Entries - Starting with H

Hodges, Asa

Asa Hodges was a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. He represented the First District of Arkansas in the Forty-Third Congress, serving from 1873 to 1875. Asa Hodges was born on January 22, 1822, near Moulton, Alabama, to William Hodges and Jeanette Daugherty Hodges. He and his family later moved to Marion (Crittenden County). After receiving his early education in local schools, he graduated from LaGrange College in LaGrange, Missouri, in 1848. Hodges also studied law and was admitted to the Alabama state bar in 1848. He then began to practice law, working first in the offices of L. P. Walker in Florence, Alabama, and later forming a legal partnership with Thomas M. Peters, who would later …

Hodges, Earle William

At the time of his election in 1910, Earl W. Hodges was the youngest secretary of state in the history of Arkansas. A longtime newspaperman and public servant, he went on to be elected twice more. It was the only elected office he held. Earl William Hodges was born in a log cabin at Newark (Independence County) on September 27, 1881, to Jesse Beane Hodges and Teresa J. Humphrey Hodges. When he was about two years old, the family moved to Fulton County in northern Arkansas. He was educated in Salem (Fulton County) schools. While there, he learned the trade of newspaper typesetting and soon became the foreman of the Monitor of Mammoth Spring (Fulton County). He eventually purchased a …

Hodges, Jerry T.

Businessman Jerry T. Hodges Jr., who grew up in the Arkansas Delta, was one of a group of African-American men to serve as Original Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. Approximately 992 pilots advanced through the segregated Tuskegee program, with over 450 seeing action in the war overseas. Hodges was one of the more than 500 who completed the training program but did not see action. He was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2012. Jerry Hodges was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 29, 1925, to Jerry Hodges Sr. and Mae Paterson Hodges. The family soon moved to Hughes (St. Francis County) and then relocated to a farm in Heth (St. Francis County). He attended the …

Hodges, Kaneaster, Jr.

Kaneaster Hodges Jr. served as a Democratic interim U.S. senator representing Arkansas from December 10, 1977, to January 3, 1979. He was appointed to the post by Governor David Pryor after the death of the incumbent senator, John L. McClellan. Hodges also served as city attorney and deputy prosecuting attorney of Newport (Jackson County) and held a number of positions in state government. Kaneaster Hodges Jr. was born to Harryette Hodges and Kaneaster Hodges Sr. in Newport on August 20, 1938; he was one of six children. His father, whose career path Hodges would follow, was a lawyer. Hodges graduated from Newport High School in 1956 and went on to receive his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1960 and …

Hodges, Thomas L.

Thomas Luther Hodges was a noted physician and amateur archaeologist in Hot Spring County in the early twentieth century. Focusing on materials related to the late prehistoric Caddo, the collection accumulated by Hodges and his wife, Charlotte, is now held by the Joint Educational Consortium in Arkadelphia (Clark County). Thomas L. Hodges was born in Morehead, Kentucky, on January 17, 1868. It is unclear what happened to Hodges’s birth parents, but he became the adopted son of William and Sarah Hodges and moved with his adoptive family to Knox County, Missouri, in the early 1870s. His father died in 1874, and Sarah Hodges remarried the following year to widower George Sloan. In the 1880 federal census, Hodges appears with his …

Hoelzeman, George Raymond

George Raymond Hoelzeman is a liturgical artist who has gained national acclaim for his creation of church furniture, statues, and relief woodcarvings, particularly those depicting the Stations of the Cross (also known as the Way for the Cross) for Catholic churches throughout the United States. George Hoelzeman was born on April 24, 1963, in Little Rock (Pulaski County), the eldest of four sons born to Aloys Joseph (A. J.) Hoelzeman, who was a carpenter, and Therese Huber Hoelzeman, a nurse and music teacher. He grew up in Morrilton (Conway County) and received his primary and secondary education at Sacred Heart School there. After graduating from high school, Hoelzeman entered St. Joseph Seminary in Covington, Louisiana, graduating in 1985 with a …

