Entries - County: Van Buren

Back Yonder, An Ozark Chronicle, published in 1932, is the autobiography of Charles Wayman Hogue (1870–1965), who grew up in Arkansas’s Ozark Mountains. Arkansas folklorist Vance Randolph wrote that Back Yonder was, “One of the finest nonfiction books ever written about the Ozark country. Hogue is a native of Van Buren County, Arkansas. He knows the truth about this region, and sets it down without any sentimental twaddle.” Hogue was the father of well-known Arkansas author Charlie May Simon. Her second husband, Howard Simon, illustrated Hogue’s book with exquisite woodcuts. As a young man in his early twenties, Hogue left the Ozarks to attend Little Rock University (now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock). It was there that he …

Opie Cates was a popular bandleader, musician, and radio personality, known as one of the great clarinetists of the swing era (mid-1930s–mid-1940s). He was a familiar presence on radio in the 1940s, at one time appearing weekly on four different shows. By Cates’s own reckoning, his audience numbered over thirty-five million listeners. Some believe that the character of Opie Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show was named after Opie Cates. Opal Taft Cates was born on October 10, 1909, in Clinton (Van Buren County). His parents, Abb Cates and Sarah Jacobs Cates, were farmers. Abb Cates died in 1914, Sarah Cates married Lee Andrew Reaves (or Reeves) in 1916. The blended family, which included several Reaves step-siblings and a younger …

Clinton has been the county seat of Van Buren County since 1844. Sheltered in the Little Red River valley, the city has been bypassed by many of the major events of Arkansas’s history, including Civil War battles, the building of the railroads, and the desegregation turmoil of the mid-twentieth century. Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood When the land that would become Arkansas became part of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Little Red River valley was included in land recognized as Osage hunting territory. The Osage had permanent settlements farther north but frequently visited north-central Arkansas. An 1825 treaty removed the Osage tribe to Kansas, opening the land for settlement by Americans of European descent. Van …

Damascus is a town located on U.S. Highway 65 on the county line between Faulkner and Van Buren counties. It is most known for its proximity to the Titan II missile base that operated from 1963 until 1980, when a missile explosion killed one person and injured twenty-one. Damascus is located on a plateau between Pine Mountain Creek and Batesville Creek. Heavily timbered until the later part of the nineteenth century, the area was lightly populated for many centuries. Prehistoric stone tools are still found by farmers plowing the soil near the town. Land records show that Elijah Cagle, Hosea King, Thomas King, and Jacob Hartwick all purchased land in northern Faulkner County in the years immediately prior to the Civil War. Local histories …

The Damascus CCC Camp Co. No. 3781 Historic District, located on Camp Hill Road in Damascus (Van Buren and Faulkner counties), is a collection of stone structures associated with a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) facility that operated there in cooperation with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (USCS) during the Great Depression. The Damascus area had long seen agricultural use, which led the CCC to establish Camp Damascus there on June 1, 1935, under USCS control to help rehabilitate farmland in a region damaged by a long history of poor farming techniques. Junior Company 3781, SCS-5 was located on a forty-acre site leased for one dollar per year from William A. Brown. Construction of the camp began on June 12, and …

The Damascus Gymnasium, located on State Highway 285 just north of the Faulkner/Van Buren County line in Damascus, is a single-story, wood-frame building constructed in 1933 and designed in the Craftsman style of architecture. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 4, 1992. The first school in Damascus was established in 1881 by neighbors in the community who held classes in a brush arbor. That rustic setting served until 1889 when summer and winter terms were held in the new Baptist church. In 1900, a two-story, four-room schoolhouse was constructed. When a high school was built in 1910, a School Improvement Association was formed to finance an eight-month term of classes. The Damascus school joined …

Fairfield Bay, located in north-central Arkansas on the north shore of Greers Ferry Lake, was created with the goal of becoming a recreational and retirement resort. Though small in terms of residential population, the number of people who visit each year through the town’s timeshare program is well over 20,000. As of the 2010 census, the combined population of its Van Buren County and Cleburne County portions is 2,338. Before the formation of Greers Ferry Lake in the mid-1960s, the hills of what is now Fairfield Bay were covered with large hardwood trees. Logging of these immense oak trees for lumber, railroad ties, and white oak barrel staves supported the thriving communities of Shirley (Van Buren County), Edgemont (Cleburne County), …

