Entry Category: Campuses and Schools - Starting with O

The Oak Grove Rosenwald School is located on Oak Grove Road in Oak Grove (Sevier County). The nearest landmark is New Zion Baptist Church, which is about 300 feet south of the Rosenwald School. The school was funded by the Rosenwald Fund in 1926. The school was primarily, if not exclusively, used for African-American students until its closure due to integration in the 1950s. This Rosenwald school has a floor plan created by Samuel Smith instead of a typical Rosenwald floor plan. The Oak Grove Rosenwald School was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 26, 2004. The Julius Rosenwald Fund was created in 1917. Rosenwald earned his wealth from an investment in the Sears, Roebuck, and …

The Oak Grove School, located off Highway 270 in Grant County’s Oak Grove community six miles east of Sheridan (Grant County), is a single-story, wood-frame, four-room structure designed in the Craftsman style of architecture and constructed in 1938–1939 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era public relief program. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 14, 1991. In 1938, the Oak Grove, Ellis, and Morris school districts in Grant County were consolidated to create School District No. 24, with the centrally located Oak Grove community selected as the site for the district’s school building. The new district applied to the WPA for funds to construct a new school, and the agency approved the project …

The Okolona Male and Female Institute was a school that operated for over seven decades in Okolona (Clark County) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally known as the Okolona Academy, it was the first formal school to operate in the town. The first families to settle in the Okolona area arrived in the early 1830s. A post office was established in 1858, and the population slowly grew over the next several decades. The first permanent school to open in the community began operations in 1857. Constructed on the site of an early school housed in a log cabin, this school was the first in the area to meet regularly. It was housed in a two-story wood building and was …

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Springdale (Washington and Benton counties) was enjoying great prosperity as a shipping and processing hub for the northwestern Arkansas fruit and vegetable industry. With the economic good times came population growth and the need for a new school building. School officials opted to demolish the town’s 1871 school and construct a new one on the same site (present-day corner of Highway 71B and Johnson Avenue). The land had been donated to Springdale School District 50 in 1901 by community leaders Millard and Ida Berry with the stipulation that the property always be used for school purposes. In the fall of 1909, Rogers (Benton County) architect Albert Oscar (A. O.) Clarke was hired …

Early residents of Randolph County settled in the Ozark Plateau area of the county. While many of these communities are gone, remnants of their existence can be seen. For the Birdell (Randolph County) community, the Old Union School survives as an example of the early history of this once thriving community. Located approximately two miles northwest of the community, the school is a prime example of what early education looked like in rural Arkansas. The early community of Birdell constructed a hewn-log school out of material readily available, which was a common building technique in early Arkansas. It is believed that the original school was built sometime prior to the Civil War. This school burned in 1910, and classes were …

Ouachita Baptist University (OBU) is an independent, residential institution in the liberal arts tradition associated with the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. Founded on April 8, 1886, it capped longstanding Arkansas Baptist interest in making higher learning more readily available to more people, in providing an educated ministry and educated lay leadership, in strengthening denominational loyalty, and in extending denominational influence. It gained university status in 1965 and has been rated by US News and World Report as the “No. 1 Baccalaureate College in the South” and included in its list of “Great Schools, Great Prices.” In 2013, it offered sixty-one degree options in eight schools within the university, and its mission statement proclaimed it “a Christ-centered learning community. Embracing the …

The Ozark Industrial College and School of Theology was sponsored by the Pentecostal Holiness Church and operated by college president Dan W. Evans from 1927 to 1932 at Monte Ne (Benton County), in buildings formerly part of William “Coin” Harvey’s Monte Ne resort. Dan Webster Evans (July 21, 1885–September 19, 1963) was born and raised in Boone County and married Rexie Gilbert (May 13, 1892–September 29, 1976) there in 1910; they had six children. His religious upbringing is unknown, but from 1914 to 1915, he and his wife were faculty members at the Pentecostal Holiness School in Stratford,Oklahoma. Pentecostalism grew out of the American Holiness movement during the late nineteenth century, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church, one division of that …

The Ozark Institute was built in 1845 upon the ashes of the Far West Seminary in Mount Comfort (Washington County) and provided education to students for the next quarter century. Cephas Washburn organized the Far West Seminary, and the state chartered it in late 1844. William D. Cunningham contracted to build a brick school building on land donated from the farm of Solomon Tuttle; however, the building was gutted by fire in February 1845, just before the seminary was to open for classes. The Reverend Robert Mecklin, who served on the seminary’s board of visitors, bought out Washburn’s interest after the fire. Rather than pursue a college-level school, he founded the Ozark Institute as a school for boys, a counterpart …

Ozarka College in Melbourne (Izard County) opened in the fall of 1975 as Ozarka Vocational Technical School to provide vocational training to residents of Fulton, Izard, Sharp, and Stone counties. In 1973, the Arkansas Department of Education selected Melbourne as one of ten communities for vocational-technical schools. Under the leadership of the first director, Walter B. Hall, Ozarka offered classes in automotive service technology, food services, major appliance service, business education, building trades, industrial equipment technology, and licensed practical nursing (LPN). It also offered classes leading to the General Education Development (GED) diploma. The first class of forty-three students graduated in July 1976. In its early years, Ozarka grew both in the physical plant and in enrollment. In 1978, the …

The Ozone School was built by the Works Projects Administration (WPA) to serve part of rural Johnson County. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015. European settlement began in the area of Ozone (Johnson County) in the early 1800s, specifically with the arrival of Major M. Gillian and Kate Gillian (sometimes spelled Gillion) in 1840. A post office was established in Ozone in 1873. The earliest schools in Johnson County were called “pay schools.” Classes were often held in private homes, and the teachers were usually itinerants. In the first part of the twentieth century, school in the Ozone area was held in a small building that also served as the Methodist church. However, by …