Entries - County: Howard - Starting with H

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 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 …

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 …

The Howard County Race Riot occurred along the Howard and Hempstead county line in late July and early August 1883. Two events spurred the outbreak of violence. First, a disagreement over the surveying of a property line led to the beating of Prince Marshall and his brother James Marshall, both African-American farmers, by Thomas Wyatt, a white sharecropper living on land owned by Joseph Reed, a white farmer. Second, a few days later, Wyatt is alleged to have approached a young black woman, a member of Prince and James Marshall’s family, as she was plowing alone in a field and “solicited” her. When she began to cry out, he hit her over the head with a fence rail. The latter …

Brief accounts of lynchings sometimes appeared in newspapers across the country but were later corrected or contradicted by local newspapers. Such was the case with an unidentified African-American man who was supposedly lynched in Howard County in December 1894. In mid-December, several out-of-state newspapers—including Memphis’s Commercial Appeal, the Indianapolis Journal, the New York Sun, the New York Times, and the Raleigh News and Observer—reported that on Monday, December 10, a Black man had “outraged” a small white child (some reports say that she was only two years old) near Center Point (Howard County). He was allegedly chased away by two women but was caught and jailed. On the night of December 11 (some sources say December 12), a mob removed …