Entries - Starting with F

Flowers, Beulah Lee Sampson

Beulah Lee Sampson Flowers was an African-American educator, community leader, political activist, and businesswoman who was also a mentor to Maya Angelou. Beulah Sampson was born on January 10, 1883, in Hempstead County, Arkansas. Her parents, John Sampson Sr. and Frances Johnson Sampson, were ex-slaves and farmers who lived in the Ozan and Mine Creek townships of Hempstead County. According to the Sampson-Flowers oral tradition, Beulah was the youngest child of approximately twenty-three full and half siblings. Family members debate the exact number of her siblings. She received a public school education in Hempstead County and attended Bowen Seminary in Clow (Hempstead County). Sampson completed her education at Williams Industrial College, a vocational training school for African Americans, in Little …

Flowers, Cleon

Cleon Aurelius Flowers Sr., an African-American physician from Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), was reported to be the first physician in the country to deliver viable conjoined twins successfully during a home birth. During his fifty-nine-year career as a physician, he earned a reputation as a compassionate and generous healthcare provider in Pine Bluff and Jefferson County. Cleon Aurelius Flowers was born in Stamps (Lafayette County) on July 26, 1913. His father, Alonza William (A. W.) Flowers, was a laborer in sawmills who later became an insurance agent for Universal Life Insurance Company, and his mother, Beulah Sampson Flowers, was a teacher, community leader, and political activist. His parents also owned and operated the A. W. Flowers and Sons grocery store …

Flowers, Gennifer

Gennifer Flowers is a singer and former model best known for her affair with Governor Bill Clinton. The relationship, which she claimed lasted for twelve years, was revealed by the tabloid Star in the early winter of 1992 and threatened to derail Clinton’s 1992 campaign for president. Eura Gean Flowers, who was known growing up as Geannie Flowers, was born on January 24, 1950, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the only child of Gene and Mary Flowers. After her birth, the family left Oklahoma for Anchorage, Alaska, and then moved to Washington state and Modesto, California. They eventually settled in rural Brinkley (Monroe County), and her father developed a crop-dusting business. Flowers says that she wanted to be an entertainer from …

Flowers, William Harold

William Harold Flowers was a lawyer, minister, social and political activist, and one of the leading figures in the civil rights movement in Arkansas in the 1940s. He was the first African American special circuit judge in Jefferson County and a president of the African-American National Bar Association. He was also active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the state, serving as president of the Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) branch and as president of the state conference of branches. Born on October 16, 1911, in Stamps (Lafayette County), William Harold Flowers was the son of Alonza (often spelled Alonzo) Williams Flowers Jr., a businessman, and Beulah Lee Sampson, a schoolteacher. He was the eldest …

Floyd, John Buchanan

John Buchanan Floyd was the governor of Virginia, secretary of war, a brigadier general in the Confederate army, and a lawyer and planter who lived in Arkansas for a period. John Buchanan Floyd was born on the Smithfield Plantation, outside Blacksburg, Virginia, on June 1, 1806. His father, John Floyd, served in the House of Representatives and as the governor of Virginia. His mother, Letitia Preston Floyd, came from a prominent Virginia family. Floyd was the oldest of twelve children. Floyd attended South Carolina College and opened a law practice in Abington, Virginia, in 1829. The next year, he married Sarah Buchanan Preston. The two adopted a daughter. In 1834, Floyd and a brother moved to Arkansas, purchasing a cotton …

Floyd, John Charles

John Charles Floyd was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He represented the Third District of Arkansas in the Fifty-Ninth through the Sixty-Third Congresses, serving from 1905 to 1915. John Charles Floyd was born on April 14, 1858, in Sparta, Tennessee, to John Wesley Floyd and Eliza Jane Snodgrass Floyd. Floyd spent his early years in Tennessee while his father served in the Confederate army. After the Civil War, the family moved to Arkansas, settling near Bentonville (Benton County) in 1869. There, Floyd received his early education, attending the local common school and the high school. He continued his education at Arkansas Industrial University in Fayetteville (Washington County), which later became the University of Arkansas, from which …

