Richard H. Powell was born in Virginia and reared in Tennessee but spent the last fifty-seven years of his life in Arkansas, as a farmer, merchant, lawyer, politician, and judge. During the Civil War, he joined the Confederate cause as a soldier in 1863 but spent much of his two-year military career as a prisoner of war. Later, he was a circuit judge in northeastern Arkansas for fourteen years, competed for a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court and lost, but then was appointed to the court for a few months in 1893. Powell’s tombstone identified his proudest moments: as a captain in Freeman’s Regiment of the First Missouri Cavalry for the Confederate States of America, which engaged in several …