Entry Type: Event - Starting with G

The Civil War expedition from Greensboro (Craighead County) to Helena (Phillips County) was undertaken in July 1863 as Brigadier General John Wynn Davidson’s Union cavalrymen descended Crowley’s Ridge in search of Confederate troops in the early stages of the Little Rock Campaign. Davidson led his 6,000-man cavalry division across the St. Francis River at Chalk Bluff (Clay County) from southeastern Missouri on July 19, 1863, to face a reported advance by Confederate troops under Major General Sterling Price. The poorly supplied Union column moved rapidly down Crowley’s Ridge while foraging for food. As one Union artilleryman put it, “our fast marching…is for grub.” As they neared Greensboro, likely on July 24, Davidson sent a party of fifty troopers of the …

On April 19, 1968, an F4 tornado touched down and caused immense damage to the city of Greenwood (Sebastian County) and the nearby area. Lasting only four minutes, the twister resulted in more than a dozen deaths, more than 250 people injured, and over a million dollars in storm damage. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used data from the 1968 Greenwood tornado to better understand the weather phenomenon. Greenwood, one of the two seats of Sebastian County, had a population between 1,500 and 2,000 in 1968. It boasted general merchandise stores, grocers, multiple hotels, and medical professionals. On April 19, around 3:15 p.m., heavy rain began to fall in the area. Shortly thereafter, a tornado was sighted as …

On December 2, 1893, an African-American man named Bob Greenwood was shot by so-called whitecappers who went to his home near Cherry Valley (Cross County) to whip his wife after an altercation. (The terms “whitecapping,” “night riding,” and “bald knobbing” denote extralegal acts of violence targeting select groups and carried out by vigilantes under cover of night or disguise such as masks.) While most newspapers were unsure of what precipitated the lynching, the December 17 edition of the Arkansas Gazette reported that the children of a white man (William Wilson) and the children of an African-American man (Bob Greenwood) had an argument, and their mothers joined in the quarrel. When Wilson’s wife reported this to her husband, he became incensed. …

The Gridiron Show is a satirical musical production that makes good-natured fun of prominent people in politics, business, the judiciary, and the legal profession. It is presented biennially in Little Rock (Pulaski County) by Gridiron Productions, Inc., a nonprofit corporation composed of lawyers and others associated with the legal profession. All cast members are either lawyers or connected to the legal profession by employment, family ties, or friendship, and all are unpaid. The director, choreographer, musical director, and band are paid professionals. The script is written by a group called the Clandestine Committee. The Gridiron Show was first presented in 1916 by members of what was then the Little Rock Bar Association at a Gridiron luncheon. The luncheon was held …

A pair of Confederate guerrillas—Jeremiah Earnest and Thomas Jefferson Miller—were hanged at the state penitentiary in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on March 18, 1864, for murdering three Unionists and threatening others. A native of Sevier County, Tennessee, farmer Jeremiah Earnest was living at South Fork in Montgomery County with his wife, Sarah, and their eight children when the Civil War began. He enrolled in Company F, Fourth Arkansas Infantry Regiment (CS) at Mount Ida (Montgomery County) on January 6, 1862, but was declared unfit for duty about four months later while suffering from dropsy and was released from the army. Earnest, age forty-three, recruited a home guard company, and Thomas Jefferson Miller, who had lived in Pike County and had …

Four young Confederate-allied guerrillas were executed on July 29, 1864, at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) for the murder of a civilian and for a fatal attack on an outpost of the First Arkansas Cavalry (US) by bushwhackers wearing Union uniforms. On April 7, 1864, ten men of Companies A and E, First Arkansas Cavalry (US) were guarding the regiment’s corrals at Prairie Grove (Washington County) when a group of men wearing blue uniforms and purporting to be from the Fourteenth Kansas Cavalry Regiment approached them; these men were actually members of Major William M. “Buck” Brown’s band of Confederate irregulars. The Unconditional Union newspaper reported that the Arkansas troopers “shook hands and conversed with them. All at once the bushwhackers …

The steamboat Westwood ran into the steamer Gulnare in the early hours of September 8, 1844, at Walnut Bend above Helena (Phillips County), sinking the Gulnare and killing three passengers. The Gulnare, described as a “splendid, light draught and fast running steamer,” was heading up the Mississippi River with a full load of dry goods and towing a barge largely loaded with salt, heading toward St. Louis, Missouri. The vessel was at the foot of Walnut Bend around twenty miles north of Helena when the south-bound Westwood, a 249-ton paddleboat built in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1843, ran into the Gulnare’s starboard side across from the main hatch at around 1:00 a.m. on September 8, 1844. The Gulnare began to sink …