Flu Epidemic of 1918

aka: Influenza Epidemic of 1918

A deadly influenza outbreak began in 1918 and spread around the world, killing more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history. In Arkansas, the flu killed about 7,000 people, several times more than the state lost during World War I. This flu’s history remains significant today as world health officials seek to prevent an outbreak of a similar influenza epidemic mutated from swine or “bird flu” from poultry. In the fourteenth century, Italian doctors noted a mysterious illness that often turned into an epidemic. They called it the influentia in medieval Latin, believing it was caused by an adverse influence of the stars or alignment of the planets. By the eighteenth century, it was called influenza di …

Fly-fishing

Fishing for food and recreation has played a significant part in Arkansas’s history. Accounts of Hernando De Soto’s expedition mention Native Americans (possibly in northeastern Arkansas around the St. Francis River) having developed complex canals and marsh ponds for keeping fish to be caught later at a chief’s leisure. By the mid-1800s, early illustrations of Arkansas show anglers fishing from a bank with a rod and line (probably using a worm or minnow). In the 1920s and 1930s, as automobiles became more common, state parks and hatchery personnel discovered that fishermen did not hesitate to travel 200 miles or more to good fishing waters. Incidental newspaper reports began to appear about this time mentioning fly anglers traveling from Batesville (Independence …

Flynn-Doran War

The Flynn-Doran War was an early 1880s struggle for control of gambling in Hot Springs (Garland County) between the gang of Frank “Boss Gambler” Flynn and the forces of rival James K. Lane and his chief hired gun, S. A. Doran. Frank Flynn arrived in Hot Springs in 1871 and, within five years, effectively controlled gambling in the town, though he also dabbled in newspapers and railroads. James K. Lane, who ran bar operations in one of Flynn’s gambling dens, decided to branch out on his own, opening the Palace Saloon and Club (at which his wife, Gracie, served as madam to its brothel operations), and the Monarch, both on Valley Street, around 1882. Angered by the competition, Flynn and …

Fogleman, John Albert

John Albert Fogleman was a lawyer who spent seventy years in the profession, including fourteen years as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, the last one as chief justice. Fogleman was an unusually congenial litigant and judge, liked by his colleagues and opponents and known for his scholarship, copious opinions, and rigid, conservative application of constitutional and statutory law.  A descendant of pioneer settlers of Crittenden County, John Fogleman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on November 5, 1911, one of three sons of John Franklin Fogleman and Marie Julia McAdams Fogleman. He was reared and educated in Marion (Crittenden County) and enrolled at the University of Arkansas (UA) in  Fayetteville (Washington County) at the age of fifteen, where he received a bachelor of arts degree. As a freshman at the university, he met and, three years later, married Annis Adell Appleby …

Foley, Blaze

aka: Michael David Fuller

Singer-songwriter Michael David Fuller worked under the names Depty (or Deputy) Dawg and then Blaze Foley, being best known by the latter. His songs have been recorded by singers such as Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, and John Prine. Blaze Foley was born on December 18, 1949, to Edwin Fuller and Louise Fuller in Malvern (Hot Spring County). His family traveled as gospel performers and were known as the Singing Fuller Family. Foley began singing with the group at the age of eleven with his mother, brother, and sisters. When Foley was a baby, the family left Arkansas for Texas, settling in San Antonio and later the Dallas/Fort Worth area. While an infant, he contracted polio, which was cured …

Folk Music

Folk music is part of a society’s “unofficial culture,” much of which is passed on through face-to-face contact among close-knit people. Early folk music in Arkansas falls into two broad categories: folksongs (which do not present a narrative) and ballads (which tell a story). Folksong collectors sought to record and preserve this traditional music in the twentieth century, with Vance Randolph, John Quincy Wolf, and others working in Arkansas. The lyric folksong form of the blues developed in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta regions in the late nineteenth century among the first generation of African Americans to come of age after slavery. Protest music of the early to mid-twentieth century, dealing with labor and social conditions—as well as war, civil rights, and …

