Entries - County: Monroe - Starting with R

In June 1898, prosperous African-American farmer G. W. Ricks and his son, Rev. Moses Ricks, were lynched in southern Monroe County for the alleged assault of a white farmer’s wife. According to historian Terence Finegan, whose A Deed so Accursed is a study of lynching in South Carolina and Mississippi, prosperous African Americans were occasionally lynched because their success threatened the notion of white superiority. Census information both illuminates and confuses the story. In 1870, there was a black farmer named Jim Ricks living in Monroe County’s Duncan Township. He was twenty-seven years old, and living with him were his wife, Miriam, and several other family members, all of them too old to be the Rickses’ children. Ricks was a …

Roe is a town on U.S. Highway 79 in western Monroe County. Roe is the only incorporated community in Monroe County that is west of the White River. Roe is on the northern edge of the Grand Prairie, a part of Arkansas that was slow to be claimed and settled. Around 1880, the St. Louis Southwestern Railway (also called the Cotton Belt) was constructed through Arkansas. Roe, then located in Prairie County, was one of the depots established by the railroad. It was likely named for a railroad executive or employee. Roe received a post office in 1880; at the time, Roe was in Prairie County, but the county line was adjusted in 1883. Being the first railroad depot south …

Gustavus Roescher, who later went by the Anglicized version of his name, Gus Rusher, was a leading figure in the town of Brinkley (Monroe County), serving as an alderman, restauranteur, hotelier, and banker. Little is known about the early life of Gustavus Roescher. Born in 1860, he immigrated to the United States with his father, Charles Roescher (1833–1890), from the German town of Baden-Baden in the mid-1800s. They settled on a farm outside of Brinkley. Gustavus Roescher owned the Arlington Hotel, which was struck by a cyclone in 1909. Roescher also purchased the Brinkley House, which burned down in 1914. This event prompted Roescher to begin construction on a new hotel with three stories and sixty rooms, which was christened …