Entries - County: Pulaski

William Edward Woodruff’s life spanned the years of Arkansas’s territorial days, statehood, Confederacy, and Reconstruction. Although best known today as the founder of the Arkansas Gazette, the state’s first newspaper, Woodruff became one of the state’s most important and colorful historical figures through his other business interests, political connections, and efforts to promote Arkansas. William Woodruff was born on December 24, 1795, on a small farm at Fire Place on Long Island, New York, the oldest of five sons born to Nathaniel Woodruff and Hannah Clarke Woodruff. His father died when Woodruff was twelve; two years later, his mother apprenticed him to Alden Spooner, a Sag Harbor, New York, printer who published the Suffolk Gazette. His original indenture document still …

Woodson is a community in southern Pulaski County, north of Hensley (Pulaski County) and east of Interstate 530. Although it was incorporated on January 17, 1882, as a timber town and a stop on the Little Rock, Mississippi River and Texas Railroad, Woodson continued to operate as an unincorporated area, leading to confusion eighty years later. William D. Pennington acquired land in the area that would become Woodson in 1843. His son, William Q. Pennington, established a post office called Pennington’s Mills in 1855. In 1860, James Jones and John Little also purchased land in the area. The Civil War had little direct impact upon the area during the course of the fighting, but the conclusion of the war reshaped the …

John Wesley Woodward was a pioneer in the education of deaf children in Arkansas as well as an influential newspaperman and state government figure who, most notably, oversaw the relocation of state records during the Civil War. John Wesley Woodward was born on a Virginia plantation near Richmond to Dr. James Woodward and Virginia Woodward on April 20, 1820. He contracted scarlet fever at the age of three, causing him to lose his hearing. Around the age of ten, Woodward came under the care of an uncle, presumably because he was orphaned. Because few schools existed in the United States for the education of the deaf, Woodward’s uncle sent him to the world-famous Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris …

World Services for the Blind (WSB), located in Little Rock (Pulaski County), offers career-path professional training for adults who are blind or visually impaired. The mission of the organization is to educate adults who are blind or visually impaired for careers and independent lives. Founded by Roy Kumpe and the Lions Clubs of Arkansas in 1946, the organization was first known as the Prevocational Adjustment Center for the Adult Blind. The passage by the U.S. Congress of the Randolph-Sheppard Act of 1936 created the first significant employment opportunities for blind individuals in Arkansas and throughout the nation. The Prevocational Adjustment Center’s original mission was to train Arkansans who were blind or visually impaired to operate vending stands in state and …

Mary Fletcher Worthen was a cultural leader, volunteer, historian, and author whose life spanned an era of great changes in her home state of Arkansas. Mary Fletcher was born on October 6, 1917, on Fletcher Farm near Scott (Pulaski and Lonoke counties) to Tom Fletcher and Mamie Sandlin Fletcher. She was part of an old Arkansas family, as her great-great-grandparents—Henry Lewis Fletcher and Mary Lindsey Fletcher—arrived in what became Arkansas in 1815. Worthen was home-schooled until the ninth grade and attended one semester at East Side Junior High. She graduated from Little Rock High School (later called Central High) and Little Rock Junior College (now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock). Inspired by her cousin Adolphine Fletcher Terry, she …

William Booker Worthen was a banker in Arkansas from 1874 until his death in 1911, and he also wrote a history of Arkansas banking. The bank he founded survived recessions and the Great Depression, becoming the largest bank holding company in the state, until being acquired by Boatmen’s Bank in 1994. It is now part of Bank of America. Born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on September 17, 1852, one of four children of George Alfonso Worthen and Louisa Booker Worthen, W. B. Worthen grew up in the turbulent times surrounding the Civil War. His father, a merchant with a variety of business interests, died as a civilian in 1864. After the Civil War, Worthen studied as a cadet at …

Wright v. Wright was a 1970 case heard by the Arkansas Supreme Court that addressed the basic question of whether a person who murders his or her parent can then inherit from the estate of the victim. The case of Wright v. Wright had its roots in the September 1953 rifle slaying of Junius Everett Wright and his wife, Macle Cullum Wright, by their son Leslie A. Wright. Accused of a double murder, Wright was convicted for killing his mother and received a life sentence for that crime. Prosecutors opted not to try the seventeen-year-old former high school basketball player for the murder of his father. He was subsequently paroled in 1964, and upon release from prison, he married Lynda …

The city of Wrightsville, located on Highway 365 in southeastern Pulaski County, existed as an unincorporated settlement for more than a century before it was incorporated late in the twentieth century. Since 1981, it has been home to a major Arkansas Department of Correction facility, which is the principal employer in the city. The area that became Wrightsville was largely wetland, lying in the vicinity of the Arkansas River, when nearby cities such as Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) were developed in the nineteenth century. Although some plantations had been established to the north and west of the site, the actual location of Wrightsville remained unclaimed until construction of the Little Rock, Mississippi, and Texas Railroad in …

The fifteen members of the XV Club meet fifteen times a year for dinner and discussion of various important and interesting issues. Since 1904, more than 100 prominent citizens of Pulaski County have been part of this select organization. The original XV Club (the name, derived from the Roman numeral fifteen, is pronounced “ex-VEE”) was organized in 1879 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. One of the founders of this group, Reverend John L. Caldwell, moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1892 and then, four years later, relocated to Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), where he organized another XV Club. The Little Rock (Pulaski County) incarnation of the XV Club was organized January 7, 1904, at the suggestion of Carl E. Voss, a …

Moses J. “Chief” Yellow Horse (sometimes rendered YellowHorse or Yellowhorse) is believed by some to be the first full-blooded Native American to play baseball in the major leagues. He spent one celebrated season pitching for the Little Rock Travelers in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1920, which catapulted him to the peak of his short and tragic career. The Pittsburgh Pirates bought “Chief” Yellow Horse’s contract after that season, and he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1921 amid acclaim and high expectations, owing to a lightning fastball that had terrified and struck out so many batters in the Southern Association that Little Rock had won its first-ever baseball championship. In Little Rock, he made a lifetime friend of writer Dee Brown, …

Thomas D. W. Yonley was born in what was then Virginia (later to become West Virginia), became a lawyer, migrated to Arkansas as the South began to secede from the Union, left the state to become a Federal soldier, and then returned to Little Rock (Pulaski County) for a ten-year political career that took him to high offices and a critical role in the turbulent era of Reconstruction. He was elected to the convention that wrote the Reconstruction constitution of 1864, and then was elected chancery judge in Little Rock, attorney general of Arkansas, and chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. As chief justice, he was the author of one of the pivotal decisions in Arkansas history. In the …

Rufus King Young was an influential church and civil rights leader in Arkansas in the second half of the twentieth century. As the leader of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Little Rock (Pulaski County), he was actively involved in the local civil rights movement and the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Rufus King Young was born on May 13, 1911, to Robert Young and Laura Scott Young in Bayou Bartholomew (Drew County). He received his early education at Young’s Chapel AME Church, an institution built on land originally owned by his grandfather, before graduating in 1933 from Chicot County Training School in Dermott (Chicot County). He continued his education at Shorter College in North …