Folklore and Folklife

When English antiquarian William J. Thoms introduced his new coinage “folk-lore” in 1846, he intended it as a “good Saxon substitute” for “popular antiquities,” a Latinate term that referred to the manners and customs of the “olden time.” Although subsequent folklore scholars have recognized that their subject is an ever-changing, modern phenomenon, the association of folklore with antiquity has often sent folklorists to people and places that seem to lie outside the mainstream of cultural development and where, they assume, a way of life untouched by modernization and globalization endures. In the United States, the “folk” were those who lived in isolation as a result especially of geography but sometimes of ethnicity or another distinguishing factor. Arkansas, especially its Ozark …

Food and Foodways

Because nutrition is essential to human survival, the production and consumption of food has been central to life in what is now Arkansas for more than ten thousand years. Evolving social customs dictate when, where, and how food is presented. Because of Arkansas’s ties to rest of the South, as well as to the Southwest and Midwest, the core components of local food preparation followed traditional “American” lines, with little impact being felt from the small immigrant population. The globalization of food, mostly via restaurants, came generally after 1960. Prehistory The first humans in Arkansas, the Paleoindians, were hunter-gatherers. Despite Arkansas’s lack of excavated and analyzed sites, evidence from adjacent areas suggests that besides hunting the now-extinct mega animals (mammoths, …

Fooy, Samuel W. (Execution of)

On September 3, 1875, a Native American man named Samuel W. Fooy was among the first six men to be executed in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) under “hanging judge” Isaac Parker. Fooy was convicted of robbing and killing a Kansas schoolteacher in Indian Territory several years earlier. Sam Fooy was born in Sebastian County in 1849. He was part Cherokee; his father was James E. Fooy of Memphis, Tennessee, and his mother was named Mary Ann. Sam married Amanda Talitha Beattie, and by 1872 they were living near Webbers Falls in the Cherokee Nation (in present-day Oklahoma). At the time of Fooy’s death, they had three children. An 1875 article in the Arkansas Gazette described him as “well educated and …

Forbes, Ralph Perry

Ralph Forbes was an Arkansas political operator, minister, and former leader in the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. He entered the Arkansas political scene in the Ronald Reagan era, when Arkansas Republicans had seen the election of a Republican governor and two GOP congressmen but were still so weak at the down-ballot level that low filing fees attracted fringe candidates that caused the party no end of embarrassment less than two decades after the heyday of Republican governor Winthrop Rockefeller. One of these fringe candidates was a one-time high official in the American Nazi Party who ultimately made his way to Pope County in the Arkansas River Valley. Ralph Perry Forbes was born on March 12, 1940, …

Forbush, Nellie

Nellie Forbush is a fictional character created by bestselling author James A. Michener (1907–1997). A native of Arkansas, the character of Nellie first appears in Michener’s book Tales of the South Pacific, which was published in 1947. Tales of the South Pacific, a series of nineteen interrelated stories based on Michener’s experiences in the U.S. Navy while stationed on the New Hebrides Islands in the Pacific during World War II, won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Michener explained that he had wanted to write observations of what he called the “valiant people” he met there: “the French planters, the Australian coast watchers, the Navy nurses, the Tonkinese laborers, the ordinary sailors and soldiers who were doing the work, and …

Ford, Archibald Washington (Arch)

Archibald Washington Ford was commissioner of the Arkansas Department of Education from 1953 until his retirement in 1978. He served under five governors: Francis Cherry, Orval Faubus, Winthrop Rockefeller, Dale Bumpers, and David Pryor. Under his leadership, the state undertook significant work to provide a quality education to all students regardless of their race, age, abilities, or location in the state. Arch Ford was born in Wooster (Faulkner County) on January 25, 1906, to Thomas Noah Ford (1872–1959) and Minnie Lee Clements Ford (1880–1954). He was the fourth of six children. His father was a farmer and a Baptist minister who served on the local school board as well as the Faulkner County Board of Education. His father helped lead …

