County: Cleburne

Adler, Cyrus

Cyrus Adler was a scholar, editor, and Jewish leader with a lifetime commitment to the study of Jewish history and culture. He worked with a number of Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and had a strong influence on American Jewish culture during his lifetime. Cyrus Adler was born in Van Buren (Crawford County) on September 13, 1863, the third of four children of Samuel and Sarah (Sulzberger) Adler. His father worked as a merchant and manager of a nearby cotton plantation. Shortly after Adler’s birth, the Adler family fled the Civil War conditions in Arkansas and relocated first to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and later to New York. …

Almond (Cleburne County)

Almond lies in the northeastern corner of Cleburne County. The community historically had close family and commercial ties to Concord and Banner in Cleburne County to the southwest and Locust Grove (Independence County) to the northeast. Almond was in Independence County until February 20, 1883, when the last county in Arkansas, Cleburne County, was created. Brock Mountain, towering over 1,200 feet, separates Almond from Independence County and its county seat, Batesville. The community of Almond in the twenty-first century is virtually a ghost town with one abandoned store building. It is not known for sure how Almond received its name, because almonds do not grow naturally in Arkansas. It is suspected that an Almond family lived in the area when …

Banner (Cleburne County)

Banner is located on Highway 87 (also called Floral Road) less than two miles from the point at which Floral Road joins Highway 25 N (Heber Springs Road) in Concord (Cleburne County). Floral (Independence County) is nearby. Until Cleburne County was formed on February 20, 1883, Banner was in Independence County; the community has close ties with both counties. A colorful pioneer of Banner was Elijah (Lige) Collard, a Kentuckian who blazed a trail to Healing Springs Township (then in Independence County) between 1845 and 1850. Collard supposedly spent time with Native Americans around the mineral springs in what is today Heber Springs (Cleburne County). One day in the 1850s, he was confronted on his trek to the springs by …

Camp Halsey

Camp Halsey was a Soil Conservation Service camp established in 1934 a few miles to the east of Greenbrier in the northeastern corner of Faulkner County. It later became a forestry camp before closing in 1939. In the twenty-first century, the site is archaeological site 3FA313. The location is about one mile east of Woolly Hollow State Park. The small community of Centerville (Faulkner County) is located about one mile to the west of the camp location. In response to expansive droughts in the early twentieth century, the U.S. government established “demonstration projects” tied to programs of soil conservation within watersheds. The Cadron Creek Demonstration Project was one of the first of these in Arkansas, although it was not affiliated …

Cleburne County

Although it was the most recent of Arkansas’s seventy-five counties to be formed, Cleburne County has proved to be a tourist mecca for the state. Thousands of Arkansans and visitors are attracted to Greers Ferry Lake and the Little Red River for fishing, swimming, and other water sports. Even before the lake was formed, summer visitors were attracted to the mineral springs in Spring Park in Heber Springs, the county seat, and to the waterfalls and unique rock formations in the surrounding hills. Cleburne County has a generally rugged terrain with elevations ranging from 270 feet above sea level in the river bottomland of the southeast part of the county to 1,400 feet in the northwest section. The valleys have …

Cleburne County Courthouse

The Cleburne County Courthouse was constructed in 1914 on the courthouse square in Heber Springs (Cleburne County). It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 12, 1976. Upon the establishment of Cleburne County in 1883, the Sugar Loaf Springs Land Company—holder of the land that would become Heber Springs (originally called Sugar Loaf Springs and then Sugar Loaf)—donated to the county a block in the center of the town. The land was set aside for the building of a courthouse, which the company bonded itself to construct. In 1884, a wooden structure was built upon this block. The building served as courthouse until 1914. In 1911, the county court appropriated $50,000 to construct a new “fireproof” …

Cleburne County Draft War

The Cleburne County Draft War was one of three violent encounters in World War I–era Arkansas that occurred in the spring and summer of 1918 between local officials determined to enforce the Selective Service Act of 1917 and citizens who resisted conscription. In this episode, those resisting the draft were Jehovah’s Witnesses, then known as Russellites, who were widely viewed with suspicion and hatred because of their refusal to take part in civic and military affairs. The Cleburne County Draft War began before sunrise on Sunday, July 7, 1918, when Sheriff Jasper Duke led four men into an area of the county between Rosebud (White County) and Pearson (Cleburne County) in search of delinquents who had not registered for the …

Cleburne County Farm Cemetery

The Cleburne County Farm Cemetery, which contains seventeen graves, is located approximately three miles south of Heber Springs (Cleburne County) at the southwestern corner of Plantation Drive East and Deer Run Cove. It is the only remaining physical on-site reminder of the Cleburne County Farm, established in the final years of the nineteenth century for the care of the poor. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 28, 2005. During the early history of the United States, the ever-growing population of poor citizens was regarded as a danger by many but was seen as a call to service by others. Many citizens and charitable organizations provided services to the poor, as did many local municipalities. …

Concord (Cleburne County)

Concord is a town located in the northeastern corner of Cleburne County. It is perhaps most well known as the home of Rimrock Records. Until 1808, the main inhabitants of Cleburne County were Native Americans who lived in the lowlands around the Little Red River. The Osage controlled most of northern Arkansas and used the area, including Cleburne County, as hunting grounds. In 1808, the United States purchased the land from the Osage, and the first Euro-American settlers arrived. In 1817, the United States established a treaty with the Cherokee, giving them the land between the White and Arkansas rivers west of a line stretching from near Morrilton (Conway County) to just west of Batesville (Independence County). This Old Cherokee …