Hogan, Dan

Dan Hogan was a socialist activist in Arkansas. A lawyer and journalist, Hogan embodied “witty and intellectual” socialism, and he spent a lifetime pursuing social justice, beginning with the Populists in the 1890s and culminating with the socialist movement in Oklahoma, where he spent his final years. His daughter, journalist and activist Freda Hogan Ameringer, carried on his efforts. Dan Hogan was born in 1871. His father, Daniel Hogan, was a Fort Smith (Sebastian County) machinist who had emigrated from Ireland and then served in the Confederate army, while his mother, Alice Hogan, was an Arkansas native. Hogan’s father abandoned the family, and Alice Hogan was granted a divorce and full custody of their three children in 1885. Dan Hogan …

Hogan, Dixon Howard (Dick)

Dick Hogan was a singer and actor whose entertainment career began in the mid-1930s and ended in the late 1940s. He is remembered mainly for his many film appearances during the 1940s, which included notable supporting roles in several popular war-themed motion pictures. Dixon Howard Hogan was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on November 27, 1917. His parents were Dixon Henry Hogan and Agnes Smith Hogan, and he had an older sister, Margaret. His father and an uncle, Ben M. Hogan, owned construction businesses that contracted for numerous Arkansas road construction projects. After graduating from Little Rock’s Central High School, he attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1934–35 before moving to California to further …

Hogan, Edmund

General Edmund Hogan was an imposing figure in territorial Arkansas. A veteran of the War of 1812, Hogan was one of the first settlers in Pulaski County, the leader of the territorial militia, and a legislator. His penchant for lawsuits and disputes rivaled his successes, resulting in a fatal encounter with a political foe. Born about 1780, possibly in Anson County, North Carolina, to Griffin and Mary (Gibson) Hogan, he spent his early years in Laurens County, Georgia. He was a tax collector, sheriff, state legislator, and a lieutenant colonel in the Georgia militia. By 1814, he had resigned his military commission and moved to Arkansas. Around 1803, Hogan married Frances Jane Green, born about 1780 in Pulaski County, Georgia. …

Hogan, John (Lynching of)

On June 28, 1875, an African American named John Hogan was lynched near Russellville (Pope County) for allegedly attempting to assault one of Russ Tucker’s daughters. Public records provide some information about the lynching victim. The 1870 census (five years before the incident) lists a twelve-year-old African American named John Hogan, who was living on the farm of a twenty-two-year-old white man named Reece B. Hogans. Hogans had a wife, Josephine, and a two-year-old daughter. Also living on the farm was another black laborer, fifteen-year-old Rose Hogan, who may have been John Hogan’s sister. If this is the correct John Hogan, he would have been only seventeen when he was lynched. Russ Tucker was probably David Russell Tucker, who in …

Hogan, Richard Nathaniel

Richard Nathaniel Hogan was one of the most influential preachers and essayists among black Churches of Christ in the twentieth century. Richard Hogan was born in Monroe County on November 30, 1902, the third child of Willie Hogan and Emma “Cathey” Hogan. He developed his skills as an orator and writer under the tutelage of George Philip Bowser, a black evangelist and educator from Tennessee. When Hogan was a child, his father died. He and his mother began living with her parents, who were devout members of the Church of Christ in Blackton (Monroe County). Perceiving few prospects for advancement or even secondary education in the racially oppressive Arkansas Delta, they allowed Hogan at age fourteen to move to Tennessee …

Holiday Island (Carroll County)

Holiday Island is a planned community in northwestern Carroll County, a few miles north of Eureka Springs (Carroll County) near the Missouri state line. Located along a portion of Table Rock Lake, which is part of the White River, Holiday Island consists of roughly 4,800 acres and has a population of more than 2,500. Holiday Island citizens approved incorporating Holiday Island as a town on November 3, 2020, and it officially became a second-class city on March 23, 2021. Northern Arkansas was long considered the hunting land of the Osage, who lived to the north in what is now Missouri. By 1825, the Osage had been removed west to what is now Oklahoma, and settlers began attempting to farm the …

Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge

Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge (Holla Bend NWR), located six miles south of Dardanelle (Yell County), is a strategic stopover for migratory birds. The 7,000 acres (owned plus managed) offers a place for wintering ducks and geese to rest, and for spring and summer birds to nest while traveling the Central and Mississippi flyways. Extensive wildlife also makes this protected area its year-round home. In 1954, the United States Army Corps of Engineers’ navigation and flood control project along the Arkansas River straightened a section of the river by cutting a channel across Holla Bend Bottoms—on the water route of the Trail of Tears—to improve navigation and prevent flood damage, resulting in an island between the old and new river …

Holland (Faulkner County)

Holland is a small community in Faulkner County located eighteen miles northeast of Conway (Faulkner County) on Arkansas Highway 287. The origin of Holland’s name and the exact date of its founding are unknown. It is believed to be named after a hunter and trapper who camped near a place called Lavender Springs along the Little Rock–Clinton Road. Settlers began homesteading the area in the 1820s. Many of the early settlers of Holland were from surrounding Southern states and were of English descent. Early settlers had to clear the heavily forested area for agriculture and build makeshift roads in order to pick up mail and get their goods to market. Farmers originally raised corn and cotton in the area. Some …

Holland, Jim (Lynching of)

On Saturday, November 26, 1881, Jim Holland, a white man, was lynched in Dardanelle (Yell County) for the crime of murder. Jim Holland, along with William Casey and Charles G. Helphrey, were accused of having murdered a cotton buyer, Burgess James, near Dardanelle in the fall of 1878. They were eventually captured and placed in the jail at Ozark (Franklin County) to protect them from a lynch mob. However, on July 18, 1881, Holland and his accomplices were able to escape from the jail; either their guard, Jim Hill, was careless or they may have drugged him. Holland and Casey were later recaptured in Polk County, Tennessee, having been trailed there by a Yell County lawman named Captain Poole. Holland …

Hollander, Andrea

aka: Andrea Hollander Budy

Poet and teacher Andrea Hollander served as the writer-in-residence at Lyon College in Batesville (Independence County) from 1991 to 2013. The author of four full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks, Hollander has published more than 250 poems and essays in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, Doubletake, Shenandoah, FIELD, Nimrod, and Arts & Letters. In addition, she has written book reviews for Kirkus Reviews, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Andrea Hollander was born in Berlin, Germany, on April 28, 1947, to Milton Henry, a physician stationed in France and Germany during World War II, and Blanche Rosalind Simon Hollander. She was raised in Colorado, Texas, New York, and New Jersey. Hollander received her BS from …

Hollensworth, Carroll Charles

Carroll Charles Hollensworth was a prominent member of the Arkansas General Assembly in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Serving as the Speaker of the House and then as the floor leader, he was a central figure in the legislature’s work throughout that period. Carroll Charles Hollensworth was born in Warren (Bradley County) on January 6, 1900, to Presbyterian minister Eli Asa Hollensworth and Mary Elizabeth Lee Hollensworth. He had an older brother and a younger sister. He grew up in Bradley County and attended the local schools, but little is known about the specifics of his early life. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I and afterward married Mayme Bird Stevens. The couple had a son and …

Holley, Donald

Donald Holley was a historian, author, and longtime professor at the University of Arkansas at Monticello (UAM). His scholarship generally focused on agricultural history in Arkansas in the twentieth century. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Arkansas Historical Association in 2007. James Donald Holley was born on February 24, 1940, in Vernon, Alabama, to the Reverend William Albert Holley and Wilma Harris Holley. His parents were from Alabama, but the family lived in Texas for a time when Holley was young. He eventually moved to Louisiana, where he finished his education. On August 14, 1962, Holley married Bankie Rae Hollis at a Church of Christ in Ruston, Louisiana. The couple had two children together. Holley received his …

Hollingsworth, Perlesta Arthur “Les”

