Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas

Arkansas’s sixth governor, Henry Massie Rector, died in Little Rock (Pulaski County). He is buried in Mount Holly Cemetery. He was, in the sagacious judgment of William Minor Quesenbury, “a violent man who fights people.” Not only did his two years in office reflect this, but he also pistol-whipped his sons’ schoolteacher because the man had disciplined one of his children. In retrospect, some would say his greatest moment came in defying President Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops. But in unifying a largely frontier state for the first modern war, he proved to be seriously lacking.