Dill School

aka: Ida School
The Dill School at Ida (Cleburne County), located on Highway 25 and Center Ridge Road, was built in 1937–1938 with assistance from the National Youth Administration (NYA), a Depression-era federal relief program. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 16, 1994. The first schools in the Ida area were established in the late 1800s and included a one-room log building called the Dill School. This school served the community until it was destroyed by fire in the early twentieth century. It was replaced by a one-room, wood-frame structure that was used until 1938, when the community sought funding from the National Youth Administration, one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, which employed young …

Disfarmer, Mike

aka: Mike Meyer
A portrait photographer in Heber Springs (Cleburne County), Mike Disfarmer’s invaluable contribution to photography and the documentation of rural America went unnoticed until 1973, fourteen years after his death. This eccentric man’s work, which later garnered national attention, captures with stark realism the people in and around Heber Springs in the early to mid-1900s. The particularities of Disfarmer’s biography are sketchy, largely because of his reclusive lifestyle and meager status during his lifetime. Various sources date his birth to German immigrants as either 1882 or 1884; however, a World War II draft registration card for one “Mike Disfarmer” of Heber Springs lists an August 16, 1882, birth in Daviess, Indiana. Disfarmer’s family later moved to the German community of Stuttgart (Arkansas …

Drasco (Cleburne County)

Originally called Crossroads or Cross Roads (because the Batesville-Clinton and Richwoods-Searcy roads intersected there), Drasco of Cleburne County lies about eleven miles northeast of Greers Ferry Lake and includes the lakeside community of Tannenbaum. Still located at a crossroads—at the junction of Highway 25 (Heber Springs Road) and Highway 92 (Greers Ferry Road)—Drasco lies in a strategic spot for the tourism business, serving travelers to the county seat of Heber Springs (Cleburne County) and to the resort areas of Greers Ferry (Cleburne County) and Prim (Cleburne County). The Osage once hunted in the area. According to local historian Ollie Latch, a branch of the Blackfoot Indians known as Drascos occupied the area in 1793, though the Blackfoot actually occupied parts …

Edgemont (Cleburne County)

Edgemont is an unincorporated community in northern Cleburne County. It is located on the northern side of the Edgemont Bridge, which spans a segment of Greers Ferry Lake. Old Edgemont is located beneath the lake. Prior to 1808, most of the inhabitants of the area that would become Cleburne County were Osage. They controlled most of northern Arkansas and used the area that includes modern Cleburne County as hunting grounds. In 1808, the United States purchased the land from the Osage, and the first Euro-American settlers entered the area. In 1817, the United States established a treaty with the Cherokee, who were given the land between the White and Arkansas rivers west of a line stretching from near Morrilton (Conway …

Endsley, Melvin

Melvin Endsley of Drasco (Cleburne County) was a musician and songwriter most noted for writing both the words and music of “Singing the Blues,” one of the biggest hits of the 1950s and one of the most recorded songs of the twentieth century. Nashville, Tennessee, recording star Marty Robbins, pop singer Guy Mitchell, and teen idol Tommy Steele in the United Kingdom all recorded versions of the song. Endsley composed more than 400 songs, many of them recorded by the top musical artists of the day, including Andy Williams, Johnny Cash, Paul McCartney, Ricky Skaggs, Stonewall Jackson, Black Oak Arkansas, Bill Haley and His Comets, and Don Gibson. Melvin Lorenzen Endsley was born on January 30, 1934, in Heber Springs …

Frauenthal, Max

Max Frauenthal, a German immigrant noted for bravery in the Civil War, established an important mercantile business in Conway (Faulkner County). He was later known as the “Father of Heber Springs and Cleburne County.” Max Frauenthal was born on November 11, 1836, in Marienthal, Bavaria, Germany. No definite records of his parents’ or any siblings’ names are available. According to family history, his grandfather was called simply Meyer until the early nineteenth century, when the enactment of the Napoleonic Code required European Jews to take surnames; Meyer took Frauenthal, the name of a town south of Vienna, Austria. Max Frauenthal was fifteen when he came to the United States, eventually settling in Brookhaven, Mississippi. At Summit, Mississippi, he enlisted in …

Greers Ferry (Cleburne County)

Greers Ferry, established and incorporated in 1968, quickly grew to become the second-largest city in Cleburne County. Named for the dam and lake that were constructed between 1959 and 1964, the community was created by some of the displaced citizens of older towns and settlements of the area. It exists in the twenty-first century primarily as a center of tourist activity. Thomas C. Stark was the first settler to arrive in the area, establishing his homestead in the 1850s. Jess Pillam operated a store for settlers in the area, and, eventually, four tiny farming communities arose in the wooded area along the Little Red River in Cleburne County. Evening Shade, Post Oak, and Lone Pine each had one-room schoolhouses, and …

Greers Ferry Dam and Lake

Greers Ferry Dam on the Little Red River, approximately three miles north of Heber Springs (Cleburne County), is a concrete dam built between 1959 and 1962. The dam’s primary function is flood control, but it also serves as a hydroelectric power plant. Greers Ferry Lake, created as a result of the dam, is a popular recreational destination. The flow of the Little Red River was uncontrolled during the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in almost yearly flooding downstream; high water levels in the Little Red River could compound flooding problems further downstream along the White River. In 1938, Congress passed the Flood Control Act, which authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build dams on most of …