Entries - County: Jefferson - Starting with B

The Band Museum in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) housed an extensive collection of wind instruments and offered a history of the American band movement. Beginning as the personal collection of its founder, the museum grew to approximately 1,500 antique instruments and was, before its closure, the only museum in the United States devoted entirely to the history of band music and instruments. Jerry Horne, founder of the Band Museum and a member of the American Musical Instrument Society, began collecting unusual instruments when he purchased the Wallick Music Company in 1970. His first was an old helicon (similar to a sousaphone), made by the C. G. CONN Company in 1925, which he found in the Wallick family’s garage. Soon, he began scouring …

Antoine Barraque established the settlement called New Gascony, one of the earliest settlements in what is now Jefferson County. He also served as a government agent with the Quapaw, whom he guided to Louisiana in 1826 after the treaty of 1824, although his efforts to ease their transition to a new land were frustrated by other government officials. Antoine Barraque was born on April 15, 1773, in southwestern France. He was educated in Paris and served in the French army under Napoleon Bonaparte, fighting at the battles of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Lodi, and Moscow. Following the end of Napoleon’s empire, Barraque relocated to Arkansas, arriving in 1816 at the age of forty-three. Living first at Arkansas Post, Barraque formed friendships …

Located in southeast Arkansas, Bayou Bartholomew was, until the construction of railroad lines in the area in 1890, the most important stream for transportation in the interior Delta. While the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers served their adjoining areas, it was the bayou that provided a transportation route into an otherwise landlocked area. This route allowed the development of one of the richest timber and agricultural tracts in the Delta. Bayou Bartholomew has the distinction of being the longest bayou in the United States, beginning its meandering 359 miles in Jefferson County and passing through Lincoln, Desha, Drew, Chicot, and Ashley counties before proceeding into Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, where it eventually empties into the Ouachita River near Sterlington. The present bayou …

By 1863, guerrilla activity had become so prevalent in the territory surrounding Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) that local citizens requested that Federal forces move into the area to reduce the threat of violence. Later that year, forces under the command of Colonel Powell Clayton were ordered to Jefferson County. The city remained occupied for the remainder of the war. To secure the area, scouting patrols were regularly sent out to assess enemy activity. On February 22, 1865, Captain George W. Suesberry took a detachment of eighty troopers of the Thirteenth Illinois Cavalry Volunteers to the north side of the Arkansas River to monitor enemy movements. Only sixty-five troopers crossed the river but were shortly joined by twenty-five additional men. As …

  On February 16, 1865, a seventy-five-man scout detachment of the Thirteenth Illinois Cavalry (US) was sent out from its headquarters at Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). The scout detachment, commanded by Captain John H. Norris (US), was sent to search for Confederate troops along Bayou Meto. Early in the morning of February 17, the scout detachment, fifty miles downriver from Pine Bluff, began crossing Bayou Meto. After one platoon had successfully crossed the bayou, Capt. Norris ordered Lieutenant Z. P. Curlee to take the platoon and search an area two miles surrounding the bayou. Lt. Curlee was instructed to engage any Confederate force he encountered and report to Norris no later than noon. During the scout detachment’s search of the …

The Bellingrath House, located in White Hall (Jefferson County), was listed on the National Register of Historic Properties in 1994 as an excellent and singular example of the English-Revival architectural style within White Hall. The house was commissioned by Ferdinand McMillan Bellingrath and his wife, Catherine Oudin Bellingrath, and it remains in the hands of the Bellingrath/Oudin family in the twenty-first century. Ferdinand Bellingrath was the son of Leonard Ferdinand Bellingrath and Mary Jane Castleberry Bellingrath, who originally resided in Georgia before relocating to the Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) area in 1916 to expand their Coca-Cola bottling operation. Ferdinand Bellingrath eventually began helping his father operate the Pine Bluff bottling plant, started by his uncles in 1911, before finally taking over …

The Belmont Missionary Baptist Church and Cemetery are located in a rural area in the southeastern corner of Jefferson County, roughly half a mile to the west of the intersection of Highway 199 and Belmont Road. Established in 1901, the site is the oldest extant resource in the Moscow (Jefferson County) vicinity representing the African-American post-bellum settlement of southeastern Jefferson County. The property is representative of small, rural African-American churches and cemeteries in the South, and covers roughly two acres. It was listed on the Arkansas Register of Historic Properties on December 4, 2019. The original 1901 church building was lost to a fire around 1945; all of the church records and history were also lost to the blaze, which …

