County: Howard

Batson, Luenell

aka: Luenell
aka: Luenell Campbell
Luenell, who goes by only her first name professionally, is a comedian and a film and television actress known for her appearances in such movies as Borat: Cultural Learning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) and Hotel Transylvania (2012). She was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2015. Luenell was born Luenell Batson on March 12, 1959, in Tollette (Howard County), a historically black community. Her father was murdered while her mother was pregnant with her. As her mother already had seven other children, she was adopted by family members out of state, becoming Luenell Campbell and moving to California. She attended school in the community of Castro Valley in the San Francisco …

Center Point (Howard County)

Center Point was the first county seat of Howard County, serving in that capacity from 1873 until 1905. Although it is near the geographical center of the county, it received its name when the post office was established in 1849 because the crossroads at that location served as the central point of trade in southwestern Arkansas west of Washington (Hempstead County). Center Point in the twenty-first century is a small unincorporated community at the intersection of U.S. Highway 278 (formerly State Highway 4) and State Highway 26. Around 1818, Robert Messer, with his wife and two daughters, traveled by river to Fulton (Hempstead County) and then by land into the forested wilderness of southwestern Arkansas. Messer built a log cabin …

Corinth (Howard County)

Corinth, named for the local Church of Christ, was originally known as Wilton Settlement. The unincorporated community in Brewer Township in Howard County has always been an agricultural area. Since the first recorded wave of settlement in 1845, the community has lost population, and in 2009 the residents numbered seventy. Caddo Indians inhabited the area in the sixteenth century, but they had been removed to Oklahoma by the mid-1800s. A land exchange with the Choctaw in the 1820s brought more Native American settlement, which made white migrants wary of moving to the area for a time. By the 1840s, Indian Removal cleared the way for white migrants heading west, and numerous families made the area, then in Pike County, their …

Davis, Miller (Execution of)

On some occasions, the names of individuals who were legally executed find their way onto lists of lynching victims. This is the case with Miller Davis, executed on November 10, 1893, who appeared on the Chicago Tribune’s annual lynching list, in Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record, and on at least two other lynching lists. In addition, Wells describes Davis as a Black man, when in fact he was white. According to public records, Miller Davis was a native of Tennessee. In 1880, he was living in Lawrence County, Tennessee, with his parents and a number of siblings, including his brother, Mannon. By 1892, he was living in Sevier County, Arkansas, where he married Hardie Hannah on October 9. Davis …

Davis, William Henry (Willie)

William Henry (Willie) Davis was a professional baseball player who spent eighteen years in the major leagues before retiring at the end of the 1979 season. Spending most of his career with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Davis played a key role on the franchise’s 1963 and 1965 World Series championship teams, and, while he finished his career with the California Angels, Davis held a number of Los Angeles Dodgers batting records at the time of his retirement. Willie Davis was born on April 15, 1940, in Mineral Springs (Howard County), but he grew up in Los Angeles, California. A multi-sport athletic star at Theodore Roosevelt High School, Davis was a world-class performer in track and field, specializing in the 100-yard dash …

Dierks (Howard County)

The city of Dierks in Howard County rose to prominence due to the thriving timber industry of the early twentieth century. Named for a well-known lumber businessman, the city has maintained its identity with an annual Pine Tree Festival but is also known as a tourist center in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas. The first families to acquire land in the township were Henry Block, John Cesterson, and James Wallen, all of whom arrived in 1848. A few more families gradually bought land in the area, which was then a dense forest of pine, oak, and hickory trees. One wagon trail connected the settlement—which they named Hardscrabble—to the town of Center Point (Howard County), ten miles south. During the …

Dierks, Herman

Herman Dierks was the co-founder and two-time president of the Dierks Lumber and Coal Company, supervising its lumberyard in De Queen (Sevier County) and other parts of eastern Oklahoma and northern Louisiana. With the help of his brothers, he helped create and control the Dierks timber empire. Born near Lyons, Iowa, on September 24, 1863, Herman Dierks was the seventh child of Peter Henry Dierks, a German farmer and a banker, and Margaretha Dorothea Tauk, a Danish immigrant. He joined his brother Hans in Nebraska after Hans bought land there along the newly constructed Burlington Railroad. Dierks farmed until he and his brother bought a lumberyard in 1887, which later proved to be the source of Dierks’s fortune. On May …

Dillard, William Thomas

William Thomas Dillard was the founder of Dillard’s, Inc., one of the nation’s largest fashion apparel and home-furnishings retailers. From an $8,000 investment in a single store in Nashville (Howard County), Dillard, an Arkansas native, built a premier retail chain with a national presence of more than 300 stores in twenty-nine states. William T. Dillard was born on September 2, 1914, in Mineral Springs (Howard County), the only son of Thomas Dillard and Hattie Gibson Dillard, who were prominent farmers and merchants in the close-knit Mineral Springs community. Retailing excited Dillard from a very young age, and he spent many hours in his father’s store. Dillard attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), where he majored in …

Duckett (Howard County)

Duckett, in the Ouachita Mountains in northern Howard County, was never a population center so much as a community defined by geography, relationships, a post office, and a school. The Cossatot River separates it from the rest of Howard County. With its post office and school long closed, the community in the twenty-first century comes together for Duckett Cemetery’s Decoration Day. Duckett coalesced into a community in the late 1800s. It was named for Allen Turner Duckett (1846–1907), who left Washburn (Sebastian County) with his family in 1876. The post office was created in 1887, around when Duckett first appeared on maps. Most people arrived in Duckett Township after the Civil War; only ten people bought federal land before the …

