hillsides Eureka Springs grew around, and they are why anyone came here to begin with. Nineteenth-century visitors arrived for the water, and the town that grew to meet them climbed straight up the rock, its Victorian storefronts stacked along streets that bend with the terrain. The entire downtown now carries a listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the only city in America that can say so, and Southern Living ranked it fifth among the South's best mountain towns in 2022. More than a dozen of the original springs have been restored, and a summer afternoon on foot moves among shaded grottos, spring-fed pools, and the galleries and cafes packed into the blocks between.

Powhatan

Powhatan is a whole town preserved in place. On a hill above the Black River in Lawrence County, at the eastern edge of the Ozark Plateau, an 1888 courthouse and a scattering of 1800s buildings mark the spot where a steamboat port once handled the trade of northeast Arkansas. The river business ended when the railroad crossed two miles north in the 1880s, and the county seat left for Walnut Ridge in the 1960s, but the buildings remained as Powhatan Historic State Park. Summer visitors tour the courthouse and the old jail, then drive the short distance to Lake Charles State Park, where a swim beach, a fishing lake, and a campground do the warm-weather work the port no longer can.

Branson

Branson calls itself the Live Entertainment Capital of the World, and its theaters back the claim. In summer, the water competes for attention. The town lies on Lake Taneycomo, a narrow, cold tailwater lake good for trout, boating, and swimming right at its edge. Table Rock Lake, about 10 miles west, opens into some 800 miles of shoreline and the region's busiest summer boating, and Bull Shoals Lake reaches to within roughly 14 miles to the east. A Missouri town of about 13,100 people spends the season hosting many times that number.

Witts Springs

Witts Springs is the kind of place people use as a trailhead. It lies about 16 miles southwest of Marshall on Arkansas Highway 16, roughly 1,900 feet up and ringed by ridges, which puts long stretches of the Ozark Highlands Trail and the Ozark National Forest within reach. Riders take horses into the forest, and hikers walk in for the day. About nine miles off, Falling Water Falls pours over a low rock ledge into a pool that swimmers crowd on hot afternoons.

Lakeview

Lakeview earned the nickname Paradise of the Ozarks, and in summer the reason is plain. The town lies on Bull Shoals Lake in Baxter County, a reservoir of more than 44,000 acres, its clear water good for swimming, scuba diving, and bass. Below Bull Shoals Dam, the White River is cold enough year-round for trout, one of the best tailwater fisheries in the country. About two miles out, the James A. Gaston Visitor Center opens the door to Bull Shoals-White River State Park, with exhibits on the dam and the river and access to the park's marina and trails.

Van Buren

Van Buren, Missouri, has one of the biggest springs in the country in its backyard. Big Spring, four miles south of town in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, pushes an average of 286 million gallons of water a day from the base of a limestone bluff into the Current River. It is the largest spring in Missouri and one of the three largest in the United States, alongside springs in Idaho and Florida. The turquoise water carries dissolved limestone from as far as 45 miles away through the karst caverns beneath the plateau. Bluffs pocked with small caves rise above the spring, and the Current River brings paddlers and floaters through all summer.

Williford

Williford has fewer than 90 residents and next to nothing in the way of a downtown, but it lies on one of the best float streams in Arkansas. The Spring River threads past the town, cold and dependable because it begins at Mammoth Spring about 30 miles upstream, the seventh-largest natural spring in the world and the largest in the state. That steady, spring-fed flow leaves the river floatable through the hottest months, when trout and smallmouth gather in its pools. About 12 miles off, Star Falls Lookout stands above the South Fork of the Spring River where it bends toward the main channel.

Ponca

Ponca is a handful of buildings at one of the best put-ins on the Buffalo National River. The upper Buffalo, the first federally protected river in the country, threads through the bluffs of Newton County here, and on summer mornings canoes and kayaks crowd the water below the Ponca low-water bridge. Elk graze the fields of nearby Boxley Valley at dawn and dusk, a herd brought back after the animals had vanished from Arkansas for most of a century. Hikers take the short walk into Lost Valley past bluff shelters and a waterfall, and outfitters in town set up floats, horseback rides, and zipline tours.

Where the Water Sets the Season

The throughline across these towns is water and what warm weather does with it. Branson spreads across three lakes, Van Buren's Big Spring pushes a quarter-billion gallons a day into the Current River, and the Buffalo carries floaters past the bluffs at Ponca. Even the smallest places trade on it, Williford on the Spring River, Lakeview on Bull Shoals, Witts Springs at the edge of the national forest. Winter empties these highlands out. Summer is when the springs, rivers, and lakes give the Ozarks their reason to come back to life.