Perlesta Arthur “Les” Hollingsworth was a lawyer whose battle for equal justice for African Americans took him through the trial courts as a civil rights litigator, into municipal politics, and eventually to the state’s highest court, where he served for fourteen months as a justice in 1983 and 1984. He was the second Black member elected to the Little Rock (Pulaski County) city board of directors and the third African American to be appointed justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. Les Hollingsworth was born on April 12, 1936, in Little Rock to Perlesta Gomez Hollingsworth, who was a soldier, and Eartha Mae Frampton, a schoolteacher in Sherwood (Pulaski County). His father spent part of his life in a veterans’ home …

Hollis, Mary Cal

Mary Cal Hollis is a liberal political activist. A native of Arkansas who now lives in Colorado, she has run for national office on both the Socialist and Green Party tickets. Mary Cal Hollis was born on January 13, 1952, in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), one of four children of Cal Hollis and Ruth Bylander Hollis. She graduated in 1970 from Pine Bluff High School. After graduation, she went on to the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), where in 1974 she earned a BA in special education, followed in 1978 by a master’s degree in specific learning disabilities. In addition, she has studied multicultural special education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A self-described “bleeding-heart liberal,” …

Holloway, William Judson

William Judson Holloway was an Arkansas-born politician and lawyer who moved to Oklahoma, where he became active in politics. He led the state of Oklahoma as governor in the early years of the Great Depression. William Judson Holloway was born on December 15, 1888, in Arkadelphia (Clark County) to Stephen Lee Holloway and Molly Holloway. Holloway’s father was a Baptist minister, and he sent his son to Ouachita College (now Ouachita Baptist University). After graduating in 1910, he studied at the University of Chicago. Holloway settled in Hugo, Oklahoma, and while reading the law, he also served for three years as principal of Hugo High School. He entered Cumberland University Law School to complete his legal training, earning his degree …

Holly Grove (Monroe County)

Holly Grove is a well-preserved Delta community. Its business district is included on the National Register of Historic Places, as are three houses and one church in the city. Henry Augustus Fay received a land grant for the region that would become Holly Grove on November 15, 1836. The rich land of the area drew several settlers who established plantations to grow cotton and other crops. The name of the settlement is drawn from thickets of holly trees native to the area. The plantation community was a suburb of Lawrenceville (Monroe County), which was the county seat until 1857, when the seat was moved to Clarendon (Monroe County). The creation of the Arkansas Central Railroad in 1872 brought prosperity to Holly …

Hollywood (Clark County)

Hollywood (Clark County) is a small community located thirteen miles southwest of Arkadelphia (Clark County). Originally a farming village along the Terre Noire Creek, the area served as the county seat of Clark County until 1842. Notable Arkansans Albert Pike, Robert Crittenden, and Chester Ashley frequented the area to further their law practices. Today, the once vibrant town has dwindled to an unincorporated status and is heavily reliant on nearby Arkadelphia. As early as 1811, people began settling along the Terre Noire Creek—also known as Wolf Creek—in the area that would become Hollywood; most of these early settlers were farmers searching for fertile soil in which to plant their crops. This small settlement quickly grew into a village along the …

Hollywood Cemetery—Confederate Section

aka: Hollywood Cemetery Confederate Section

The Confederate Section of Hollywood Cemetery in Hot Springs (Garland County) is a 60′ x 54′ cemetery plot surrounded by a low concrete wall with ornamental concrete posts at all four corners and an opening on the western side inscribed “Confederate Veterans.” The plot contains thirty-four marked burials, a fieldstone monument, and four concrete benches. David Stone Ryan, who served as a lieutenant in a North Carolina unit during the Civil War and later made a home in Hot Springs, purchased the Confederate Section in Hollywood Cemetery in 1900, on behalf of the Albert Pike Camp of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), to ensure a final resting place for his fellow aging Confederates. The Albert Pike Camp was disbanded in …

Holmes, John Clellon

John Clellon Holmes was a novelist and poet known primarily for helping to define the “Beat Generation” of writers. He taught creative writing and literature at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) from the mid-1970s until 1987. John Clellon Holmes was born on March 12, 1926, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to John McClellan Holmes Sr. and Elizabeth  Franklin Emmons (Betty) Holmes. He had two sisters. During the Great Depression, Holmes’s father moved through a variety of odd jobs, with the family income supplemented when Holmes took a job delivering milk during high school. He dropped out of high school in 1942 and briefly took a job in the Reader’s Digest subscription department before moving to New York City …

Holmes, Sturgis Williford, Jr.

