Entries - County: Madison - Starting with H

Delmar Allen (Dale) Hawkins Jr., a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, specialized in creating a sound (called “Swamp Rock” by some) that helped shape rock and roll music. Hawkins was successful in many roles in the music industry: singer, songwriter, recording artist, producer, arranger, band leader, musician, TV host, disc jockey, and promoter. Billboard magazine lists Hawkins’s Suzie Q album in its Top 100 most valuable albums in the development of rock and roll. His first cousin, Ronnie Hawkins, rose to fame with the musical group the Band. Different sources have reported different birth dates for Hawkins (given the practice in the 1950s for promoters to alter birth dates to make their clients more appealing to a younger …

Ronald Cornett (Ronnie) Hawkins, a rock and roll singer and bandleader, was known primarily for starting the group the Hawks, which later became the Band. Ronnie Hawkins was born on January 10, 1935, in Huntsville (Madison County). His father, Jasper Hawkins, was a barber, and his mother, Flora Cornett Hawkins, was a schoolteacher. In 1945, the family, which included Hawkins’s older sister Winifred, moved to Fayetteville (Washington County). Hawkins was educated in the city’s public schools, graduating from Fayetteville High School in 1952. During his high school and college years, Hawkins formed his first bands, which played such Fayetteville venues as the Tee Table, the Bubble Club, and the Shamrock Club. A physical education major at the University of Arkansas …

The town of Hindsville is near U.S. Highway 412 in western Madison County. Hindsville was established in Vaughan Valley, one of the few areas in the Ozark Mountains that consists of large flat acres suitable for farming. Osage hunted and fished in the Ozark Mountains until after the Louisiana Purchase made Arkansas part of the United States in 1803. Settlers first began arriving in Vaughan Valley in the 1830s. John Hinds, for whom the town would be named, built the first house in the valley in 1832. His brother William Hinds arrived in 1832, as did brothers David and Samuel Vaughan, along with Andrew Smith (who is thought to have married Abigail Hinds, a sister of the Hinds brothers). A …

Huntsville is the seat of Madison County, a rural county in the Arkansas Ozarks. Pre-European Exploration The area which is now Huntsville has been inhabited at least 10,000 years.  Early inhabitants lived in the White River lowlands, farming there and building some mound centers; the upland shelters served as storage areas, burial sites, and temporary camps.  Artifacts of the Mississippian culture have been found at the Huntsville Mounds, an archaeological site near the town.  By the historic period, all of what is now Madison County was part of the Osage hunting grounds.  Treaties in 1808 and 1825 ceded Osage interest in these lands to the United States.  The signature of Hurachais, the War Eagle, appears on the 1825 treaty; he is …

In the midst of the Civil War, on January 10, 1863, nine men were taken from a guardhouse and led to a field on the Samuel P. Vaughn farm about one mile northeast of Huntsville (Madison County), where they were shot by Union soldiers on the bank of Vaughn’s Branch near the road that led to Carrollton (Carroll County). One survived. Although the reason for the execution may never be known, it may have been in response to the ambush of a Union army escort and the mistreatment of the daughters of Isaac Murphy by locals. Isaac Murphy was elected in 1861 to the Secession Convention from Madison County on the Unionist platform, receiving eighty-five percent of the vote and …