The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, written by Clinton (Van Buren County) native Monica Potts, was released on May 30, 2023, to critical acclaim. The memoir recounts Potts’s personal experience reconnecting with childhood friend Darci Brawner over a period of years after returning to her hometown of Clinton. Within its first week, it appeared on the New York Times bestsellers’ list. In the book, Potts connects moments of her life, Brawner’s life, and the lives of other members of their community with larger studies and data pertaining to the experience of living in rural America. Monica Potts was born and raised in Clinton. After graduating from high school, she attended Bryn Mawr College …

The Fowler Cemetery is located approximately two miles east of Damascus, along the southeastern border of Van Buren County. The property is just over an acre and is representative of small, rural family cemeteries found throughout Arkansas. There are eighty-nine marked burials on the grounds. While the cemetery mostly contains members of the Fowler family, there are also individuals from other local families who were related to the Fowlers by marriage. It was listed on the Arkansas Register of Historic Places on August 5, 2020. The Fowlers were one of the many families attracted to the Damascus area in the late nineteenth century, during the cotton farming boom. The family initially settled in the Muddy Bayou area, along the White …

William Erwin Halbrook was a prominent educator and education reformer in Arkansas during the first half of the twentieth century. Halbrook promoted high school education and led reform efforts to modernize schools in his native Ozarks region and was later important in combating adult illiteracy in the state. The Arkansas Education Association (AEA) considered Halbrook among the “Giants in Arkansas Education.” His career is representative of the early-twentieth-century education reformers who crusaded to bring progress and efficiency to the state’s public school system. William E. Halbrook was born on March 14, 1878, to Urijah Halbrook and Sarah Elizabeth (Woolverton) Halbrook in rural Van Buren County; he had five younger brothers. His father was a poor hill farmer, and Halbrook grew …

Will H. Hardin was murdered in his jail cell in Clinton (Van Buren County) on April 17, 1899, after his death sentence for killing a local man was commuted. An accomplice, Lee Mills, had already been hanged for his role in the incident. Hardin—a former deputy sheriff—and Mills, both of whom lived near Scotland (Van Buren County), rode to the home of Hugh Patterson on Culpepper Mountain about six miles southwest of Clinton on the evening of December 13, 1897, intending to rob him of between $1,000 and $1,800 believed to be in his house. Also at the house when the robbers arrived were Patterson’s son Jim, along with Jim’s wife Rebecca and their five children. Patterson’s brother William James …

Sturgis Williford Holmes Jr. was a famous Arkansas folk artist who specialized in the medium of paint-by-numbers. According to art historian Taylor Panini, Holmes’s output was larger than any other paint-by-numbers artist’s in the continental United States, though this claim remains controversial. Sturgis Holmes was born on April 1, 1936, in rural Van Buren County to Sturgis Holmes Sr., an itinerant chicken farmer, and Bethejewel Haggis Holmes; he had eleven siblings. He possibly studied in Dennard (Van Buren County) schools, though there is no record of him ever graduating. The Holmes family was poor, and Holmes Sr. had to take up the illicit manufacture of spirits—i.e., moonshining—in order to make ends meet. As Holmes recounted to later interviewers, when his …

Sue Kidd was a female baseball star who gained local fame for the athletic prowess she displayed while playing on and against all-male baseball teams in Van Buren County and surrounding areas. Glenna Sue Kidd was born in Choctaw (Van Buren County) on September 2, 1933, to William Marvin Kidd and Julia Duncan Kidd, local farmers and merchants, though her father also served as postmaster at Choctaw. She had five siblings. The original community of Choctaw was covered by water when Greers Ferry Lake was filled in the 1960s. That community is now referred to as “old Choctaw,” as opposed to the present community of “new Choctaw” located on state Highway 65. As a student at Clinton High School, Kidd …

The National Championship Chuckwagon Race is held every Labor Day weekend at Dan and Peggy Eoff’s ranch in Clinton (Van Buren County). Spectators from across the United States travel to the small town nestled in the Ozark Mountains to see the largest outdoor chuckwagon race in the country. The chuckwagon is associated with Charles Goodnight, who designed the first wagon to follow the cattle trails in the 1800s. Stories hold that, at the end of the cattle drive, the cowhands would collect their pay, pack up their supplies, and race into town. Legend has it that the last one there had to buy the first round of drinks for all. The races were started in 1986 when Dan and Peggy …

William Newman was hanged at Clinton (Van Buren County) on November 8, 1895, for murdering his wife, though he died denying the crime. William Newman, described as “a prominent white farmer,” lived in Van Buren County with his wife Mary and their seven children. The Newmans had been married for twenty-four years, “and their entire married life was one discord.” On August 17, 1895, the couple got into an argument; as it escalated, he threw a saucer at her, which broke on her back. They continued fighting the next morning until she left to seek some lost calves “and he started to visit a widow…of whom he was particularly fond.” He returned home shortly afterward, and when his children said …

