Wire service reporters used to do something called a “new top” as stories developed. If something happened reasonably soon after an original story was sent out on the wire, the reporter would write a new lede that would replace the opening paragraph or paragraphs, and editors down the line could use it and graft the rest of the story behind it.
Today we offer a new top to an old story that we related in this space on September 5, 2016. It was about the naming of the Lake of the Ozarks.
Construction of Bagnell Dam was completed in April, 1931 and the water reached spillway level in May.
A year-and-a-half before the dam was finished, a controversy broke out about what to name the reservoir. Union Electric, now Ameren, the builder of the dam, found itself fighting an effort in January, 1930 to name the reservoir “Lake Osage.”
A land company had bought property on the planned lakeshore and had gone to the Camden County Recorder of Deeds to register the name “Lake Osage.” But the development of the lake was a private enterprise by Union Electric which immediately said the proposed name was not authorized and would not be allowed.
The land company liked the name because it wanted to build a “summer colony” it wanted to call Osage Beach.
But critics thought “Lake Osage” would be confusing because the new lake was only two counties away from Lake Sac-Osage at Osceola (now the Truman Reservoir).
The 1929 legislature passed a bill calling the new lake “Lake Missouri,” but Governor Henry Caulfield vetoed it. Several other names were suggested including Lake Benton, for Senator Thomas Hart Benton. When the legislature passed a bill in ’31 calling the reservoir “Lake Benton,” Caulfield vetoed it, too, because it referred to “Missouri’s greatest Senator,” a phrase some might question then and one that could be questionable when future men and women had the job.
Union Electric, through the construction years, had referred to the dam creating the “Ozark Reservoir,” which turned out to be the largest man-made lake in the world—a claim that was eclipsed five years later.
By 1932 the lake was generally referred to as the Lake of the Ozarks. As far as we know there was never a formal dedication of the lake’s name.
And Osage Beach became much more than a “summer colony.”