Duckett Ford (Howard County)

aka: Duckett Crossing (Howard County)
Duckett Ford (a.k.a. Duckett Crossing) was one of nearly a dozen places to cross, or ford, the Cossatot River in northern Howard County. According to a 1913 map, there were eleven fords in the twenty-plus-mile length of the river that separated Duckett Township from the rest of Howard County. Duckett Ford, however, had the advantage of being a straight shot between Wickes (Polk County)—and the Kansas City Southern Railway (KCS) that created it in 1897—and Galena (Howard County). Families who controlled low water crossings, such as Allen Turner Duckett’s family, could benefit financially. After the automobile and good roads came to the Ouachita Mountains, fords like this one became relics, and the Cossatot River became a whitewater tourist attraction. Little is …

Duckett Township Lynching of 1919

On Wednesday, August 10, 1919, an unknown African American man was killed by an unnamed officer in Duckett Township in northern Howard County after a “thrilling weekend man hunt” across southern Polk and northern Howard counties, where no Black people lived. This man had allegedly committed “an awful crime” against a seven-year-old girl in broad daylight in Sevier County, 3.5 miles southwest of De Queen (Sevier County), and then fled north. He “was the only one of his color in the county he so vainly sought to find cover in, and was shot at and harassed at every turn he made.” His death certificate gave his occupation as “horse theft.” Between 50 and 100 white men chased him in a …

Elders, Joycelyn

aka: Minnie Lee Jones
Joycelyn Elders was director of the Arkansas Department of Health and the U.S. surgeon general in the administration of President Bill Clinton. Her controversial opinions led to her resignation after just over a year as surgeon general. She was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 1995 and the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame in 2016. Joycelyn Elders was born Minnie Lee Jones on August 13, 1933, in Schaal (Howard County). She took the name Joycelyn while attending college. The eldest of Curtis and Haller Jones’s eight children, she spent much of her childhood working in cotton fields. From an early age, Jones showed considerable academic ability, and in 1949, she earned a scholarship to Philander Smith College …

Ferguson, John Lewis

John Lewis Ferguson—historian, minister, author, archival administer, and historic preservationist—served as Arkansas state historian and the director of the Arkansas State Archives (previous called the Arkansas History Commission) from 1960 to 2005, only the third person to hold that position since 1905. His forty-five-year tenure was the longest in the agency’s history. John Ferguson was born on March 1, 1926, on a farm near Nashville (Howard County) to farmer and World War I veteran Clarence Walter Ferguson and his wife, Nannye N. McCrary Ferguson. As a child attending the rural York’s Chapel School, he read every history book he could find. Early on, he decided to pursue a career in history. He graduated from Nashville High School in 1944. In 1951, he was …

Garrett Whiteside Hall

Garrett Whiteside Hall, located at the corner of North Third Avenue and Lockesburg Street in Nashville (Howard County), is a single-story, wood-frame gymnasium built in 1940 through the National Youth Administration (NYA), a Depression-era federal relief program. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 21, 1994. The public school system in Nashville had its origins in the 1880s when the Nashville Academy opened; it had three teachers and 115 students by 1890. The original 1886 wood-frame school building burned in 1931 and was replaced a year later. As the Great Depression yielded President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, the school district sought funding for a gymnasium through the NYA. In part through the aid of …

Hembree, Lathe (Execution of)

Lathe Hembree was hanged on July 25, 1902, at Center Point (Howard County) for a murder he denied committing. He was one of six men executed on the same date in Arkansas. On March 1, 1900, W. M. Willis, an inspector and paymaster for the Hammond-Signor Tie Company, was found shot to death on the Pee Gee Road five miles south of Mena (Polk County). Circumstantial evidence led investigators to arrest Lathe Hembree, a white man, for the crime. He was tried in Mena and convicted of first-degree murder on March 17 after the jury deliberated “only one hour.” He was sentenced to hang on May 18. Hembree’s lawyers appealed the conviction, and the Arkansas Supreme Court delayed the execution, …

Howard County

Howard County encompasses the Ouachita Mountains to the north and the Coastal Plain to the south. It was created in 1873 from portions of Pike, Polk, Hempstead, and Sevier counties. Nashville in eastern Howard County was the birthplace of the Dillard’s department store chain. Howard County was also the location of one of the state’s most notorious race riots. European Exploration and Settlement The first accounts of the inhabitants from this area come from the chronicles of the Hernando de Soto expedition in the sixteenth century. The area is known to have been inhabited by the Caddo tribe. By the mid-1800s, however, the U.S. government had relocated the Caddo to what is now Oklahoma. This area was also part of the …

Howard County Courthouse

The Howard County Courthouse is located on 421 North Main Street. It stands at the gateway of downtown Nashville (Howard County), which encompasses the city’s commercial and government districts. The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program recognizes the two-story building as architecturally and historically significant, as it stands as a visible result of the New Deal policies of the 1930s. The National Park Service added it to the National Register of Historic Places on June 14, 1990. At the county’s creation in 1873, the Nineteenth Arkansas General Assembly made Center Point (Howard County) the county seat due to its convenient geographical location. Meanwhile, the economic hub centered on Nashville, with cotton, wool, and peaches driving economic output. After the Arkansas and Louisiana …