Entries - County: Saline

John Orval Thomas was a teacher, mentor, and role model for many television and film industry professionals in Arkansas. He worked as a sound engineer on major motion pictures, produced political campaign commercials, and had a variety of jobs in the television industry. Orval Thomas Jr. was born in Slocomb (Saline County) on November 25, 1919, to John Quincy Thomas Sr., who was a traveling preacher, and Eliza Eldridge Thomas. When Thomas was four, his parents started taking him on various “speaking engagements” of the revival circuit, where they would play one-reel silent movies in between his father’s sermons. When he was fourteen, Thomas took a job at a photography studio, the Deluxe Studio in Hot Springs (Garland County). There, …

The only documented lynching recorded in Saline County occurred on October 23, 1854, when a slave known only as “Toll” was murdered by a mob. He was hanged on a hill near the Saline County Courthouse in Benton. Recent scholarship has argued that the Toll lynching was not a spontaneous event but was instead an organized act of vengeance. The man known as Toll—spelled “Tol” in the Arkansas Gazette—was a slave owned by Scottish-born Samuel McMorrin, who, at the time, was living in Fourche Township in Pulaski County. Reportedly, in 1853, Toll sneaked up on and shot two white men, Jessup McHenry and John Douglas, who were deer hunting about fifteen miles outside of Little Rock (Pulaski County). Toll was …

Traskwood is the southernmost community in Saline County. Located on State Highway 229 (and on the Union Pacific Railroad tracks) about halfway between Benton (Saline County) and Malvern (Hot Spring County), Traskwood is several miles from Interstate 30 and therefore does not have the commercial enterprises of its larger neighbors. Although the Saline River has been a means of transportation since prehistoric times, the land of southern Saline County remained unclaimed until after the Civil War. Among the first white settlers were Henry Taylor Collatt (1875), Joseph Reed (1875), Henry James (1877), John Tobin (1882), and John Benton (1883). By this time, the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway had already completed a railroad through the region, establishing a depot …

Mike Trimble was an Arkansas-born writer who had a celebrated career as a reporter and editor for six different newspapers in Arkansas and Texas. His career spanned forty-eight years, starting at the Texarkana Gazette and followed by jobs at the Arkansas Gazette, Arkansas Times, Pine Bluff Commercial, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and Denton Record-Chronicle. His remarkable observational skills and down-to-earth writing lent unusual humanity to his articles—whether they were news, features, or columns—and he always developed a large and fanatical following wherever he went, although the burden of high expectations and low self-confidence often led him to move to something else and start over. Travis Mac Trimble was born on November 3, 1943, to Edgar Mac Trimble and Frances Trim Trimble, schoolteachers …

The former UA Little Rock Benton Campus was located in Benton (Saline County) at 410 River Street near the Benton Commercial Historic District. It began operations in 1994 as the Benton Center, and in 2016, its name was changed to reflect its status as a full branch of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (once known as UALR, then UA Little Rock). By 2018, the UA Little Rock Benton Campus offered three four-year programs and three two-year programs in addition to several nursing prerequisites. Due in part to a substantial decrease in student enrollment, however, it was closed in June 2020. UA Little Rock held night classes at Benton High School beginning in 1975. In 1991, Benton native and …

The USS Saline County (LST-1101) was an LST-542 Class tank landing ship built in 1944 that saw service in World War II and the Korean War. It was designated the USS Saline County on July 1, 1955, in honor of counties in five U.S. states, including Arkansas. LST-1101 was one of a class of vessels—called Landing Ship, Tank—created to carry tanks, wheeled and tracked vehicles, artillery, construction equipment, and supplies during military operations along coastal areas. Called “Large Slow Targets” by their crews, they were designed as shallow-draft vessels; when carrying a 500-ton load, LST-1101 drew only three feet eleven inches forward and nine feet ten inches aft. They carried pontoons amidships that could be used to create causeways when …