The town of Shirley rests on the Middle Fork of the Little Red River in northeastern Van Buren County. Established by the railroad, the town has become an agricultural center for the region with a focus also on recreation and tourism. The rocky and wooded hills of the Ozarks have been sparsely populated for most of recorded history. When the land that would become Arkansas was acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase, Osage hunters and fishers were the primary visitors to the land that would become Shirley. Changing treaties first recognized the Osage as owners of the land, later gave it to the Cherokee, and ultimately removed both the Osage and the Cherokee west to what is now …

South Fork Nature Center (SFNC), which opened in 2010, is the Gates Rogers Foundation’s premier conservancy project. Located in central Arkansas just east of Clinton (Van Buren County), it lies in the Boston Mountains range of the Ozark Mountains on the banks of the South Fork of the Little Red River section of Greers Ferry Lake. Featuring two miles of interpretive nature trails on the peninsula and a spectacular view of the lake, the center serves as a model to educate and inspire the public to be aware of the environment, to protect vulnerable plant and animal species, and to adopt practices that are ecologically sound. It seeks to preserve Arkansas’s native flora and fauna in a manner that ensures …

The South Side High School Sign, located on the grounds of the South Side Bee Branch School District complex in Van Buren County, consists of large stones that were placed by workers of the National Youth Administration (NYA) in 1937 to mark the location of the local high school. The South Side Bee Branch School District was established in the fall of 1929 to serve the students living south of the small, thriving town of Bee Branch (Van Buren County). The Great Depression began around the same time, and Van Buren County took advantage of the federal relief programs established to bring jobs to afflicted areas. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) established a camp at Damascus (Faulkner and Van Buren …

Produced, written, directed, and edited by Richard C. Sarafian, Terror at Black Falls was filmed in Arkansas in Scotland (Van Buren County) in 1959 and released in 1962. The low-budget, black-and-white Western was barely of feature length. A DVD runs sixty-eight minutes, but the movie was probably originally longer. Various sources say the film was seventy, seventy-two, or seventy-six minutes. It was the first film directed by Sarafian and may have been intended as his calling card film in Hollywood, a sample to show studios his ability. The film’s loquacious narrator says that the movie tells “a true story” set “when Arkansas was part of the wild American frontier.” However, it was not based on a true story. Like another …

The Titan II Launch Complex 374-7 in Southside (Van Buren County), just north of Damascus (Van Buren and Faulkner counties), became the site of the most highly publicized disaster in the history of the Titan II missile program when its missile exploded within the launch duct on September 19, 1980. An Air Force airman was killed, and the complex was destroyed. The Titan II Missile Launch Complex 374-7 Site was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on February 18, 2000. Complex 374-7 had already been the site of one significant accident on January 27, 1978, when an oxidizer leak sent a cloud of toxic fumes 3,000 feet long, 300 feet wide, and 100 feet high drifting across U.S. Highway …

Following the Soviet Union’s detonation of its first thermonuclear bomb in 1953, the United States began actively developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The Titan II Missile program was a Cold War weapons system featuring fifty-four launch complexes in three states. Eighteen launch complex sites were in Arkansas, from which intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nine-megaton nuclear warheads could be launched to strike targets as far as 5,500 miles away. Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) systems were part of a three-pronged nuclear weapon strategy that included manned bombers, land-based ICBMs, and sea-launched ballistic missiles. The ICBMs needed only thirty to thirty-five minutes to reach their targets, making them capable of first strikes on enemy territory. Their powerful warheads were designed to destroy …

United States v. Waddell et al. is a U.S. Supreme Court case that arose from an 1883 incident of nightriding (sometimes called whitecapping) in Van Buren County, in which a group of armed white men attempted to drive off a Black homesteader. The case centered upon the question of whether or not an individual, having settled upon a piece of property for purposes of obtaining a federal homestead, enjoyed the protection of the federal government in attempting to exercise his rights in the face of conspiracies to intimidate. On December 13, 1882, Burrell Lindsay (sometimes spelled Lindsey), an African American man, made a homestead entry for a tract of land in Bradley Township in southeastern Van Buren County. On the …