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 …

Holmes, Theophilus Hunter

Theophilus Hunter Holmes was a lieutenant general in the Confederate army and served variously as the commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department and commander of the District of Arkansas. After he failed to regain northwestern Arkansas and saw failures at the Battle of Arkansas Post and the Battle of Helena, public confidence in his abilities evaporated. After a medical leave of absence, Holmes resigned his command of the District of Arkansas and returned to North Carolina to serve out the rest of the war. Theophilus Holmes was born on November 13, 1804, in Sampson County, North Carolina, to Gabriel Holmes, North Carolina congressman and governor, and Mary Hunter. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1829, forty-fourth …

Holt v. Sarver

In the landmark Arkansas case Holt v. Sarver, inmates of the racially segregated Cummins Farm and Tucker Intermediate Reformatory units of the Arkansas prison system brought suit against the commissioner of corrections, Robert Sarver, and the Arkansas Board of Corrections, challenging their conditions of confinement. The case was heard in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Pine Bluff Division, before Chief Judge J. Smith Henley. Holt v. Sarver was a turning point in the history of court intervention in the management of American prisons. The decision marked the end of the “hands-off” era of the federal judiciary toward prisoners and the beginning of an era of prisoners’ rights. Holt v. Sarver, which inspired the 1980 film …

Holt, Elias (Lynching of)

Elias Holt was murdered in Mississippi County by a gang of disguised men on January 25, 1872, after an accused horse thief implicated him as a conspirator in the crime. Elias Holt, a Kentucky native, was listed in the 1870 census as a twenty-nine-year-old farmer living with his wife, Martha, age nineteen, in Mississippi County’s Big Lake Township. In early 1872, a young man named Jones was arrested and charged with horse theft. During his initial questioning, Jones claimed that Holt had recruited him to steal the horse (with plans to steal another himself), meet him in Jacksonport (Jackson County), and then ride to Texas to get rid of the stolen animals. Jones’s statement, which the Osceola Times decried as …

Holt, George Moreau

George Moreau Holt played a prominent role in antebellum Arkansas as a physician, an Arkansas State Militia general, and a major in service to the Confederacy. He is also the only general officer of the Arkansas State Militia and its descendant organization, the Arkansas National Guard, to be killed in action by enemy forces. George M. Holt was born on July 4, 1831, in Tipton County, Tennessee, the third son of six of Archibald Murphy Holt and Margaret Tilford Holt. His father, initially a engineer, later became a prominent physician in Bedford County, Tennessee. Holt and his brother Joseph followed in his footsteps by becoming physicians. Little information is found to detail the early life of Holt except what is …

Holt, Georgia

aka: Jackie Jean Crouch

Actress and singer Georgia Holt had small parts in the movies and on television, but she was best known as the mother of pop superstar Cher and actress Georganne LaPiere, as well as being the grandmother of musician Elijah Blue Allman and LGBTQ+ rights advocate Chaz Bono. Georgia Holt was born Jackie Jean Crouch on June 9, 1926, in Kensett (White County). She was born in poverty; her father, the teenage Roy Malloy Crouch, was a baker, and her mother, Lynda Inez Gulley, was reportedly thirteen years old at the time she gave birth. Crouch would later have a younger brother, Mickey. Her father taught her how to sing and play guitar during her early childhood. After her parents separated, …

Holt, J. Seaborn

James Seaborn Holt was a lawyer who spent fifty years in private and government practice, the final twenty-three as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He was a member of a prominent family from Boone County that provided three generations of leaders of the Arkansas bar, including three Supreme Court justices and three attorneys general. J. Seaborn Holt, as he was known, was born on November 17, 1884, in Bellefonte (Boone County), a tiny community southeast of Harrison (Boone County), to Joseph Rutherford Holt and Paralee Elizabeth Coffman Holt. His father was a farmer who grew corn, wheat, and oats, and raised cattle. He thought banking would be a good career for the boy and got him a job …

Holt, Jack Wilson, Jr.

