Entries - County: Lee - Starting with R

The town of Raggio existed briefly on the east bank of Alligator Bayou, about a mile from the St. Francis River, in Lee County. A logging community that was served by the railroad, the town was destroyed by fire around 1916 and was never rebuilt. Until after the Civil War, the site that would become Raggio was largely unclaimed wetland with abundant trees. Hunting and fishing occupied the few visitors to the area, and steamboats traveled the river. Following the war, a logging settlement was established at Raggio; the community was named for a local merchant who had come to Arkansas from Italy. Logs were bound together as rafts to be transported by water to sawmills. Shortly after Lee County was created, …

A young Black man named Dave Ramsey was lynched in Marianna (Lee County) on January 9, 1881, for allegedly having attempted to rape a white girl. This was the first recorded lynching in Lee County, where the death toll by lynching would eventually reach seventeen documented cases by 1919. At the time Ramsey was killed, the Black population of Lee County was more than double the white population, a disparity that would only increase in the coming years.   The first report of this event appeared in the Arkansas Gazette on January 13, 1881, under the headline, “A Raper Roped,” with the subtitle, “The Pine Bluff Code Works to Perfection.” This report consists of reprinting a letter, dated January 10 and …

The town of Rondo in Lee County—not to be confused with a settlement of the same name across the state in Miller County—was laid out at the intersection of the tracks of the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad and those of the Missouri Pacific Railroad. The town, founded early in the twentieth century, dwindled as a result of the mid-century improvement of roads, which caused many businesses to relocate to larger cities such as Marianna (Lee County). Rondo was established on land that had been part of Phillips County until Lee County was established in 1873. At that time, most of the land was devoted to cotton farming, although some parts were still heavily forested. Construction of the railroads facilitated the …