Entries - County: Perry - Starting with B

Perry County native Harold George Bennett was a Green Beret serving in Vietnam in 1964 when he was captured in South Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war. He was executed on June 25, 1965—the first American prisoner of war to be executed during the Vietnam War. He was honored with a posthumous Silver Star in 2010. Harold George Bennett was born on October 16, 1940, in Thornburg (Perry County), one of nine children of Pauline Bennett and World War I veteran Garland Bennett. He was set on a military career from a young age, and on his seventeenth birthday in 1957 he quit school and went to Little Rock (Pulaski County) to enlist in the U.S. Army. Bennett …

Bigelow is located in the eastern part of Perry County, near the confluence of the Fourche La Fave and Arkansas rivers. The town’s past is tied to the lumber industry, and it has seen its population surge and fall with the state of the local lumber economy. An early settler in the area was Gustave Klingelhoeffer, a German immigrant who came to Arkansas in the early 1830s and eventually settled in Perry County, first near the county seat of Perryville and then later near the mouth of the Fourche La Fave River. Klingelhoeffer featured prominently in the stories of Friedrich Gerstäcker, a German writer who traveled through Perry County and visited the Klingelhoeffer home. In 1880, an application to establish …