Entries - County: St. Francis - Starting with P

Palestine is located in northeastern Arkansas on Interstate 40 and State Highway 70, with the L’Anguille River on its east side. It is one of the oldest towns in St. Francis County and was also the site of the first county school. Civil War through Reconstruction In 1840, what is now Palestine was part of the much larger L’Anguille Township, which had only nine recorded households. The Prairie Township was formed from part of the L’Anguille Township in the 1870s (including the African-American communities of El Cannon, Shiloh, Hawkins, Weaver, Fullerton, and Cooperwood), and the Palestine area, which was located centrally within the Prairie Township, grew in population. Palestine was named in 1870, when the first post office was established there. …

On December 3, 1915, an African-American man named William Patrick was lynched in St. Francis County for allegedly killing a young white man named Bard Nichols in October of that year. There is very little information available about William Patrick. In 1900, there was an eighteen-year-old African American by that name boarding in Franks Township in St. Francis County and working on a farm. He could both read and write. In 1910, there was an African American named W. D. Patrick living in Franks Township; his age is listed as thirty-six at the time, making him a slightly more likely candidate. He was a farmer living with his wife and four small children. If Patrick was fifty-five years old as …

On the evening of January 14, 1936, an American Airlines twin-engine Douglas airliner crashed into a swamp near Goodwin (St. Francis County), killing all seventeen people aboard, including Arkansas’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) state administrator, William Reynolds Dyess. Dyess and Robert H. McNair Jr., the WPA’s director of finance and reports for Arkansas, were returning to Little Rock (Pulaski County) after conferring with agency officials in Washington DC. They were among fourteen passengers on the plane, known as the Southerner, along with pilot Jerry Marshall, co-pilot Glenn Freeland, and stewardess Perla Gasparini. The plane left the Memphis, Tennessee, airport at 7:04 p.m. The last contact with Marshall was at 7:18 p.m. as the plane headed to Little Rock. At about …