Entry Category: Business Leaders - Starting with C

Samuel Jacob (Jack) Carnes was the founder and owner of Camark Pottery, one of Arkansas’s premier art pottery companies. Camark pottery has become highly valuable to collectors and is featured in museums such as the Old Statehouse Museum and the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Jack Carnes was born on March 12, 1896, in Zanesville, Ohio, the son of John O. Carnes, a lawyer. His mother’s name is unknown. He had one sister, Hazel, and one brother, Craig. He grew up in Cambridge, Ohio, and graduated from Cambridge High School in 1915. He received his BS degree from Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, on June 4, 1918, and did graduate work in engineering at the Massachusetts …

Lewis Williamson Cherry was an important businessman in Little Rock (Pulaski County) who founded several enterprises and served in a leadership role in various banks, as well as managing a robust real estate business. Lewis W. Cherry was born on November 22, 1858, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Calvin Washington Cherry and Sarah Blount Williamson Cherry. His father, a banker, was son of Daniel Cherry, a wealthy North Carolina–born land speculator in early nineteenth-century Tennessee who founded Cherryville in Haywood County. After an initial education in Memphis public schools, Lewis W. Cherry was educated at a number of private schools in Tennessee and Kentucky, completing his education at James Byars’s academy in Covington, Tennessee. Cherry began his career as bookkeeper for …

Faye Clarke co-founded the Educate the Children Foundation, which was created to support rural and impoverished school districts with donations of books and other educational materials. She was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2002. Faye Wilma Robinson was born on August 6, 1931, in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) to Jerimah and Eariest Robinson. In high school, she was an Arkansas National Merit Scholar and went on to study at Hampton Institute in Virginia. After graduation, she attended a one-year program in businesses at Radcliffe College taught by professors of the Harvard Business School, where women were not yet allowed; she was the first African-American woman in this program. She began working at Aramark, a company that …

John C. Claybrook was a lumberman, farmer, baseball team owner, and one of the most successful African American businessmen of his time in the South. He built a town around his farming and logging operation in eastern Arkansas and eventually gained national attention for being among the first African Americans in the South since Reconstruction, if not the first, chosen to sit on a jury trying black men for the rape of a white woman. John Claybrook was born on June 11, 1872, in Florence, Alabama. His parents’ names and occupations are unknown. He ran away to Memphis when he was thirteen to find work, which he soon found as a laborer on riverboats. After renting and working some plantation …

Walt Coleman is a longtime football official who began serving as a National Football League (NFL) referee in 1995. While the 2018 season marked his thirtieth as an NFL official, making him only the seventh NFL official to achieve that milestone, he is best known for his call in the 2002 American Football Conference (AFC) game between the New England Patriots and the Oakland Raiders in which he invoked the “Tuck Rule” resulting in an apparent fumble by New England quarterback Tom Brady being ruled an incomplete pass and keeping the Patriots on the road to an eventual Super Bowl victory. Walter Carpenter (Walt) Coleman III was born on January 16, 1952, to W. C. Coleman Jr. and Robbye Cooper …

Virgil Young (V. Y.) Cook was a veteran of two wars—the Civil War and the Spanish-American War—who founded the town of Olyphant (Jackson County) and eventually accumulated thousands of acres of land, running a vast plantation enterprise in northeastern Arkansas. His home in Batesville (Independence County), today known as the Cook-Morrow House, is on the National Register of Historic Places. V. Y. Cook was born on November 14, 1848, in Boydsville, Kentucky, to William Detterline (Bill) Cook and Pernecia Dodds Cook. Cook attended subscription schools in Boydsville, obtaining the equivalent of an elementary education. Kentucky was a divided state in the Civil War, and even though it stayed with the Union, there were many Confederate sympathizers living there. One was …

John Cooper Jr. led Cooper Communities, the real estate development company founded by his father, John A. Cooper Sr., through a period of outstanding growth. The firm was a pioneer and a recognized leader in the field of recreational and retirement living. John Alfred Cooper Jr. was born on September 13, 1938, in Memphis, Tennessee, to John Alfred Cooper Sr. and Mildred Borum Cooper, spending much of his youth in West Memphis (Crittenden County). He had three sisters. He graduated from Christian Brothers High School in Memphis and spent a post-graduate year at the Marion Military Institute in Marion, Alabama. He attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). There, he majored in business and was a member …

John A. Cooper Sr. was the founder, chief executive officer, and board chair of Cooper Communities, Inc. He and the business he founded were pioneers in establishing the recreational and retirement community industry in America. His first master-planned retirement community was Cherokee Village (Fulton and Sharp counties), which he formed near the northeastern Arkansas town of Hardy (Sharp County). His company eventually developed various projects across the southeastern United States, including the Arkansas communities of Cherokee Village in 1954, Bella Vista (Benton County) in 1965, Hot Springs Village (Garland and Saline Counties) in 1970, and Sienna Lake (Pulaski County) in 2005, as well as Tellico Village, Tennessee in 1986; Savanah Lakes Village, South Carolina, in 1989; Stonebridge Village, Missouri, in …

Few figures were more recognized in the multi-billion dollar sportfishing industry than Arkansas native Carl Richey “Cotton” Cordell Jr., who built a fishing tackle empire based in Hot Springs (Garland County) that grew to be the largest in America. Carl Cordell Jr. was born in Benton (Saline County) on December 9, 1928, the only child of Carl R. Cordell and Alice J. Barnes Cordell. His father worked for Alcoa but moved the family in November 1945 to Lake Catherine near Hot Springs, where he had purchased a marina and resort. Cordell, nicknamed “Cotton” because of his light hair, spent most of his youth traversing the Arkansas outdoors for fish and game, becoming able to help his father at the marina …

Influenced by a teacher’s counsel, Harvey Crowley Couch helped bring Arkansas from an agricultural economy in the early twentieth century to more of a balance between agriculture and industry. His persuasiveness with investors from New York and his ingenuity, initiative, and energy had a positive effect on Arkansas’s national reputation among businessmen. He ultimately owned several railroad lines and a telephone company and was responsible for what became the state’s largest utility, Arkansas Power and Light (AP&L). Harvey Couch was born on August 21, 1877, in Calhoun (Columbia County) to Tom Couch, a farmer turned minister, and Mamie Heard Couch. He had five siblings. Couch attended school in Calhoun two months out of each year, as did many farmers’ children …

Edward Savage Crossett was a pioneer Arkansas lumberman during the late nineteenth century. As the great Southern forest was being developed to meet a growing nation’s need for lumber and wood fiber, Crossett and two associates—all from Davenport, Iowa—came to south Arkansas, acquired land, and began a sawmilling operation that was one of the largest of its kind. The city of Crossett (Ashley County) was named for him and came to be known as “The Forestry Capital of the South.” Edward Crossett was born on February 4, 1828, in West Plattsburgh, New York, one of three children of Mary Gregory and John Savage Crossett, a veteran of the War of 1812. Crossett received his early education in the public schools …