Entry Category: Institutions and Buildings - Starting with H

The Harmonial Vegetarian Society was an experiment in communal living in Benton County, along the lines of the famed Oneida Community of New York, whose members practiced a strict vegetarian diet and shared all property in common. Though it was in existence for only four years, it has the distinction of being the only utopian commune in nineteenth-century Arkansas. Historical records regarding the Harmonial Vegetarian Society are sketchy at best. The community started in about 1857 when Dr. James E. Spencer, a Connecticut physician, moved to Arkansas and purchased a large tract of land in Benton County. He named this land Harmony Springs and settled a group of vegetarian “Reform Christians” on his property later that year. This group, for …

Henderson-Brown College (HBC) was a private, co-educational college located in Arkadelphia (Clark County). HBC served as a Methodist institution of higher learning in the southern part of the state. It exists today as Henderson State University. HBC was founded in 1890 as Arkadelphia Methodist College. Local members of the Methodist state convention had decided to start a college to serve students in southern Arkansas and to compete with Ouachita Baptist College (now Ouachita Baptist University), also located in Arkadelphia. The school was the third Methodist college in the state, joining male-only Hendrix College in Conway (Faulkner County) and Galloway Female College in Searcy (White County). Arkadelphia Methodist College was the first co-educational school in the Methodist state convention. Methodist citizens …

Henry’s Chapel was a log church built at Mound Prairie (Hempstead County) around 1817 by Methodist pioneers from Bellevue Valley, Missouri. Many accounts refer to Henry’s Chapel as the area’s first Protestant church. In 1817, a Methodist conference appointed itinerant Methodist preacher William Stevenson to the Hot Springs Circuit, a wilderness area on the western frontier in what would later become southwest Arkansas. Stevenson had scouted the area in 1813 and realized the need to establish a church. He chose the tiny settlement of Mound Prairie as the place for it. At Stevenson’s urging, thirty families from the Bellevue Methodist Church moved to the area. The leader of the group was the Reverend John Henry, a thirty-eight-year-old preacher and farmer. Several others …

The Bible Church of Little Rock (later called Hillcrest Hall) was constructed in 1961 on one of the last undeveloped lots in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Little Rock (Pulaski County). The Midland Hills area of the Hillcrest neighborhood opened to development in three phases, beginning in October 1908 and ending in May 1911. However, the triangular section of land bordered by Kavanaugh Boulevard and Martin and Lee streets was never developed, possibly because of its steep terrain. In 1961, the Bible Church of Little Rock acquired the property as a site for a permanent sanctuary for a congregation that had met in a home at 1814 Broadway since it was formed by eight families in 1951. The congregation hired architect …

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 …