The USS Van Buren was a Tacoma-class patrol frigate launched in 1944 that served in the New Guinea campaign in the western Pacific during World War II. The USS Van Buren was the second U.S. naval vessel to bear that name. The first was an early nineteenth-century revenue cutter named for U.S. president Martin Van Buren. The World War II patrol frigate was named in honor of the city of Van Buren, the county seat of Crawford County. The Van Buren’s hull was laid down on June 24, 1943, by Consolidated Steel Corporation in Los Angeles, California. The vessel was launched on July 27. It was commissioned at Terminal Island on December 17 under the command of Lieutenant Commander Charles …

Formed in 1833, Van Buren became the twenty-ninth county in Arkansas Territory and preceded statehood by three years. Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood The area that is now Van Buren County, in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, has been inhabited for roughly 10,000 years. Osage and Cherokee Indians were the first historic Native American tribes known to have a connection to the area. Hunters from Ozark villages in southwestern Missouri, and later in northeastern Oklahoma, often visited the area, although they had no permanent settlements in the county. No official records are available to tell who the first European or American settlers were or where they came from, but indications are that they began making their way into the …

The Van Buren County Courthouse in Clinton (Van Buren County) is situated in the hilly terrain of northern Arkansas. It was built with local materials from a quarry outside of Dennard (Van Buren County), with walls made of reddish sandstone. The smallest courthouse in the state, it measures just 100 feet by 43 feet, with a basement. The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program (AHPP) recognizes the building as historically significant as a New Deal–era public works project, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 13, 1991. After Van Buren County was established on November 11, 1833, the county elite housed the first two courthouses in one-room log structures near the now-defunct community of Mudtown, whose …

The Van Buren County Historical Society, headquartered in Clinton (Van Buren County), was organized on April 22, 1963. The society disbanded in 1966 but re-formed in 1976 for the nation’s bicentennial, Clinton’s celebration of its centennial as an incorporated city, and the dedication of the Clinton Airport. The function of the society is: 1) to discover and collect any material that would help establish or illustrate the history of the county, its exploration, settlement, and development, and its progress in population, education, arts, science, agriculture, trade, and transportation; 2) to collect and preserve printed materials and museum materials illustrative of life, conditions, events, and activities of the past or present pertaining to Van Buren County; and 3) to make these …

In early February 1894, three white men—Robert Plunkett, Charles Plunkett, and Henry Bruce—were lynched in Van Buren County for allegedly attacking and robbing an unidentified elderly couple. While no specific date is given in any of the reports, the lynching had to have happened before February 10, when the first accounts were published. Citing “meager details,” accounts indicate only that the lynching happened in what was known as “the Gulch,” and that the men’s alleged crime had “aroused great indignation” in the neighborhood. For additional information: “A Lynching.” Arkansas Gazette, February 10, 1894, p. 2. “Three Men Lynched. Indianapolis Journal, February 10, 1894, p. 3. “A Triple Lynching.” Forrest City Times, February 16, 1894, p. 8. Nancy Snell Griffith Davidson, …

The Van Buren County 2E Bridge is an open masonry substructure bridge crossing a tributary of Driver’s Creek near Scotland (Van Buren County) built under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era federal relief agency. In 1940, Van Buren County received a $117,789 grant from the Works Progress Administration to “improve and construct roads. Work includes clearing, grubbing, excavating and surfacing; moving fences, constructing and reconstructing bridges and drainage structures, and performing incidental and appurtenant work.” The construction of a bridge across a Driver’s Creek tributary on a rural Van Buren County road was almost certainly part of this project since no individual WPA project card exists for the bridge. Its designer is not known but could …

John Louis Ward was an author, editor, journalist, teacher, and political operative from Arkansas. In addition to becoming the first major biographer of Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller, he is known for his work as a campaign manager and public relations director. He was also heavily involved in the academic affairs of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UA Little Rock) and the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in Conway (Faulkner County). John Ward was born on December 17, 1930, in Damascus (Van Buren and Faulkner Counties) to Roy W. Ward and Mamie L. Ward. His father was a pastor. Ward was one of eight children. A talented musician, Ward played in his high school band and even toured as …

Allen Rufus (A. R.) Witt was a politician and Confederate colonel who served in infantry and irregular cavalry regiments during the Civil War. A. R. Witt was born on August 17, 1830, in Hamilton County, Tennessee, the oldest of four children. The family moved to Alabama in 1836 and then moved to Van Buren County, Arkansas, six years later, settling on the Little Red River. Witt went to Arkansas College in Fayetteville (Washington County) and lived in Fayetteville until 1857, when he was elected state land commissioner and moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County). In 1859, Witt drove a herd of cattle to California and remained there for two years. Returning to Little Rock as the Civil War was approaching, …