Charles Edward Taylor, Progressive reform mayor of Little Rock (Pulaski County) from 1911 to 1919, brought a new sense of responsibility to city government and directed a wide range of reforms that transformed Little Rock from a nineteenth-century river town into a twentieth-century modern municipality. Charles Taylor was born on September 15, 1868, in Austin, Mississippi, the son of William Arbuckle and Mary Perkins Taylor. During the mid-1870s, the Taylors moved to eastern Arkansas, where W. A. Taylor died. The family then moved to Little Rock when Charles was around twelve. After attending Scott Street High School and taking a bookkeeping course at a local business school, Taylor went to work to help support his mother and sister. He clerked …
Jonas March Tebbetts of Fayetteville (Washington County) was a prominent lawyer, judge, and politician known for his abhorrence of slavery and support for the Union during the Civil War. His aid to Union forces led to his later arrest by Confederates, who condemned him to death. But fortuitous circumstances led to his freedom, and he lived a long life. Jonas M. Tebbetts was born on January 5, 1820, in Rochester, New Hampshire, one of five sons of Enoch Tebbetts and Anne Roberts Tebbetts. Tebbetts attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. At sixteen, he was working as a marketing agent selling copies of The Family Expositor by English religious nonconformist Philip Doddridge. As a salesman, he traveled throughout New England, …
Green Walter Thompson was a major African-American political leader and businessman in Little Rock (Pulaski County) from the end of the Civil War until his death. Green Thompson was born Green Elliott, a slave on the Robert Elliottt farm in Ouachita County. Nothing is known of his early life, though his tombstone lists a birth date of August 15, 1847. A birth year of 1848 is estimated from documents accumulated later in his life. The 1880 census records him as a “mulatto,” so it is likely a white man fathered him. His mother eventually married a slave named Thompson, and Green Elliott took his stepfather’s name. While a teenager, he married a slave named Dora Hildreth; they soon had a …
William Henry (Bill) Townsend was the first African American licensed optometrist in Arkansas and was a leading figure in the civil rights movement. He was a founding member of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations (ACHR) and the Council on Community Affairs (COCA), and he served as one of the first Black representatives of the twentieth century in the Arkansas General Assembly. Bill Townsend was born on July 30, 1914, on a farm in West Point, Mississippi, to John Henry Townsend and Fannie Caruthers Townsend, the oldest of eleven children. He was raised in Earle (Crittenden County) and later attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for high school and undergraduate studies. He earned a BS in agriculture. Townsend enlisted in …
Jackson Stewart Trimble was an influential figure in the development of Independence County in Arkansas’s early years. J. S. Trimble was born on March 28, 1815, in Smithland, Kentucky, to James Trimble and Elizabeth Stewart Trimble. In 1817, the family left Kentucky and ventured into what would become Arkansas, settling in an area about five miles southwest of Batesville (Independence County). Trimble grew up there and received his early education in the county’s common schools and at Batesville. After his formal schooling ended, Trimble became a farmer. In 1850, he married Catherine P. Hamilton. The couple had a daughter, Elvira. That same year, Trimble entered politics, successfully biding to represent Independence County in the lower house of the Arkansas General Assembly. A devotee of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, he ran as a Democrat. In …
G. W. “Buddy” Turner Jr. was an influential member of the Arkansas House of Representatives in the latter part of the twentieth century who helped shape state policy throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Grover White Turner Jr. was born on August 15, 1923, in Thornton (Calhoun County) to Grover White Turner and Ollie Robinson Turner. He grew up in Rison (Cleveland County), where he helped his family on the farm his father had bought during the Great Depression. In addition to picking and chopping cotton on the farm, he worked at the family store, which, in addition to a sawmill, his father had also acquired. Eventually, Turner became an accomplished meat cutter. By the time he graduated from Rison …
Jesse Turner, a North Carolina native, was a lawyer and politician who played a major but fickle role in Arkansas’s long odyssey through slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. He finally turned to economic development, principally railroads. He was a leader of the Whig Party in Arkansas until its disintegration during the Civil War, and he then took a respite from politics; during Reconstruction, he returned as a Democrat. Turner was elected to both houses of the Arkansas General Assembly, was the federal prosecuting attorney in the new United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, and served briefly as an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He spent most of his life in Van Buren (Crawford …
aka: King-Everett War
The Tutt-Everett War began as a struggle over political power in Marion County in the 1840s. Though centrally involving the Tutt and Everett families, the contest attracted many county residents to one side or the other. It spanned nearly a decade of increasingly violent confrontations, claiming the lives of up to fourteen people. The Arkansas legislature created Marion County in 1836. In its early politics, the Everetts and their supporters became identified with the Democratic Party, while the Tutts and their supporters were associated with the Whig Party. The two sides clashed repeatedly as they competed for electoral office and thus control of the county. Driving the conflict was the knowledge that if “their side” held political power, one could …
Arlo Tyer was an Arkansas businessman and politician who served as a county official in his native Randolph County in the 1960s and in two separate stints in the Arkansas House of Representatives in the 1960s and 1970s. A previously low-key county official, Tyer fired one of the opening shots of the culture wars that would erupt in the 1980s. Gaylord Arlo Tyer was born on September 15, 1911, in the Water Valley community of rural Randolph County, the oldest of five children of Silas Lafayette and Emma Mae Vermilye Tyer. After military service and his marriage to Mary Lou Mock in 1946, Tyer engaged in farming and small business until his election to the Arkansas House in 1952, where …