Jack Wilson Holt Jr. was chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court for ten years, and his landmark lawsuit against the Arkansas penitentiary caused the entire Arkansas prison system to be declared unconstitutional in 1970, triggering judicially inspired prison reforms in many states. Jack Holt Jr. was born Samuel Wilson Holt on May 18, 1929, in Harrison (Boone County) to Jack Wilson Holt Sr. and Margaret Spikes Holt; he had a younger sister. He insisted that his parents change his name to Jack because children teased him that he had a girl’s name, Sammie. In 1928, his father was elected prosecuting attorney and, in 1934, circuit judge for the Fourteenth Circuit. His father was elected attorney general in 1936, and …

Holt, Jack Wilson, Sr.

Jack Wilson Holt Sr. was an eminent Arkansas politician for two decades in the mid-twentieth century. He was attorney general for three terms before World War II but lost three bitter races for governor and U.S. senator to the dominant politicians of the postwar era—John L. McClellan, Sid McMath, and Francis Cherry. Jack Holt, one of eleven children of Bud and Adeline Holt, was born on February 7, 1903, on his family’s farm along Crooked Creek north of Harrison (Boone County). He entered the first grade at a one-room school at Walnut Grove and graduated from Harrison High School, where he was a basketball and track star. He often rode a pony into town to attend high school. Holt received …

Holt, Joseph Frank

J. Frank Holt was a major figure in Arkansas legal and political circles in the 1950s and 1960s. He served in numerous public offices, including two terms on the Arkansas Supreme Court. Joseph Franklin Holt was born on October 22, 1910, in Harrison (Boone County). One of eleven children of Noah Calvin “Bud” Holt and Malicia Adeline Moore Holt, he grew up in Harrison, where he sold newspapers and worked in a garage while in high school before attending the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). He had to drop out of college and return home due to the Great Depression. He worked a variety of jobs, including selling insurance, teaching in the Cotter (Baxter County) school district, …

Holt, Maud Spiller

Maud Spiller Holt was an avid traveler and painter who painted in every American state and throughout much of Europe. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) guide to 1930s Arkansas cited Holt as one of the state’s most accomplished women artists. Today, her paintings are on display at the Arkansas State Capitol, at Historic Arkansas Museum, and in various other public and private collections. Maud Spiller was born in Carbondale, Illinois, on November 1, 1866, the daughter of James W. Spiller and Sarah Patrick Spiller. On December 22, 1886, Spiller married Winfield Scott Holt at Albion, Illinois, and moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County). Winfield Holt became one of the most progressive businessmen of Little Rock and served many years as …

Holtz, Louis Leo (Lou)

Louis Leo (Lou) Holtz is a former football coach and television sports analyst who also became a popular public speaker known for his quips on television talk shows. Along with serving as the head football coach at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) from 1977 to 1983, he also held coaching positions at the College of William & Mary, North Carolina State University, University of Minnesota, University of Notre Dame, and University of South Carolina, compiling a career record of 249–132–7. In professional football, he coached the New York Jets of the National Football League (NFL) in 1976, where his record was three wins and ten losses. Holtz is known for successfully leading the 1988 Notre Dame …

