Businesses

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Entry Category: Businesses - Starting with H

Harps Food Stores Inc.

Harps Food Stores Inc. is a regional chain of employee-owned grocery stores based in Springdale (Washington and Benton counties). The corporation has grown to eighty stores in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri since its founding in 1930. Founder Harvard Harp had spent years picking produce in California before returning home to Arkansas. In 1930, during the Great Depression, he took his $500 life savings (approximately $7,100 in 2015 dollars) and with his wife, Floy, opened Harps (or Harp’s) Cash Grocery in Springdale. The store slowly became popular in the community. The store was a family business. All four of Harvard and Floy Harp’s children (Donald, Reland, Gerald, and Judy Harp) worked at the store as they grew up. After Donald Harp’s …

Hornibrook House

aka: Empress of Little Rock
The Hornibrook House, constructed in 1888, is one of the finest examples of ornate Victorian architecture in the state. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 30, 1974. In 1867, James H. Hornibrook and his wife, Margaret McCulley Hornibrook, moved from Toronto, Canada, to Little Rock (Pulaski County). Upon his arrival in Little Rock, Hornibrook entered a partnership with Miles Q. Townsend in a liquor sales and saloon business that flourished for twenty-two years. After Hornibrook’s financial success, he wished to build a home for his family that was worthy of his accomplishments. The lavish home took approximately seven years to construct. It was completed in 1888 at a reported cost of $20,000. Designed by …

Hotel Pines

The Hotel Pines, located at the northwest corner of Main Street and West 5th Avenue in downtown Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), was conceived and built to attract more business to the section of Main Street that lies to the south of the city’s railroad tracks. As such, it provides a glimpse at one effort to alter a city’s main business and shopping area in the early twentieth century. This classically designed hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 10, 1979. Since the area north of the tracks was a thriving commercial area, the city’s Main Street property owners believed that the presence of a modern hotel would lure business south of the tracks. Many of …

Humphreys’ Dairy Farm

Humphreys’ Dairy Farm started in 1911 in Hot Springs (Garland County) with two cows and several acres. As the farm and family grew, so did the importance of the dairy farm to Hot Springs and surrounding towns. As an early adopter of homogenization and pasteurization, the dairy led in innovations that transformed the dairy industry. Humphreys’ Dairy Farm, which closed in the 1990s, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. Harris Humphreys founded Humphreys’ Dairy Farm in 1911. He was born in Arkadelphia (Clark County) in 1878 and attended Ouachita College (now Ouachita Baptist University). After moving to Hot Springs in 1909, he began buying land and clearing it for farming. The extant farmhouse was built …

Hyten, Charles Dean

Charles Dean “Bullet” Hyten was a master potter and the originator of the famous Niloak Pottery. Although he was not the first pottery maker in Saline County, his patented swirl technique and use of locally sourced clay gave his pottery a unique look. Because Hyten’s pottery-making process was a trade secret, his creations became valuable historic artifacts. Charles Hyten was born in Benton (Saline County) on March 14, 1877, to John F. Hyten and Hattie E. Brown Hyten. His father, a potter by trade, had moved the family to Benton around 1876. There, he opened a pottery business and continued working until his death in 1881 following an illness. Hattie Hyten, widowed with four children, married Frank Woosley, who had …