Ford, Edsel

Although Edsel Ford did not arrive in the Arkansas Ozarks until the age of eleven, he lived most of his adult life in the region, consistently incorporated its culture into his writing, and became one of its most distinguished poets. At the time of his death, at the age of forty-one, he was a well-established regional poet who was beginning to earn national literary attention. Edsel Ford was born to James Tilden Ford and Nora Louisa Ford in Eva, Alabama, on December 30, 1928. His family farmed cotton, and he was one of four children. When Ford was two years old, he moved with his family to Roswell, New Mexico. In 1939, the family moved to Avoca (Benton County) to operate …

Ford, Joe Thomas

Joe Thomas Ford, son of Arkansas’s longtime top school official Arch Ford, embarked on a political career as a young man but then devoted himself to his business, building it into one of the largest communications companies in the world. His political career comprised four terms—sixteen years—as a state senator from Pulaski County. His once tiny rural telephone company was growing rapidly and in 1982 he had to make a choice: to either quit politics or his business. His name had come up in speculation about higher offices—governor or Congress. He quit politics, or at least the electoral aspect of it, and did not run for reelection. In 2008, Ford sold his company, Alltel, to Verizon Communications, Inc., for $28 …

Ford, L. L. (Execution of)

L. L. Ford was one of two men hanged for the 1879 murder of a Crittenden County man, though many believed him innocent and he denied being involved in the crime. On October 26, 1879, four masked men rode up to the home of John Broadway, age fifty-five, about ten miles north of Marion (Crittenden County). One of them was John Potter, who worked for Broadway and believed that Broadway had $300 in his home. When Broadway tried to defend himself, another robber, Hiram Jeffries, shot him down. The four men fled, having netted only eight dollars. Potter, Jeffries, L. L. Ford, and Cal Huey were arrested and charged with Broadway’s murder. Huey got a change of venue to Mississippi …

Ford, Richard Carrel

Richard Carrel Ford is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist whose formative years in Little Rock (Pulaski County) helped shape his career as a writer. He has written seven novels and five collections of short works and was the first person to be awarded both the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner Award for the same book. Ford was born on February 16, 1944, in Jackson, Mississippi, to Parker Carrel Ford and Edna Ford. His mother was a native of Arkansas, and his grandfather, Ben Shelley, managed the Marion Hotel in downtown Little Rock. As a child, Ford often spent his summers at the hotel and, during his teen years, worked as a lifeguard at the Little Rock Country Club. Ford recalls that his residence …

Fordyce (Dallas County)

Located at the intersection of Highways 167 and 79 in south central Arkansas, Fordyce was established in 1882 and named for Colonel Samuel Wesley Fordyce, a railroad builder and developer. It has long been a center for the timber industry in southern Arkansas. Pre-European Exploration Prior to European settlement, present-day Fordyce was inhabited by ancestors of the Caddo. Although no historic Caddo communities existed there, artifacts of Native American life are occasionally found in the area. Louisiana Purchase through Reconstruction Fordyce was a relatively late bloomer in Dallas County as compared to centrally located Princeton (Dallas County), which was incorporated in 1849 and served as the first county seat, and Tulip (Dallas County), which was considered the cultural center of …

Fordyce Commercial Historic District

The Fordyce Commercial Historic District includes the core of downtown of Fordyce (Dallas County). Centered on Main Street, the district included sixty-one resources at the time of its addition to the National Register of Historic Places on May 20, 2008. Thirty of the resources contributed to the district, with six additional sites being empty lots. The boundaries of the district are roughly Fifth Street to the north, Oak Street to the west, Spring Street to the east, and the railroad tracks south of First Street. Incorporated in 1884, Fordyce served as a stop on the Texas and St. Louis Railway, later named the St. Louis, Arkansas and Texas, but commonly known as the Cotton Belt. Named for Samuel Wesley Fordyce, …