Robert Marshall Utley was a pioneer in the field of public history. Most of Utley’s early work was with the U.S. Army and the National Park Service (NPS). After serving as historian for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Utley was appointed chief historian of the NPS in 1964. In 1977, Utley became the deputy executive director of the President’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. He was influential in the establishment of the Fort Bowie, Hubbell Trading Post, Golden Spike, and Fort Davis National Historic Sites as units within the NPS. Utley also authored several books focusing on the American West and topics in Native American history. Robert M. Utley was born in Bauxite (Saline County) on October 31, 1929, to …

Jerry Van Dyke was a famous comedian and actor who lived in Arkansas; he was inducted into the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame in 1998. He was perhaps most noted for his Emmy-nominated performance as Luther Van Dam on the television show Coach. Van Dyke and his wife, Shirley Jones, owned a ranch in Hot Spring County, and, in the late 1990s, they purchased and renovated a city block in Benton (Saline County), including the Royal Theatre and a soda shop that bears his name. Jerry Van Dyke was born in Danville, Illinois, on July 27, 1931, to Loren and Hazel Van Dyke. Loren Van Dyke was a traveling salesman for the Sunshine Biscuit Company. Both their sons had successful …

Volmer “Cactus” Vick was one of Arkansas’s first radio and television personalities in the post–World War II era. As a showman, Vick was a combination of magician, ventriloquist, comedian, preacher, and cowboy. Vick’s three-decade-long career began on a local radio station in the late 1940s. He made thousands of appearances, in character, while working as spokesperson for the Finkbeiner Meat Packing Company and for the Continental Baking Company in Little Rock (Pulaski County), makers of Arkansas Maid Wieners and Wonder Bread, respectively. Volmer Voss Vick was born on a plantation at Varner (Lincoln County) on November 2, 1911. His father, K. P. Vick, had a general store there before he died, leaving Vick—the oldest of three children—to help his mother, …

Vimy Ridge is an unincorporated community in Otter Township in Saline County, approximately twelve miles southwest of Little Rock (Pulaski County) and three miles southeast of Alexander (Pulaski and Saline counties). Originally known as Germania, the community’s name was changed in 1918 due to anti-German sentiment during World War I. Early settlers to the area primarily farmed, with most of the land that became the Vimy Ridge community later owned by the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway Company in the 1880s. An influx of German immigrants to the area in the late 1870s and 1880s provided a large addition to the original residents. By 1879, twenty-three German families had migrated to the area, and they began a German …

Doyle L. Webb II is a lawyer and former state senator from Benton (Saline County). He began serving as chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party in 2008. Webb served as Lieutenant Governor Winthrop Paul Rockefeller’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2007. Webb lives in the historic Gann House with his wife, Barbara Webb, who served as Saline County’s prosecuting attorney from 1996 to 2002. Doyle Webb was born on December 3, 1955, in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Doyle L. (D. L.) Webb and Dolores Cornett Webb. He has one sister, Candis. Webb attended Benton High School, graduating in 1974. His political career began as Saline County coordinator for Ken Coon’s gubernatorial campaign in 1974. Webb earned a BA …

Released in 1973, White Lightning is a film written by William Norton and directed by Joseph Sargent starring Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty. It is set in fictional Bogan County, Arkansas, though it was shot in several locations throughout the central part of the state and includes many recognizable landmarks, particularly in Benton (Saline County). Taking its name from a colloquial term for moonshine whiskey, the film primarily deals with central character Gator McKlusky (Reynolds) and his attempt to infiltrate an illegal bootlegging operation. Upon hearing of his brother’s murder, McKlusky, who at the outset of the film is in prison for bootlegging, agrees to work as a “stool pigeon”—or cooperative informant—for the federal government in an attempt to bring …

Leonard Lee Williams, a nineteen-year-old African American man, was killed on Sunday, August 17, 1969, at the Wagon Wheel Drive-In in Benton (Saline County) in an incident sparked by racial strife in the city. The following day, a group of Black citizens marched to city hall to demand justice. Mounting racial tensions were eventually eased through an emergency meeting of the city’s newly formed biracial committee. A grand jury handed down indictments to a number of individuals on various charges for their roles in the killing of Williams and the ensuing violence. According to a report in the Northwest Arkansas Times, published on August 18, 1969, Williams and a “girl companion” went for a late-night meal at the Wagon Wheel …