William (or Henry) Black was executed at Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) on June 28, 1892, for what he claimed was the accidental killing of his stepdaughter. William Black (he was called William in Arkansas newspapers and Henry in St. Louis, Missouri, papers) lived at Red Bluff (Jefferson County), on the west bank of the Arkansas River, with his wife and her daughter, Georgia Smith, aged sixteen. On February 13, 1892, while arguing with the teenager after she refused to run an errand, he fired a shot toward her as she ran off, killing her. On May 2, Black was convicted of first-degree murder for Smith’s death, which he claimed was accidental, after the “quickest trial that ever occurred in the …

Judge Joseph William Bocage was a prominent pioneer settler of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). He served as attorney for the Second Judicial District from 1844 to 1849 and as judge of the county court. In 1847, he prosecuted the first trial in Jefferson County to result in an execution. He was a successful planter, lumberman, inventor, manufacturer, and building contractor. Late in his life, he served as mayor of Pine Bluff. Joseph Bocage was born on May 8, 1819, on the island of St. Lucia in the French West Indies. His father, William Coit Bocage, owned a large sugar and coffee plantation, a mercantile, and a shipping business. He died at the age of twenty-one, when Bocage was an infant. …

The Boone-Murphy-Moore House, now located at 714 West 4th Avenue in downtown Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), was built in 1860 by Thomas A. Boone. The home played a significant role during and after the Action at Pine Bluff in 1863. Serving as the Union headquarters during the Civil War, the Boone-Murphy-Moore House was utilized as the residence of Federal commander Colonel Powell Clayton. The small wooden-frame home is a one-story, single-pile weatherboard house with one-story additions to the east and west. It is raised slightly above grade on concrete pier foundation (alteration) with a tin shingle gable roof and shed roofs on the additions. The house has flat-roofed porches with turned posts and sawn brackets that flank the building on …

William Harvey Bowen was a senior partner in Arkansas’s largest law firm, president of the state’s largest bank, chief executive officer of a health insurance company, and dean of the state’s largest law school, which was later named the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law. He was a friend and adviser to Bill Clinton and managed the governor’s office for a year while Clinton was running for president. He was also a friend and adviser to Dale Bumpers and David Pryor when they were governors and U.S. senators. William H. Bowen was born on May 6, 1923, in Altheimer (Jefferson County), one of five children of Robert J. (Bob) Bowen, who farmed and managed …

Malcolm Cleaburne Bowman was respected worldwide as an analytical chemist, researcher, and author. He and his associates are credited with devising many techniques and processes as well as developing much of the equipment that became common within the fields of chemistry and scientific research. Malcolm Bowman was born on December 6, 1926, in Alcedo, Texas, to Clyde C. Bowman, a Cotton Belt Railroad brakeman and conductor, and Lillian McBee Bowman, a teacher and retail clerk; he was the couple’s only child. The family moved to Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) in 1936. Bowman graduated from Pine Bluff High School and went on to receive a BS in chemistry at Arkansas State Teachers College (now the University of Central Arkansas) in Conway …

Jesse Branch served as a college and professional football player, football coach, and college athletics administrator. His athletic abilities and knowledge took him from playing fields in Arkansas and Canada to the coaching and administrative ranks in Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Kansas, and Oregon. Jesse Oliver Branch was born on February 1, 1941, in the small community of Sulfur Springs (Jefferson County) near Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). His parents were George Branch, who was a farmer, and Ada Branch, who was a homemaker. He graduated from Watson Chapel High School in Pine Bluff in 1959. Having distinguished himself on the high school football field, he received an athletic scholarship to the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). During his …

When the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1944 that Southern states could no longer bar African Americans from voting in party primaries because it violated the U.S. Constitution, Arkansas legislators and Democratic Party officials set about to thwart the expected flood of new voters in the primaries. These steps, including loyalty oaths, produced so much confusion at the polls in 1946 that they were abandoned, and Black voters surged to the polls for the first time in the Democratic primaries of 1948. The white Democratic-led response resulted in the criminal investigation, prosecution, and conviction of a young civil rights advocate who later became one of the South’s most renowned civil rights lawyers. The Arkansas Supreme Court case upholding the conviction …

Wiley Austin Branton was a civil rights leader in Arkansas who helped desegregate the University of Arkansas School of Law and later filed suit against the Little Rock School Board in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court as Cooper v. Aaron. His work to end legal segregation and inequality in Arkansas and the nation was well known in his time. Wiley Branton was born on December 13, 1923, in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), the second child of Pauline Wiley and Leo Andrew Branton. His father and paternal grandfather owned and operated a taxicab business. His mother was a schoolteacher in the segregated public schools prior to her marriage. He had three brothers and a sister. Branton was …