Fordyce House

The Fordyce House at 2115 South Broadway in Little Rock (Pulaski County) is a two-and-a-half-story wood-frame residence built in 1904 for John R. Fordyce and designed by noted architect Charles L. Thompson. It exhibits the rarely used Egyptian Revival style. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 6, 1975. John Fordyce, the son of Cotton Belt Railroad president Samuel Fordyce, was a prominent businessman, engineer, and inventor, as well as the president of Little Rock’s Thomas-Fordyce Manufacturing Company. He married Lillian August Powell in 1898 and, six years later, hired Thompson to design a house for their growing family. Thompson designed the Fordyce House in the Egyptian Revival style of architecture, which was most popular …

Fordyce on the Cotton Belt Festival

The small town of Fordyce (Dallas County) celebrates the railroad and its historical significance with the annual Fordyce on the Cotton Belt Festival, which is held each year on the fourth Saturday in April. Along with fun for the community, the festival has a major financial impact on Fordyce and the surrounding area. Joe Bill Meador, a member of the board of directors of the Fordyce Chamber of Commerce, first had the idea for an annual festival. As Meador traveled across the Southern states, he saw how a festival could infuse life into a small town. In 1980, he began discussing the idea with the other members of the chamber. A committee was formed to plan a festival for Fordyce. …

Fordyce, John Rison

The son of Hot Springs (Garland County) entrepreneur and Cotton Belt Railroad president Samuel Wesley Fordyce, John Rison Fordyce forged his own way into Arkansas history. He was educated as a mining engineer but was also an inventor, manufacturer, leader in commerce, public servant, and amateur archaeologist. John R. Fordyce was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on November 7, 1869. He moved to the health resort of Hot Springs at age five with his father and mother, Susan Chadick, after his father, suffering from malaria contracted during the Civil War, found renewed health in the local thermal springs. The third of five children, Fordyce—along with his three surviving siblings—was educated in Hot Springs schools. His father was instrumental in Hot Springs’ …

Fordyce, Samuel Wesley

Samuel Wesley Fordyce was a businessman who spearheaded efforts to build thousands of miles of railway in the South and Southwest during the late nineteenth century, including the Cotton Belt route that crossed Arkansas. He also was a major force behind the transformation of Hot Springs (Garland County) from a small village to major health resort. The town of Fordyce (Dallas County) is named for him, as is the Fordyce Bath House in Hot Springs. Samuel Fordyce was born on February 7, 1840, in Senecaville, Ohio, the son of John Fordyce and Mary Ann Houseman Fordyce. As a boy, he never liked school, but he attended Madison College in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and North Illinois University in Henry, Illinois, before becoming …

Foreman (Little River County)

aka: New Rocky Comfort (Little River County)

The city of Foreman, also known as New Rocky Comfort, was at one time the county seat of Little River County. Located about twenty miles north of Interstate 30 on State Highway 41, the city’s primary industry is a cement factory that was built in 1957 and renovated in 2007. Before the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, the southwestern corner of Arkansas was covered by a shallow sea. Layers of sediment deposited on the seabed formed chalk and lime, which are the principal substances found in the terrain surrounding the city of Foreman. A natural spring supported a stand of willow trees and attracted wildlife and human visitors to the area, which became known as both Willow Springs and Rocky …

Foreman, Gene

Born in a small Ohio town and reared in the rural community of Wabash in Phillips County, Gene Foreman became one of Arkansas’s and the nation’s most honored newspaper editors. At the Arkansas Gazette, he was a leader in the paper’s coverage of the tumult over school integration in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1957–1959. Foreman also became managing editor at the Pine Bluff Commercial and the Arkansas Democrat. He spent most of his career as an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He managed the newsroom at the Inquirer for more than twenty-five years, a period during which the newspaper received numerous awards for its reporting, including eighteen Pulitzer Prizes. In retirement, he was a professor of journalism at Pennsylvania State …

Forest Fire Lookouts

aka: Fire Towers

Fire towers (also known as lookouts) go back thousands of years. The oldest lookout still standing is the Tuztoromy Firewatch Tower in Sopron, Hungary, which was built in the thirteenth century and remodeled in 1681. The first one built in America was in downtown Harlem, New York, constructed in 1856 in what is now Marcus Garvey City Park. The first fire lookout strictly for protection of American forests was built in 1902 at Bertha Hill near Headquarters, Idaho. At the height of their use (1930s to 1970s), Arkansas had more than 120 fire towers; by 1994, forty-eight were still standing, and by 2023, there were forty-six. Arkansas has fourteen lookouts on the National Historic Lookout Register and three on the …