Holy Angels Convent

The Holy Angels Convent located near Jonesboro (Craighead County) is home to the Community of Olivetan Benedictine Sisters in Arkansas. These sisters have provided education and health care to northeast Arkansas for over a century. The Community of Olivetan Benedictine Sisters at Holy Angels had it origins in Convent Maria Rickenbach high in the Swiss Alps near Engelberg in Canton Unterwalden. In response to requests from early missionaries for sisters to teach in the mission fields of America, five sisters were sent to establish a base in Conception, Missouri, in 1874. Additional sisters followed in succeeding years. Because many German-speaking immigrants were coming to northeast Arkansas, Father E. J. Weibel, an early missionary in northeast Arkansas, requested sisters from Missouri …

Holyfield, Wayland

Wayland Holyfield is a prolific country music writer and recording artist who wrote one of Arkansas’s official state songs, “Arkansas, You Run Deep in Me.” He is a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame. Wayland D. Holyfield was born in Mallet Town (Conway County) on March 15, 1942. He attended grade school in Springfield (Conway County) and Little Rock (Pulaski County) and graduated from Hall High School in Little Rock in 1960—after attending high school in Mabelvale (Pulaski County) during the Lost Year of 1958–59 when Little Rock’s high schools were closed. He attended Hendrix College in Conway (Faulkner County) on a basketball scholarship and then the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville …

Home Demonstration Clubs

Home demonstration clubs were an integral part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service, which was established during the early twentieth century as an experiment in adult education, providing agricultural demonstration work for men and home demonstration work for women. The home demonstration work taught farm women improved methods for accomplishing their household responsibilities and encouraged them to better their families’ living conditions through home improvements and labor-saving devices. Beyond just the realm of the individual family, the clubs also became sources of education and charity in communities. On January 1, 1912, Emma Archer organized the first canning club work for girls in Mabelvale (Pulaski County). In 1916, Archer became Arkansas’s first state home demonstration agent. As such, she …

Home Ice Company

The Home Ice Company building, once located at 700 Cate Avenue in Jonesboro (Craighead County), was an early twentieth-century industrial structure that was associated with various industries. The building was first home to a wagon factory, then a peanut processing plant, then an ice cream manufacturing facility, and finally an ice plant. The businesses occupying the building over the years provided jobs and products for the local community and for communities abroad. In June 2017, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places; it was announced the next month that the building would be demolished. Around 1910, the Jonesboro Wagon Manufacturing Company, the only maker of farm wagons in Jonesboro, constructed a new two-story exterior brick structure, …

Home News (McCrory)

Walter Wilson Raney, an enterprising newspaper publisher, is credited with helping shape McCrory (Woodruff County) into a business center. Raney founded the Home News in McCrory in 1915, establishing the News as a Democratic paper published on Fridays. Raney printed on the masthead that the paper was “edited in the interest of McCrory and Woodruff County” and wrote in the first issue that citizens had solicited him to “give us a home paper.” In 1918, for printing the News, Raney installed the first and only typesetting machine in the county. Raney had begun his newspaper career in the printing office of the Woodruff County News (1901–1910), run by Gustave W. Kramer. After working for the Woodruff County News for two …

Homelessness

Large numbers of homeless people live in Arkansas. Looking at data for people who received a funded service, emergency shelter, or transitional shelter from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Arkansas Management Information System found that 22,000 people were homeless at some point during 2006 in Arkansas. A statewide count on January 24, 2007, of people housed in shelters, along with an observational count on the streets and in camps, determined that 7,400 to 8,000 Arkansans are homeless on any given night. The Arkansas Homeless Coalition completed a survey in 2005 among the homeless who congregate under bridges and frequent the soup kitchens in the Little Rock (Pulaski County) area. One hundred survey responses documented that …

Homer

The Homer was a steamboat that plied the waters of the Ouachita River in the early 1860s. It achieved significance for its role in the Camden Expedition of 1864, when Union troops seized it, along with its cargo, and sunk it. Confederate soldiers later used its timbers to bridge the Ouachita. The Homer, built for $30,000 in Parkersburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), in 1859, went into service on November 14, 1859, at the Port of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was a 194-ton sidewheel packet measuring 148 feet long, twenty-eight feet wide, and five feet deep. Its co-owners were Levi Hopkins of Mason County, Virginia, and his father-in-law, stock dealer and farmer William H. Neale of Parkersburg. Neale and Hopkins sold the Homer …

