Entry Category: Historic Preservation - Starting with H

Hughes Hall, located at 514 West M Street on the Arkansas Tech University campus in Russellville (Pope County), is a two-story, U-shaped stone masonry building constructed with assistance from the WPA (the Works Progress Administration, renamed the Works Projects Administration in 1939), a Depression-era federal relief program. Constructed in 1940, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 18, 1992. The campus of Arkansas Polytechnic College (now Arkansas Tech University) comprised seventeen major buildings, including several dormitories that the U.S. Office of Education deemed “unfit for human habitation,” when Joseph W. Hull became the college’s eighth president in January 1932 and embarked on a major building campaign. After receiving assistance from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and …

The Hughes Water Tower is located on Church Street in Hughes (St. Francis County). The metal water tower was built by the Chicago Bridge and Iron Works for the Public Works Administration (PWA) in 1936. It is a good example of a 1930s water tower and the only surviving example of a PWA-built water tower in the county. Hughes was founded in 1913 as the Iron Mountain Railroad built its expensive “mud line” from West Memphis (Crittenden County) to Marianna (Lee County) through the swamps and scrub prairies of the Arkansas Delta. It was named for Robert Hughes, who donated land to the railroad. By the time the Great Depression struck, the small town of Hughes served the vast agricultural …

The first human dissection performed in Arkansas is commemorated by an obelisk located at the edge of MacArthur Park in Little Rock (Pulaski County). In 1927, the Arkansas Medical Society unveiled the marker, whose inscription states that the dissection was held on that spot in November 1874. To clarify: the monument honors the state’s first such legal event, and the unveiling took place on May 13, despite the marker being dated May 12. Following appeals by doctors, in April 1873 the Arkansas General Assembly passed Act 45 authorizing “dissection in certain cases for the advancement of science.” This paved the way for the establishment of a medical school, as the new law gave both doctors and medical students the right …

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 …