Forest Management and Conservation

The Dictionary of Forestry defines “forest management” as the application of biophysical and socioeconomic principles to predominantly tree-covered lands to meet specific objectives while maintaining productivity. To this end, forest management encompasses the art and science of manipulating timberlands for a range of renewable natural resources, including (but not limited to) wood products, wildlife, water, clean air, carbon storage, biodiversity, aesthetics, and recreation. Conservation has always been an integral part of forest management, although its definition has evolved over the decades as the practice of forestry has matured. Today, conservation has more of an emphasis on long-term sustainability, but during the earliest years of professional forestry, any effort related to the non-exploitive treatment of forests was considered conservation. In Arkansas, …

Forest Rose [Steamboat]

The steamboat Forest Rose suffered a disastrous boiler explosion on March 31, 1857, on the Mississippi River near Napoleon (Desha County), resulting in several deaths. The Forest Rose was a 205-ton sternwheel paddleboat built in 1852 in California, Pennsylvania, for Captain Francis Maratta of Beaver County, Pennsylvania. The vessel, which was 154 feet long and 28.5 feet wide and had a five-foot draft, initially ran between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and St. Louis, Missouri. By 1857, Captain Richard Allen of Paducah, Kentucky, owned the Forest Rose and was running the steamboat along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The Forest Rose was heading up the Mississippi from New Orleans, Louisiana, with a full cargo load bound for Little Rock (Pulaski County) and …

Forester (Scott County)

Forester was a self-contained sawmill town owned by the Caddo River Lumber Company. It was founded and built by Thomas Whitaker Rosborough in 1930 in southeastern Scott County. At first, a prominent Waldron (Scott County) businessman wanted the mill built in his town, but after hearing that Rosborough intended to employ African Americans, this businessman was happy with the chosen location and later was instrumental in getting the railroad extended from Waldron into Forester. The mill became the largest and most productive in the state, with its huge lumber shed measuring eighty feet wide and 1,000 feet long and storing millions of board feet of kiln-dried, planed lumber. The company town was named after Waldron businessman Charles A. Forrester. Contractors …

Forgotten Girls, The

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 …

Forrest City (St. Francis County)

Forrest City, located on the western slope of Crowley’s Ridge near the center of St. Francis County, has been a center of commerce and trade since its incorporation in 1870. Serving as the county seat since 1874, the city is named in honor of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. It is the only such named city in the world spelled with two Rs. Pre-European Exploration through Early Statehood The many Native American artifacts found along the St. Francis River and a number of identified Indian mounds within the county provide evidence that the area was inhabited long before the expedition of Hernando de Soto visited the surrounding area in 1541.White settlers began to be attracted to the high ground on …

Forrest City Riot of 1889

In the 1888 election, the Union Labor Party, which included farmers of the Agricultural Wheel, allied with the Republicans to challenge the Democrats. Aware of black Arkansans’ important electoral support of this movement, white Democrats responded by launching an effort to end African Americans’ political participation. In St. Francis County in eastern Arkansas, which had become a black-majority county by 1890, the Wheel/Republican alliance became politically powerful. In 1888, county Union Laborites and Republicans formed a fusion ticket to challenge the previously dominant Democrats. Much to the Democrats’ dismay, three black Republicans captured the offices of county assessor, treasurer, and coroner, and white Union Labor candidates won the offices of sheriff, county clerk, and county judge. Shortly after the election, …

Forrest L. Wood Crowley’s Ridge Nature Center

The Forrest L. Wood Crowley’s Ridge Nature Center in Jonesboro (Craighead County) was built through the efforts of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC). It is one of four such nature centers that were built after the 1996 passage of a one-eighth-cent conservation sales tax. Named after Forrest L. Wood, former commissioner and longtime supporter of the AGFC, the center opened on August 25, 2004, after nearly two years of construction. Located on the northern, wider part of the 200-mile-long Crowley’s Ridge, the center provides the public an opportunity to view wildlife in its habitat and learn about the area’s history. The facility maintains several interactive indoor/outdoor exhibits and offers two related films. Educational programs focus on Arkansas’s history …