Homestead Act of 1862

The Homestead Act of 1862 was a federal statute that regulated most federal transfers of land to Arkansans after the Civil War. It required two things of homesteaders: settlement and cultivation. In other words, homesteaders had to live on and farm their land, and, in exchange, they received land at a very low cost. These land transfers comprised more than eight million Arkansas acres, nearly a quarter of the state’s land, for nearly 75,000 applicants. Just about half (4,037,291 acres of 8,133,791 acres) was transferred in the twentieth century. As the railroads made more of Arkansas accessible, more and more Arkansans homesteaded land. In contrast to the Southern Homestead Act—which was in force during the Reconstruction years only from 1866 …

Hon (Scott County)

The town of Hon is located along Highway 28, about seven miles west of Waldron (Scott County). Hon was established between Poteau Mountain and Chalybeate Round Top near Bull Creek, which is a tributary of the Poteau River. The town was named after John Hon, whose father, Jackson Hon, established the community in 1836; it was first known as Valley Forge and later Poteau. Hon was officially established sometime in the late nineteenth century. Prior to European exploration, Hon was a wilderness whose inhabitants included peoples of the Mississippian, Archaic, and Woodland periods. Eventually, the native people of the Caddo Nation settled near Hon along the Poteau River. There are numerous archaeological sites from several periods located near Hon. Throughout …

Honorable, Colette Dodson

Colette Dodson Honorable is an Arkansas lawyer and public official. A longtime member—and ultimately, chair—of the Arkansas Public Service Commission (APSC), she was appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in 2014 by President Barack Obama, beginning her service on January 5, 2015; her term ended on June 30, 2017. She was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2014. Colette Dodson was born in 1970 in St. Louis, Missouri, to Joyce and Harold Dodson. She and her twin sister, Coleen, have three older brothers and a half-sister. The family moved from St. Louis to California when the twins were young. After her parents divorced, Dodson moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County), where she attended Forest Heights …

Hoo-Hoo Monument

The Hoo-Hoo Monument, built in 1909 and located in the southeastern corner of the Missouri Pacific Railroad Depot parking lot at North 1st and Main streets in Gurdon (Clark County), is a granite and bronze monument with Egyptian Revival detail, designed by artist George J. Zolnay. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 2, 1999. The International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo, a fraternal group of lumbermen, was founded in 1892 in Gurdon in the Hotel Hall by Bolling Arthur Johnson and five other men. According to tradition, Johnson—a lumber trade journalist—had for some time seen a need to link together, or “concatenate,” the workers of the timber industry. In 1891, there were many local and …

Hoofman, Clifton Howard (Cliff)

Clifton Howard (Cliff) Hoofman, who was reared by grandparents on tenant farms in White County, became a lawyer and politician and held constitutional offices in all three branches of state government. He served in the Arkansas House of Representatives for eight years, the Arkansas Senate for twenty years, four years as a state highway commissioner, and two years on the Arkansas Supreme Court; he also had two separate sojourns of two years each on the Arkansas Court of Appeals. As a close friend and ally of two governors, Bill Clinton and Mike Beebe, Hoofman was instrumental in passing much of the major legislation enacted during their combined twenty years in the governor’s office. Cliff Hoofman was born on June 23, …

Hookworm Eradication

Hookworm disease was a significant public health issue in Arkansas until the movement to eradicate hookworms in the early twentieth century. With official estimates claiming that up to twenty percent of the entire population of the state suffered from hookworm infestation, this parasite was sufficiently widespread to affect the economy as well as the health of Arkansas. Its virtual eradication was the result of a public health and education campaign on the part of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission between 1910 and 1914. The hookworm is an intestinal parasite that grows and reproduces in the intestines of its hosts. When infected people deposit feces containing hookworm eggs in warm, moist, shaded soil, the eggs hatch and develop into larvae. Within five …