Clifton Rodes Breckinridge was a late-nineteenth-century Arkansas politician who attained national prominence. After serving as a leading congressman for more than a decade, he became the first Arkansan appointed to a major European diplomatic post, serving as minister to Russia for three years. Late in life, Breckinridge was a delegate to the 1917–1918 Arkansas Constitutional Convention. Clifton Breckinridge was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on November 22, 1846, to Mary Cyrene Burch and John Cabell Breckinridge. The Breckinridges were a political dynasty that began with his grandfather, John Breckinridge, who was President Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general. The dynasty continued with John Cabell Breckinridge, who served as a senator and vice president of the United States and as a general and secretary …

Although William Lee Conley “Big Bill” Broonzy achieved fame and success in the Chicago blues scene and the folk revival in the United States and abroad, some of his earliest encounters with the blues and his earliest experiences as a performer and songwriter were in Arkansas. Sources differ as to the date and place of Big Bill Broonzy’s birth. Broonzy himself claimed to have been born in Scott, Mississippi, on June 26, 1893 (though some sources say 1898). However, more recent research has him born near Lake Dick, Arkansas, on June 29, 1903, with the name Lee Conley Bradley. His parents were Frank Broonzy (Bradley) and Mittie Belcher, and he was one of seventeen children. Broonzy spent most of his …

Fountain Brown was a Methodist preacher who was the first person to be charged and found guilty of violating the Emancipation Proclamation. Charged with having sold several of his slaves back into slavery after they had in fact been freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s order, Brown found himself at the center of a case that reflected the changes that came with the war. For a brief time, it was a celebrated legal matter leading to an active postwar effort to secure a pardon for the physically ailing Brown. Little is known about Fountain Brown’s early years. He is thought to have been born in 1806 or 1807, but the location is unknown. A one-time resident of Tennessee, he had been …

Maxine Brown was a musician known for her work with the country group the Browns in the 1950s and early 1960s. She had a brief solo career before retiring from the music business in the 1960s. While the Browns had several songs that sold a million records, Brown documented her frustrations with the music industry in her 2005 memoir Looking Back to See. While she always called Arkansas home, Ella Maxine Brown was born in Campti, Louisiana, on April 27, 1931, to Floyd Brown and Birdie Lee Tuberville Brown. She was one of five children. Her siblings included two boys (Jim Ed and Raymond) and two girls (Bonnie and Norma). As a young girl, she moved with her family to …

Whit Brown was an African American man hanged in Jefferson County on February 24, 1882, for a murder that he died denying having committed. Robert Yonley, “a reputable saw mill man” who lived near Little Rock (Pulaski County), went to Red Bluff (Jefferson County) on August 8, 1881, to look after some timber interests he had in the area. His body was later found in the Arkansas River. Whit Brown, a local man who was born in Randolph, Tennessee, in about 1849, was summoned to serve in a coroner’s inquest jury, during which he “betrayed agitation and guilt and asked to be excused,” which was granted. Little Rock detective Sid Boyce, who knew Brown as “a barber, gambler and robber,” …

A vocal trio from southern Arkansas, the Browns had several country hits. They were also instrumental in the development of the elegant, often orchestral “Nashville sound,” which replaced the string bands of earlier eras. The Browns began as a duo featuring Jim Ed Brown, born in 1934 in Sparkman (Dallas County), and his sister Maxine, born in Campti, Louisiana, in 1931. Their sister Bonnie, born in Sparkman in 1938, joined the group in 1955. The Browns grew up in the piney woods near Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), where their father, Floyd Brown, worked as a log hauler and farmer. The group began its recording career for Fabor Records in southern California shortly after Jim Ed and Maxine graduated from high …

Bobby “El Charro Negro” Butler broke down barriers as the first African American to become an award-winning Tejano singer. Butler’s career spanned over fifty years and included two Grammy nominations as part of the Tortilla Factory band. Robert (Bobby) Butler was born in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) on October 14, 1937, to Cora Butler; the name of Butler’s father is unknown. His mother worked as a maid for wealthy white families who often mistreated her because of the color of her skin. His family moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and by seven he was picking cotton alongside his mother and younger brother. In the fields, he learned to sing the Tejano music the Mexican laborers taught him. In 1956, Butler …