Forsyth, Missouri, to Batesville, Scout from

A patrol of ninety-three men of the Eighth Missouri State Militia Cavalry led by Captain James J. Akard left their base at Forsyth, Missouri, on December 26, 1863, to deliver dispatches to Federal troops who had occupied Batesville (Independence County) the day before. The Missourians endured a lack of forage for their horses for the first forty-five miles of their journey but found ample fodder as they neared Batesville. Passing through Mountain Home (Baxter County), Calico Rock (Izard County), and Wild Haws (Izard County), they killed two Confederates and captured nine others, along with nineteen horses, during their scout to Batesville, turning them over to the provost marshal when they got there on December 29. They left the next day …

Fort Bussey

Fort Bussey was an earthen fortification built astride the Military Road in Benton (Saline County) to protect Union forces occupying the town in late 1863 and early 1864. It was located at the intersection of the Military or Stagecoach Road and roads leading to Hot Springs (Garland County) and Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). The fort is no longer in existence, although remnants of it were still visible in the mid-twentieth century. With the fall of Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Union forces on September 10, 1863, Confederates retreated through Benton on the way to Arkadelphia (Clark County). Within a few days, Union cavalry entered Benton as they scouted southward. On September 22, 1863, the community was occupied by 500 cavalrymen …

Fort Chaffee

aka: Camp Chaffee

Fort Chaffee, just outside of Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and Barling (Sebastian County) on Arkansas Highway 22, has served the United States as an army training camp, a prisoner of war camp, and a refugee camp. Currently, 66,000 acres are used by the Arkansas National Guard as a training facility, with the Arkansas Air National Guard using the fort’s Razorback Range for target practice. Groundbreaking for what was then Camp Chaffee was held on September 20, 1941, as part of the Department of War’s preparations to double the size of the U.S. Army in the face of imminent war. That month, the United States government paid $1.35 million to acquire 15,163 acres from 712 property owners, including families, farms, businesses, …

Fort Curtis

Fort Curtis was a major Union army fortification located in Helena (Phillips County) during and immediately after the Civil War. It is best known for being part of the Federal defenses at the July 4, 1863, Battle of Helena. After the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862, the Union Army of the Southwest under the command of Major General Samuel Ryan Curtis moved across northern Arkansas and southern Missouri before eventually taking the town of Helena, located on the Mississippi River. Helena would remain under Federal control for the remainder of the war. Located at the end of Crowley’s Ridge, the land around the city was well-suited for a defensive position. Construction on fortifications began almost immediately as the Army of …

Fort Hindman

Located on the Arkansas River near the site of Arkansas Post, Fort Hindman served as an important Confederate defensive fortification during the Civil War. Captured by a combined force of Federal troops and the Union navy, the fort was destroyed in 1863, and the site was eventually claimed by the river. On September 28, 1862, Major General Theophilus Holmes ordered the construction of fortifications along the Arkansas and White rivers. The construction of these fortifications was in direct response to Federal movements on the Mississippi River and followed a Union fleet attacking a Confederate post at St. Charles (Arkansas County), located on the White River. Located about twenty-five miles above the mouth of the Arkansas River, Arkansas Post was selected …

Fort Lincoln

aka: DeValls Bluff Fortifications

Fort Lincoln was an earthen fortification constructed in 1864 as part of the extensive network of earthworks Union forces built to protect the sprawling Federal base at DeValls Bluff (Prairie County) during the Civil War. Confederate forces had used DeValls Bluff at various points early in the war because of its status as the eastern terminus of the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad, which ran from the White River to the north side of the Arkansas River opposite Little Rock (Pulaski County). The site had few improvements, though, and what buildings were there were destroyed by Union raiders in January 1863. Major General Frederick Steele established a base at DeValls Bluff in August 1863 during his advance on Little Rock, …

