Entries - County: Clay - Starting with H

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center, located at 1021 West Cherry Street in Piggott (Clay County), opened on July 4, 1999. The museum and educational center is designed to contribute to the understanding of the 1920s and 1930s by focusing on the internationally connected Pfeiffer family of Piggott and their son-in-law, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1953 for the novel The Old Man and the Sea and was named Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1954 for his overall contribution to writing. The museum includes the Pfeiffer-Janes House and the Hemingway Barn-Studio. W. D. “Buck” Templeton built both structures in 1910. Paul Pfeiffer bought the house and barn in 1913 and moved his family to …

Elias Hensen was seized from a house and shot to death on March 12, 1879, in Clay County after testifying against a co-defendant in a horse-stealing case and preparing to testify against other members of his gang. The 1870 federal census lists Elias Hensen, born around 1852, as an illiterate farmhand working for Abraham Roberts in Randolph County’s Current River Township, and it indicates that he might have had a diminished mental capacity. By 1879, he apparently was working with the Montgomery Brothers gang and had earned a reputation as a “rather unsavory character in this neighborhood, and was accused of various thefts, horse-stealing among them,” according to the Clay County Courier. Hensen and an accomplice, Charley Jenkins, were arrested …

William Herrig, a white man described in news reports as “a well-to-do farmer 67 years old” was lynched in Clay County by vigilantes on December 29, 1887, for murdering his young wife and a man with whom she was apparently friendly. No William Herrig was living in Clay County by the time of the 1880s census, although other men of that name were living in various places in the United States at the time, all of them German immigrants. Herrig’s wife, whose maiden name was Julia Bennett (and who is also dubbed “Mrs. Nettie” in reports), was described as “a charmingly plump little 20-years-of-age wife” who “had been for the two years before her marriage an actress in the Pauline …

Doyle Overton Hickey served as an officer in the U.S. Army during World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, before retiring as a lieutenant general. Doyle Hickey was born in Rector (Clay County) on July 27, 1892, the oldest child of John and Genie Hickey; he had two brothers and two sisters. John Hickey was a carpenter, and the family moved to Camden (Ouachita County) before 1900. Doyle Hickey graduated from Camden High School in 1909 and entered Hendrix College, graduating in 1913. Hickey studied law and worked at a lumber company in Memphis, Tennessee, before entering the U.S. Army in 1917. Trained at the First Officers Training Camp, Camp Stanley, Texas, Hickey received a commission as …