Fort Logan H. Roots Military Post Historic District

aka: Fort Roots

In 1893, the U.S. Army chose Big Rock Mountain in North Little Rock (Pulaski County) as the location for one of its new military posts. Fort Logan H. Roots, as it was later named, served as an important military training facility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Camp Pike (now Camp Joseph T. Robinson) was constructed to provide the military with a larger training facility. In 1921, Fort Roots was transferred to the Public Health Service and became a veterans’ hospital. Today, Fort Roots remains an important part of the Veterans Health Administration. The history of Fort Logan H. Roots begins with the history of Big Rock Mountain, …

Fort Pinney to Kimball’s Plantation, Expedition from

The expedition from Fort Pinney to Kimball’s Plantation was undertaken to break up a Mississippi smuggling operation. Captain Benjamin Thomas of the Sixty-Third United States Colored Troops (USCT), who served as the provost marshal for the Eastern District of Arkansas, organized the expedition, which was manned by troops from the Sixty-Ninth USCT under Captain Charles T. Parks from Fort Pinney, a contraband camp located southeast of Helena (Phillips County) across the Mississippi River from Friar’s Point (usually spelled Friars Point), Mississippi. The goal of the expedition was to capture a pair of deserters and smugglers named Dustin and Stewart who were operating from a Mrs. Kimball’s house on the east side of the river. Thomas worked with Acting Master William …

Fort Pleasants

aka: Fort Weightman

Fort Pleasants was a large Confederate fortification erected on Day’s Bluff near Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) on the Arkansas River in order to impede any attempts by Union forces to advance on Little Rock (Pulaski County) using the river in 1863. Following the Union destruction of Fort Hindman during the Battle of Arkansas Post in January 1863, Confederate leaders rushed to fortify high ground upriver from the post to defend the approaches to Little Rock. Missouri troops under Brigadier General Daniel M. Frost were dispatched to White Bluff, located about sixty-five miles below the capital, in early February to begin fortifying there, but on February 18, Frost recommended building an earthwork at Day’s Bluff, fifteen miles farther downstream, writing that …

Fort Smith (Sebastian County)

Fort Smith shares its status with Greenwood as the county seat of Sebastian County. Early in the history of Arkansas and the city, Fort Smith was an important point of contact to the American West. It is now home to large manufacturing plants; St. Edward Mercy Medical Center and Baptist Health-Fort Smith, which provide healthcare to residents beyond the confines of the city; and the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. Fort Smith was for a long time the second-largest city in Arkansas after Little Rock (Pulaski County) but, after the 2020 census, was ranked the third-largest, with Fayetteville (Washington County) now the second. Pre-European Exploration No indigenous peoples appear to have had permanent settlements at the time of European …

Fort Smith Confederate Monument

The Fort Smith Confederate Monument is a sculpture erected in 1903 at the Sebastian County Courthouse in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) by the Varina Jefferson Davis Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to commemorate local men who served in the Confederate army during the Civil War and to honor the Confederates buried in Fort Smith National Cemetery. Sebastian County supplied troops for both sides during the Civil War. In the initial months of the war, four infantry companies, a cavalry company, and an artillery battery joined the Arkansas State Troops, and at least five infantry companies and two companies of independent scouts were later raised for Confederate service. Sebastian County residents also enlisted in other Confederate units. U.S. troops …

Fort Smith Conference (1865)

As a diplomatic assembly of Native American delegates and U.S. government officials, the Fort Smith Conference of 1865 was designed to reestablish relations between the federal government and Native American tribes of Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) who had allied themselves with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Talks, which stretched from September 8 to September 23, 1865, informed tribal delegates that all pre-war treaty rights were forfeited upon taking up arms against the Union and that new treaties with the United States had to be negotiated. The Fort Smith Conference ultimately failed to achieve new treaties, as Native American delegates refused to consent to strict treaty stipulations and because factional squabbling between loyalist and secessionist Native Americans hampered negotiations. At …